Consumers plan to spend less on technology this back-to-school season, which will have total sales of $82.8 billion vs. $83.8 billion last year, found a June poll from the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics that Amazon cited Thursday. The company was pushing such specials for its upcoming Prime Day event, beginning Monday. The biggest change by category is tech, said Mark Mathews, NRF vice president-research. Laptops, tablets and smartphones have become “an everyday part of household life and aren’t necessarily a purchase parents save for the start of the school year,” Mathews said. Still, Amazon said more than a third of back-to-school and off-to-college shoppers reported shopping for school items there during 2017 Prime Day, with NRF forecasting a 2018 rise to more than half. Comcast focused on Prime Day delivery theft. “Porch pirates,” it said, “may also be looking to snag the latest goods at the expense of unsuspecting consumers.” Amazon began Amazon Key last fall as a Prime membership benefit in 37 cities, controlling access to customers’ homes.

The developer of the radio industry’s NextRadio FM smartphone app conceded Thursday it's no closer to swaying Apple to unlock FM chips in its iPhones but vowed it won't stop lobbying the company on NextRadio support (see 1701060004). “No, we are not any closer,” Ryan Hornaday, Emmis Communications chief financial officer, emailed us Thursday. Other broadcasters and FCC Chairman Ajit Pai have unsuccessfully urged Apple on the issue (see 1709280060). That company “controls the real estate inside their phones and has simply been unwilling to activate the FM chip, despite it being in their phones,” said Hornaday. “Apple always weathers this storm" of public opinion and "refuses to budge," he continued. "We will not give up the fight, but we are not winning.” Apple didn’t comment. NextRadio is giving the radio industry “a remarkable opportunity for data attribution” to enhance selling advertising, said Emmis CEO Jeff Smulyan on a Thursday earnings call. The radio station owner is “far along in discussions in changing the focus of NextRadio, with significant input and partnership from major radio broadcasters,” he said. Emmis and its radio industry "brethren" believe strongly that "if we can provide rich data analytics" to advertisers, "we can regain the strength" that radio had, even in the face of digital competition from Google and Facebook, said Smulyan. Radio historically has had the unique advantage of providing “audio messages” that “really lock into people’s heads, but because of the rich data attribution characteristics of Google and Facebook, that advantage has been lost,” he said.

DOJ appealed a federal judge's ruling that rejected its antitrust complaint and cleared AT&T to take over Time Warner. DOJ filed a brief notice with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Thursday in USA v. AT&T (No. 1:17-cv-02511-RJL) that it's appealing the June 12 final judgment entered by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon (see 1806120002 and 1806120060). The department sued the companies in November to block the deal, alleging the combined company would be too big an anti-competitive risk to rival video distributors. AT&T General Counsel David McAtee said in a statement: “The Court’s decision could hardly have been more thorough, fact-based, and well-reasoned. While the losing party in litigation always has the right to appeal if it wishes, we are surprised that the DOJ has chosen to do so under these circumstances. We are ready to defend the Court’s decision at the D.C. Circuit.” AT&T/TW "is a bad deal for consumers and competition," said John Bergmayer, Public Knowledge senior counsel. "Since it has gone forward, AT&T has already raised prices for its DirecTV Now video service, more than doubled the mysterious ‘administrative fee’ it tacks on to most of its wireless bills, and raised the price of some of its wireless plans while removing the HBO subscription that it had previously included. Judge Leon’s decision contained numerous errors, and we believe the DOJ’s position should be vindicated.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency plans the first nationwide test of wireless emergency alerts to wireless devices using the presidential level code on Sept. 20, FEMA said in an FCC filing. FEMA sought waiver of FCC rules to let wireless carriers participate in the test, to start at 2:18 p.m. EDT and be transmitted throughout the U.S. and its territories. On the same day, FEMA said it plans the fourth in a series of nationwide tests of the emergency alert system, to start at 2:20 p.m. EDT. The WEA test “is necessary because it will determine if carrier WEA configuration, systems, and networks can and will process a Presidential WEA delivering the message via all WEA enabled cell sites with minimal latency,” FEMA said in docket 15-91. “FEMA proposes to conduct this test in September in conjunction with National Preparedness Month.” FEMA said tests of public alert and warning systems can “assess the operational readiness of the infrastructure for distribution of a national message and determine what technological improvements need to be made.” The WEA test will instruct wireless subscribers: “THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed.”

There was more resistance to an FCC reassigned-number database proposal to help combat unwanted robocalls, in replies filed this week in docket 17-59. Initial comments provided greater support for a Further NPRM (see 1806080047 and 1803220028). AT&T endorsed CTIA views backing market solutions to prevent robocalls to reassigned numbers, "rather than creating a new database." If the FCC pursues a database, business caller beneficiaries should shoulder the costs, replied the telco, which urged simple industry reporting duties. Adopting a safe harbor from Telephone Consumer Protection Act liability for callers using a "qualified commercial data aggregator" could "spur competition for number verification services," leading to "solutions that are more cost effective and at least as accurate as any government-run database," said the American Cable Association. It said small voice providers should be exempt from reporting duties. CenturyLink backed resolving TCPA interpretation issues first, suggested a "wireless-only database" test before wider implementation, given frequent reassignment of cellular numbers, and said provider reporting costs must be reimbursed. Neustar said business caller support for a database is "predicated on the naive view" that its use "should involve only a 'nominal' fee or should even be 'free,' even while they advocate for robust features and functions." ITTA cited the "potentially substantial costs" and "uncertain" benefits. The "most practical way to eliminate multiple undesired calls to a reassigned number is for the individual who is receiving the call to communicate that the number being called is incorrect," because "no legitimate business" wants to repeatedly call unintended recipients, said the Coalition of Higher Education Assistance Organizations, which suggested a study of complaints. The Alarm Industry Communications Committee, TracFone and "15 SMS Industry Participants" voiced database concerns. But Comcast said "a large and diverse ... cross-section of business commenters, consumer groups, and governmental bodies agree on the basic policy justifications" for the database and safe harbor proposals, with "substantial common ground" on many implementation details. Opponents "generally overstate the costs" and underestimate benefits of a database, which would be "a significant improvement over existing commercial tools," Comcast said. Also supportive were the Retail Industry Leaders Association and Student Loan Servicing Alliance.

The FCC went on a full-court press on social media Wednesday defending a formal complaint rules proposed order on Thursday's commissioners' meeting agenda. "Fake news travels fast!," tweeted Chief of Staff Matthew Berry about a report painting the rule change as harming consumers. "Nothing is changing" with regard to how informal complaints are handled, he said. He called other coverage "fake news" and tweeted kudos to The Washington Post for a fact-check. The FCC's official Twitter account also lauded the Post story. The order has come under fire from some House Democrats (see 1807100069). Insinuations that filing any complaint will require a $225 filing look "false ... but I'm going to report on it and characterize it as probably true because I dislike" Chairman Ajit Pai, Nebraska College of Law assistant professor Gus Hurwitz tweeted, characterizing some coverage. R Street Institute technology policy fellow Joe Kane tweeted similarly about media coverage. An FCC spokesman emailed that the House Democrats' letter "is completely inaccurate" and that the draft order "would simply align the text of a rule with longstanding FCC practices [regarding formal complaints] that have been in place for years." He said the $225 fee for handling formal complaints "has been the norm" and there's no fee-less venue for formal complaints. Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood had criticisms of the proposed rule change's revised language on setting a carrier response deadline and elimination of text indicating no obligation to respond to a complainant when both sides are satisfied (see here and here). He tweeted (see here and here) that the FCC claim the proposed order contains no substantive changes is "the Chairman's office spin machine is in full gear" since it removes the agency's ability to decide on informal complaints.

The FCC is “planning to rebuild and re-engineer” its electronic commenting filing system and has asked the House and Senate Appropriations committees for “the funds necessary,” Chairman Ajit Pai wrote Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa. “We hope they will enable us to make important improvements by approving it soon.” The revamp would come more than a year after the ECFS application programming interface experienced problems during an FCC proceeding on rescinding its 2015 net neutrality rules. The FCC faced pushback over its claim the glitch stemmed from a distributed denial-of-service attack (see 1710130052 and 1806050046). “In addition to being technologically behind the times, the system that this Commission inherited from the prior Administration was designed to make it as easy as possible to file comments,” Pai told Merkley and Toomey. “While facilitating widespread public participation in the rulemaking process is a worthy and important goal, we believe that we can accomplish that goal while at the same time updating our system to minimize the potential for abusive behavior.” Pai said he will make several proposals that reflect the lawmakers' suggestions, including pitching CAPTCHA authentication or similar verification. “We will seek to redesign ECFS to institute appropriate safeguards against abusive conduct,” Pai said. The senators' offices didn't comment Wednesday. The FCC doesn't “have any information regarding whether any 'fake' comments were submitted by foreign governments, nor can we verify the total number of comments that may have originated from bots,” Pai told the senators: More than 7.5 million comments that favored 2015 rules had the same exact sentence and were “associated with only 50,508 unique names and street addresses.” More than 447,000 comments favoring 2015 rules claimed to come from people residing at the same address in Chelyabinsk, Russia, Pai said. Docket 17-108 had 2 million comments that used stolen identities, half a million from Russian email addresses and almost 8 million nearly identical comments from email domains associated with FakeMailGenerator.com (see 1805090076).

The full FCC voted to adjust application fees to reflect a 3.7 percent increase in the consumer price index, said an order in Tuesday’s Daily Digest. The FCC "expects that this Order will become effective before October 1," the order said.

The U.S. policy path to spurring the growth of artificial intelligence comes in freeing up spectrum for flexible use, cutting red tape and "regulatory humility" of avoiding imposing rules in the absence of market failure or consumer harm, Chairman Ajit Pai said Tuesday at the ITU Global Symposium for Regulators in Geneva, per prepared remarks. He said that through ITU is opportunity to work on international spectrum allocation and harmonization that can help along AI and other emerging technologies. He said guaranteeing universal access is a key part of the U.S. approach to emerging technologies, and ITU's priority should be widespread broadband connectivity to help drive the potential of AI, blockchain and other technologies. Pai has mulled organizing an FCC forum on AI and machine learning to help the agency get up to speed on such emerging tech (see 1806140049).

FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly sought to clarify Guam’s diverting of state 911 fee revenue for unrelated purposes, in a Friday letter to Mikel Schwab, DOJ civil chief for Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. O’Rielly asked Guam twice for information after the territory didn’t respond to FCC staff for the agency’s latest report on 911 fee diversion (see 1806200052), then last month faced a flurry of conflicting takes from Guam representatives about scope, legality and impact of fee shifts there. Gov. Eddie Calvo (R) wrote June 21 to O’Rielly, saying that a September bill authorized such tactics, though a previous law set up a 911 fund from which money couldn’t be transferred. The actions complied with federal and local laws and didn’t disrupt emergency response, Calvo said. Guam’s acting fire chief confirmed the territory diverted $448,799 in 2016, failing to tell the FCC due to “internal personnel assignments.” Also June 22, Guam Legislature Speaker Benjamin Cruz (D) wrote O’Rielly to clarify “false” statements by Calvo that the territory’s diversion was legal. The legislator said the law authorizing diversion allowed it only from FY 2018, not retroactively, so it wouldn’t cover the 2016 shifting. Later that day, in another letter to O’Rielly, Calvo called Cruz’s letter a “political ploy” and restated that Guam is complying with federal E-911 policy. O’Rielly attached the letters to his asking Schwab to clarify if Guam appropriately allocated the 911 funds. “Regardless of whether Guam can divert 9-1-1 funds, there is no question as to whether it should divert such funds,” O’Rielly wrote. “I am not interested in engaging in local politics in Guam or anywhere else. What I am interested in is ending the disgraceful practice of 9-1-1 fee diversion throughout the country.”