House Communications Subcommittee members broadly agreed during a Tuesday hearing there is significant support for seven bills aimed at combating abusive robocalls, but it's less clear how they would package them for final passage. It's also unclear how they will reconcile those measures with the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence (Traced) Act. HR-2015/S-151 is being targeted for fast-track Senate passage yet wasn't considered at the Tuesday House hearing (see 1904290166).
The FTC is under pressure after Facebook estimated it will lose $3 billion-$5 billion as a result of the FTC’s data privacy investigation (see 1904240064), but a fine in the billion-dollar range would be significant, some experts said in recent interviews. Ex-FTC Chief Privacy Officer Marc Groman noted he had estimated a penalty in the $300 million range when news of Cambridge Analytica initially broke.
DOJ has made no decision on T-Mobile buying Sprint, antitrust chief Makan Delrahim told CNBC Monday, in perhaps his most complete comments yet on the deal, which as of Monday is a year old. Delrahim said there’s no magic number of national carriers to guarantee wireless competition. T-Mobile and Sprint, meanwhile, postponed the deadline for completing the deal from Monday to July 29, said an SEC filing.
There was much enthusiasm for looking at the 4.9 GHz band when a Further NPRM was approved on a 5-0 vote 13 months ago (see 1803220037). Now, FCC and industry officials said they've heard almost nothing since the agency took comments last summer. While 4.9 GHz offers prized mid-band spectrum, it’s one segment that rarely gets attention as the FCC looks at 5G. Last year’s notice was the sixth the agency issued.
A Tuesday anti-robocalls hearing gives the House Communications Subcommittee an opportunity to make a public return to bipartisanship as members delve into a group of seven anti-robocalls bills, lobbyists told us. Stakeholders are monitoring the House Commerce Committee's telecom policy agenda for signs of a pivot in its trajectory. The committee's contentious debate over the Save the Internet Act net neutrality bill (HR-1644) culminated in the measure's passage earlier this month (see 1904230069). The hearing begins 10 a.m. in 2123 Rayburn (see 1904260068).
Intel is still deciding what to do with the rest of its 5G modems business, after announcing it’s exiting 5G smartphone modems for lack of profit potential (see 1904170004), said CEO Bob Swan on a Q1 call Thursday. The stock fell Friday after "underlying trends" worries sparked Intel to cut its 2019 revenue forecast.
General Motors decided to ask the FCC to pull the company's waiver bid to not provide some real-time texting functions (see 1904250038) after deciding it wasn't necessary, GM confirmed Friday. The company's Cruise shared autonomous vehicles that continue being tested in three big cities lack some features that would have subjected them to the RTT rules, in this view.
The joint industry-government Contraband Phone Task Force released an interim report Friday, based on more than a year of work in response to a push by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who has focused on the issue (see 1901290052). Virginia Tech professor Charles Clancy, who has been coordinating efforts, and officials from CTIA, the Association of State Correctional Administrators (ASCA) and Bureau of Prisons updated the FCC on the status of the efforts to curb contraband devices in prisons, posted Friday in docket 13-111.
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, is pushing the Senate Commerce Committee’s bipartisan privacy working group (see 1904040073) to include elements of his bill (see 1812120036) in its proposal, according to lobbyists. They said that’s one aspect complicating long-awaited negotiations among Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Schatz.
FCC staff Friday afternoon approved SpaceX's plans for satellite broadband, over some industry opposition that was dismissed. The company's Nov. 8 application to modify its previously authorized 4,425 non-geostationary orbit satellite constellation using Ku- and Ka-band spectrum is greenlighted. Now, the company with its Starlink satellites can cut the NGSO satellites to 4,409 in what staff called "a very small reduction in the number of satellites initially granted." That was deemed "a fundamental element in assessing whether there would be significant interference problems" from the change, as others contended there would be.