Rhode Island lawmakers might consider ending 911 fee diversion next year, Rhode Island House Finance Vice Chairman Kenneth Marshall (D) told us Friday. Seeking a more immediate fix, FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly and state Rep. Robert Lancia (R) slammed a proposed Rhode Island budget that renames rather than restricts the state 911 fund. “The citizens of your state deserve more than just a name change,” said O’Rielly in a Friday letter to Gov. Gina Raimondo (D) and Rhode Island House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello (D). Raimondo earlier supported legislators ending diversion (see 1803200052).
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said net neutrality "passion and heat" obscure "common ground" for upholding a free and open internet that stimulates broadband network investment, consumer choice and digital opportunity. The right solution is for Congress and stakeholders to hammer out legislation on consensus policies targeting internet blocking, throttling and anti-competitive arrangements, and then move on, he said Thursday evening in Q&A at the Cato Institute. State and local internet regulation is a "recipe for chaos," he said.
The 3.7-4.2 GHz band will play a role in deployment of 5G, speakers agreed Friday at a New America event, but they jousted over whether the C-band could be cleared in only some geographic areas and complained about lack of clarity and technical details on the two main plans for terrestrial access to the band. Top priority must be preventing harm to incumbent users, and there needs to be far more detail about the Broadband Access Coalition (BAC) and Intelsat/SES/Intel proposals before an evaluation can start, said American Cable Association (ACA) Senior Vice President-Government Affairs Ross Lieberman.
Groups that typically would be expected to rally behind FCC nominee Geoffrey Starks have remained mostly quiet in the weeks since President Donald Trump sent the nomination to the Senate (see 1806010072 and 1806040067). That appears to reflect concerns the groups cited soon after Starks emerged in March (see 1803090040) as the likely nominee: with almost no track record and little else to go on, self-described public interest groups and others are reluctant to say too much about the nomination. Starks’ lack of a record is widely viewed as one of his selling points and an important reason the Senate is likely to easily confirm him, communications lawyers and others told us. The Senate Commerce Committee set Starks' confirmation hearing for Wednesday in what's perceived to be a bid to fast-track approval (see 1806120047 and 1806130096).
All lawmakers at Thursday's House Digital Commerce Subcommittee hearing on advertising industry digital data gathering practices agreed problems need to be addressed. There was a partisan divide in tone and tenor of lawmakers' questions to executives and consumer advocates, whose testimony mirrored written remarks (see 1806130074). Lawmakers from both parties frequently referenced the ongoing debate on the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica privacy breach issues (see 1806130057).
Many urged the FCC to limit business-oriented caller exposure to Telephone Consumer Protection Act liability, after partial court reversal of a 2015 commission decision targeting unwanted robocalls (see 1803160053). Financial and other corporate interests, including some telecom groups, said the commission should narrow its key definition of "automatic telephone dialing systems" (ATDS) subject to TCPA wireless restrictions and give parties more protection when making inadvertent calls to reassigned numbers. Consumer groups, class-action parties and a few others resisted such pleadings, which they said would further open the floodgates to unwanted robocalls. Comments were included in docket 18-152 on a public notice inviting input on the remand and other TCPA interpretations (see 1805150014).
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon giving a thumbs up to AT&T buying Time Warner (see 1806120060) isn't precedent-setting and shouldn't affect how DOJ looks at other potential vertical mergers, experts said on C-SPAN's The Communicators, to be telecast Saturday and now online. "I don't think this is a referendum on vertical mergers," said Joshua Wright, executive director-Global Antitrust Institute, George Mason University. The American Antitrust Institute, which opposed the deal, wants Justice to appeal. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, meanwhile, said separately he will continue judging deals case by case and vertical combinations are neither necessarily good nor bad (see 1806140049).
Discussions turned heated at the FCC Disability Advisory Committee Thursday on captioning and why captions disappear when content migrates to the internet. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai expressed his commitment on disability issues.
PHILADELPHIA -- Pennsylvania may reverse pre-empt the FCC for pole attachment authority, an option for states not taken for nearly a decade. Public Utility Commissioners voted 5-0 for a motion by Commissioner Norman Kennard to open a rulemaking that surprised some. Earlier Thursday, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr told the Above Ground Level (AGL) Summit in Philadelphia the FCC may learn from state small-cells bills as the federal agency weighs action to lower state and local barriers to 5G deployment.
Sinclair could restructure its Tribune buy to fit under the 50 percent national ownership cap being pushed by several TV station owners (see 1806050040) if that's what the FCC decides on, Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley responded to us at a panel during an S&P investor conference Thursday in New York. Ripley declined to speculate what the agency would do.