The U.S. should auction most broadband subsidies "to catch up with the rest of the world," said American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark Jamison, who was on Donald Trump's presidential transition team for the FCC. Peru and Chile pioneered telecom subsidy auctions and much of FCC Connect America Fund support is now auctioned for high-cost areas, but such auctions should be expanded to other USF programs, he said in a Friday blog post. "The old E-Rate, Rural Health Care, Lifeline and some CAF programs would be dropped. E-Rate, Rural Health Care and some CAF programs would be rolled into a CAF Phase II-like reverse auction. Lifeline support would move to income subsidies." Other federal government broadband programs should be terminated, with funding channeled "through the new world-class FCC system," he wrote. "As Commissioner Michael O’Rielly recently observed, federal broadband spending must have integrity and efficiency. The best bet for accomplishing this is a revamped FCC system." Asked how many countries auctioned broadband subsidies, Jamison told us he didn't know, but said "it is considered best practice internationally."

Four video relay service providers lobbied the FCC to issue a Further NPRM on VRS rates by the end of March, and draft an order by June 30, the end of the current rate year. CSDVRS (ZVRS), Purple Communications, ASL Service Holdings (GlobalVRS) and Convo Communications reviewed their Jan. 31 VRS rate proposal, said a joint filing posted Friday in docket 10-51 on a meeting with an aide to Chairman Ajit Pai. The FCC's 2013-2017 schedule of rate reductions was premised on planned "structural and competitive reforms," but many of those actions haven't been implemented "and the VRS market remains dominated by a single provider," said their Jan. 31 submission. "The current glide path has, in fact, benefited the dominant provider by forcing the non-dominant providers to reduce costs below optimum operating thresholds (i.e., near break-even or at an operating loss), while the dominant provider continues to compete from a position of comparative financial strength," they wrote. "The rate reduction that took effect on January 1, 2017, threatens the viability of all non-dominant providers, and will result in only further concentrating the VRS market." They proposed a four-tier rate structure to "move all providers toward a more reasonable operating margin" create "much needed rate stability" and save the telecom relay service fund $14 million over four years. Under the proposal, per-minute VRS compensation would be: $5.29 for an Emergent tier (500,000 monthly minutes and below), $4.82 for Tier 1 (up to 1 million minutes), $4.35 for Tier 2 (1,000,001 to 2.5 million minutes) and $2.83 for Tier 3 (above 2.5 million minutes). Sorenson Communications, the top VRS provider, didn't address the proposal but discussed various other topics in a filing on a meeting it and CaptionCall had with the same Pai aide.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday requiring agencies to establish what the administration is calling regulatory reform task forces. “Each Regulatory Reform Task Force will evaluate existing regulations and identify candidates for repeal or modification,” the administration said in a news release. “Each agency’s Task Force will focus on eliminating costly and unnecessary regulations. To hold the Task Forces accountable, agencies will measure and report progress in achieving the President’s directives.” He surrounded himself by executives Friday when signing the order and lambasted what he called job-killing regulations. “An impossible situation, we’re going to solve it very quickly,” Trump promised at the order’s signing. He said the litmus test should be whether regulations make life better or safer for people. “We have begun a historic program to reduce the regulations that are crushing our economy,” Trump said Friday during the Conservative Political Action Conference. “We’re going to put the regulation industry out of work and out of business.” He repeated his belief that 75 percent of the “repetitive” and “horrible” regulations aren't needed, despite pledging his commitment to strong regulations otherwise. The order requires each task force to provide progress updates to agency chiefs within 90 days. “Within 60 days of the date of this order, the head of each agency, except the heads of agencies receiving waivers under section 5 of this order, shall designate an agency official as its Regulatory Reform Officer,” said the order text. Agency chiefs may request waivers from compliance with the order.

The FCC extended a March 1 filing deadline for submission of Form 477 data as of Dec. 31. The Wireline Bureau will announce the new deadline once technical difficulties in the filing interface are resolved, said a public notice Friday in docket 11-10. It said the interface Wednesday "experienced significant and unanticipated technical issues that have required the site to be inaccessible. The Bureau is working to resolve these technical difficulties as quickly as possible." The FCC's Electronic Document Management System also had problems Wednesday, which were apparently caused by a computer update, but they were resolved the same day (see 1702220072).

Approval of Ligado's LTE plans must include conditions protecting Iridium operations from interference, Iridium said in a series of meetings this week with all three FCC commissioners and staffers, said an ex parte filing Wednesday in docket 11-109. It recapped meetings with Iridium Vice President-Public Policy Maureen McLaughlin about Iridium's spectrum at 1617.775-1626.5 MHz, adjacent to 10 MHz of Ligado uplink spectrum. The company said it's still working with Ligado on technical fixes to interference concerns, but the agency should consider such conditions as reduced out-of-band emission (OOBE) from Ligado mobile terminals into Iridium bandwidth and exclusion zones around airport facilities where Ligado user terminal operation would be banned to protect aviation satellite communications. Iridium said Ligado's OOBE limit proposal is insufficient. Ligado Thursday said it "filed publicly a proposal that addresses Iridium’s concerns, and we hope to continue our discussions with Iridium on that proposal as soon as possible to find a mutually agreeable solution.”

Groups urged the FCC to reverse a Feb. 3 revocation decision and reinstate Lifeline broadband provider designations for nine companies (see 1702030070). Chairman Ajit Pai "took away the connections of 17,500 customers that one of these providers was already serving, and stalled imminent service from the other eight," said a Free Press release Thursday highlighting a letter to the FCC signed by it and 37 others, including the AFL-CIO, American Library Association, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Center for Media Justice, Common Cause, Communications Workers of America, NAACP, National Hispanic Media Coalition, New America's Open Technology Institute, Public Knowledge, Benton Foundation, Greenlining Institute and United Church of Christ. Separately, Gigi Sohn, a former counselor to previous FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, said the new Republican majority also has in its "crosshairs" the E-rate program subsidizing school and library telecom service and connections. She cited the Feb. 3 revocation of a January staff E-rate report and Commissioner Mike O'Rielly's Feb. 9 criticism of self-construction efforts by E-rate applicants that overbuild existing networks (see 1702100060). "Much like the case of Lifeline, the majority is using procedural steps and administrative tools to weaken the E-Rate program," said Sohn, an Open Society Foundations Leadership in Government fellow, in a blog post Wednesday. An FCC spokesman said Thursday the agency had no comment beyond Pai's recent defense of the Lifeline decision (see 1702070062).

Large multichannel video programming distributors and small cable programmers remain apart on restricting some carriage contract conditions, in FCC docket 16-41 reply comments posted Thursday on the independent and diverse programming NPRM. The American Cable Association and indie programmers jointly attacked large programmer arguments that the market is working, saying the "modicum of diversity" that comes from bundled conglomerate networks "foreclos[es] access to others [and] disserves the public interest." They said determination of whether most-favored nation language is unconditional will be relatively easy from the text of the provision itself. Joining ACA were programmers MAVTV Motorsports Networks, Ride TV and sister networks One America News Network and AWE. Charter Communications and Mediacom together said given the vast array of content choices available to consumers, no regulation promoting carriage of a particular program channel or channel group is needed. NAB continued its defense of bundling (see 1701270006), replying that no one provided any empirical evidence of large programmers having market power that rivals that of MVPDs. Public Knowledge said the FCC has authority under sections 616 and 628 of the Communications Act to tackle carriage agreement terms that hurt competition and said there's ample evidence to back the prohibition of unconditional MFNs and unreasonable alternative distribution method (ADM) language. Saying there was widespread agreement that defining indie programmers as those not vertically integrated with an MVPD is too broad, RFD-TV backed a definition meaning unaffiliated with a broadcast network, movie studio or MVPD. Along with backing a prohibition on unconditional MFN and unreasonable ADM clauses in carriage agreements, RFD-TV said the FCC should tackle bundling practices and the high switching costs and early termination fees. Charter/Mediacom also supported the agency taking a narrow definition of indie programmer, pushing one that doesn't include programmers that command significant market power through their offerings of must-have programming. NAB urged that broadcasters not be excluded from the indie programmer definition. Calling itself "a potential entrant to the video distribution marketplace," T-Mobile said the FCC should ensure unconditional MFNs don't block emerging video competitors and that unreasonable ADMs don't block over-the-top competition.

The FCC received 380 nominations for Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee membership (see 170222006), Chairman Ajit Pai announced Thursday after commissioners' meeting. He welcomed the "overwhelming" demand to serve on the panel and said agency staff is reviewing the nominations.

A White House official confirmed Thursday the Trump administration is considering broadband as part of its infrastructure proposal. The Trump team previously listed telecom as one factor in such an infrastructure starting in November but hasn't offered details on what such a proposal would look like. The proposal could be as much as $1 trillion, based on earlier statements from the administration. Members of Congress have been raising the broadband issue directly with President Donald Trump this month, with some senators citing what seemed to be a "positive" reception (see 1702220054).

Cutting regulatory budgets responsibly would help boost economic and job growth, said a Phoenix Center report Wednesday. It said the annual "cost per regulator" to the U.S. economy is 138 jobs and $11 million in output. "Reducing the size of the regulatory state is a promising means for cutting spending and growing the economy," said an accompanying release. A 10 percent reduction, or about $5.6 billion, in the regulatory budget -- "which implies a return to pre-Obama Administration levels" -- would produce an additional $1.2 trillion in GDP over five years, or $244 billion annually, and 3 million new private-sector jobs per year on average, it said.