The FCC should not “engage in a rush to judgment” and give non-carrier providers like Vonage direct access to numbering resources, a group of CLECs told Commissioner Mignon Clyburn Monday, an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/11RZckj). The commission must give “fair consideration” to several outstanding issues, it said, such as how non-carrier providers will be obligated to pay intercarrier compensation or interconnect with other carriers. The CLECs, including Bandwidth.com and Level 3, discussed their concerns about number exhaust, number portability and call routing, and urged the commission to address these issues in a rulemaking rather than by granting multiple waivers or trials. “The issue of direct access to numbering resources cannot be addressed piecemeal, separate and apart from other IP interconnection and IP transition issues,” they said.
The high cost of Inmate Calling Services (ICS) didn’t come up when the FCC unanimously passed rules last year to prevent unwanted third-party charges, also known as “cramming.” But those rules, and similar state requirements cracking down on the practice, have made providing ICS increasingly expensive, said Securus Technologies Director-Regulatory and Government Affairs Curtis Hopfinger. In a filing Wednesday (http://bit.ly/11RTuyB), Hopfinger said that as cramming rules have become stricter, “rates for riding on a LEC bill have increased substantially.” Some LECs have started demanding penalties of $100 or more from Securus if a consumer “simply alleges” that an inmate call charge is unauthorized, he said. Virtually all investigations reveal that the inmate collect call was fully authorized, “but the LEC typically has already reversed the disputed charge back to Securus and imposed the penalty that must be paid,” Hopfinger said. Those costs get passed along to the end user in the form of higher ICS rates, he said. Site commissions -- which opponents dub “kickbacks” -- also increase the costs, he said. “Mandatory free calls would be very difficult to implement” from an operations perspective, he said, with some proposals requiring a completely new billing application and complex systems to determine which calls should be charged and which should be free. “Creating that kind of system would be next to impossible,” he said.
Western Pacific Broadcast dismissed its petition for special relief by order of carriage. WPB filed the petition urging the FCC Media Bureau to order Atlantic Broadband, Quincy, Mass., to carry local commercial TV station WACP, Atlantic City, N.J., on its cable system serving the Philadelphia designated market area (CD Dec 7 p20). WPB dismissed its petition “pursuant to a settlement agreement between the cable operator and Western Pacific,” it said in a filing in docket 12-364 (http://bit.ly/ZDoSx2).
Kentucky’s telecom deregulation bill died in the House this week. AT&T-backed Senate Bill 88 would have reduced state regulation of phone services but prompted great concern from some consumer advocates. “AT&T drafted this bill, seeking to end its obligation to provide basic local exchange phone service for all new and all existing customers in areas with over 5,000 housing units,” the Kentucky Resources Council said in its roundup of state legislation Wednesday (http://bit.ly/YM7y6e). “For exchanges with less than 5,000 housing units, AT&T, Windstream and Cincinnati Bell could require customers with stand-alone basic landline phone service to accept wireless voice service instead, and could cease offering basic phone service on an unbundled, stand-alone basis. The Public Service Commission would also lose regulatory powers over the quality and reliability of basic local exchange phone service.” The bill passed the Kentucky Senate 24-13 in February but failed to receive a vote in the House when the legislative session ended this month. “We're especially disappointed for the Kentucky consumers already demanding access to wireless and broadband services that are being held back by antiquated laws,” said AT&T Kentucky President Mary Pat Regan in a statement. “Sadly, despite strong bipartisan support for SB 88, House leadership did not give the bill honest and fair consideration.”
National Religious Broadcasters urged departing FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski to finalize a notice of proposed rulemaking allowing noncommercial stations to devote a segment of airtime to fundraising for nonprofit organizations. The commission proposed the new rules, which would do away with the waiver process allowing stations to raise funds for emergency and disaster relief purposes (CD April 27/12 p8). The concept at the heart of this proceeding will serve an essential public interest not only by “facilitating the charitable impulse of listeners and viewers, but also by aiding non-profit groups in meeting critical community needs through partnerships with broadcasting stations,” it said in a letter to Genachowski in docket 12-106 (http://bit.ly/Zrtgf6).
Smart City Telecom seeks a limited waiver of FCC rules governing 2011 rate-of-return carrier base period revenue, it told the FCC in a petition Thursday (http://bit.ly/10d9Hd1). The rural Florida ILEC wants to include in its FY 2011 base period revenue amounts for Transitional Intrastate Access Service that should have been billed and collected by March 31, 2012, “but were not due to a billing dispute,” it said. A local exchange carrier had disputed an amount billed, “asserting a portion of the billed minutes were VoIP traffic and therefore not subject to tariffed intrastate access rates for switched access service,” Smart City said. After the FCC’s USF/intercarrier compensation order was released, directing that terminating VoIP minutes be billed at interstate rates and originating VoIP minutes continue to be billed at intrastate rates, Smart City was able to negotiate a settlement with the LEC, it said. A waiver would let Smart City include the revenue in its 2011 figures, which would serve the public interest “in that Smart City would be able to continue to serve its customers consistent with the FCC’s National Broadband Plan goals while having the benefit of the transitional recovery mechanism to the full extent intended by the Commission,” it said.
Public Knowledge and more than 30 groups and companies urged lawmakers in letters sent Thursday (http://bit.ly/XknoZY) to codify rules that permit consumers to unlock their cellphones. The letters urged the chairmen of the Senate and House Judiciary committees, Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., and Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., to adopt “more permanent proposals” to legally permit consumers to unlock their wireless devices. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) those who unlock their phones without permission from their carriers may be subject to civil lawsuits, criminal fines or imprisonment. Leahy and Goodlatte introduced companion legislation this month, the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act (S-517 and HR-1123) (CD March 15 p10). The bills offer a legislative fix that restores an exemption to the DMCA for cellphone firmware unlocking that permits consumers to use their phones with other carriers once their contracts have expired. But such proposals would merely return to a “flawed process that creates a perpetual re-lobbying of many settled issues every three years,” the letters said. The Judiciary committees should instead embrace legislation from Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., or Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., which would “enact sound public policy” that removes wireless unlocking from the “bureaucratic treadmill,” the letters said. Wyden’s bill (S-467) would amend the DMCA, rather than simply restoring the exemption, and Klobuchar’s bill (S-481) would direct the FCC to begin a rulemaking that ensures consumers can circumvent the technological protection measures that prevent their handsets from being used with other networks. Congress should “act quickly to ensure that this exemption to the DMCA can be codified permanently,” the letters said. The groups added that consumer concern about cellphone unlocking “highlights a need to examine the DMCA’s anticircumvention provisions more fully in the future,” according to the letters. The committees should therefore convene hearings to investigate “possible reforms” to the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA, the letters said. The letters were signed by more than 30 organizations and companies including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Internet Archive, Reddit and BoingBoing. Some of the group’s members led or participated in the online protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act in 2012 (CD Jan 23/12 p9). Committee spokesmen from the House and Senate Judiciary committees did not comment.
The Universal Service Administrative Co. spent a large part of 2012 working on insourcing its information technology infrastructure and operations so it could more quickly review applications for funding for the Schools and Libraries Program, it said in its 2012 Annual Report, submitted to the FCC Wednesday (http://bit.ly/11ROOcd). It has also worked on responding to FCC reform of the High Cost, Lifeline, and Rural Health Care programs, it said. USAC’s unaudited administrative expenses were $110 million in 2012. The total approved disbursements to the high cost program were $4.15 billion; $2.22 billion to Schools and Libraries (also known as E-rate); $2.19 billion to Lifeline; and $155 million to rural healthcare.
Bond Broadcasting in Greenville, Ill., and East Kentucky Broadcasting, Pikeville, Ky., requested a declaratory ruling that the current Auction 83 rules and procedures will not be changed without proceedings. A notice and comment proceeding is needed “to allow for heretofore prohibited major changes to long-pending FCC Form 175 applications of non-commercial educational ... applicants that specify non-commercial educational status,” they said in a joint request in dockets 97-234 and 07-172 (http://bit.ly/YIYYeG). Many commercial broadcasters have been waiting more than 10 years since filing for Auction 83 FM translators for the enhanced service that their applications would allow, they said. A change now in the Auction 83 procedures would substantially harm commercial broadcasters who relied upon commission rules “to continue to prosecute Auction 83 FM translator applications in good faith reliance upon the published procedures.” Hundreds of Auction 83 commercial applicants “are now spending significant resources in the continued prosecution of their Auction 83 applications,” the broadcasters said.
Major brands including Amazon, Target and Best Buy and the U.S. Army and National Guard have advertisements that appear on websites that host pirated content, according to the March Ad Transparency Report from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab (http://bit.ly/10d1u8x). “Due to the convoluted natures of the advertising marketplace and the on-demand bidding process, brands which do not support illicit file-sharing can come to have adverts placed on non-DMCA compliant websites, providing an in-direct form of subsidy,” the report said. The report also lists the top 10 advertising networks on sites hosting illegal content for March, including Propellerads, Infolinks and Yahoo/Right Media. Three of the 10 are on the list for the first time, which “indicates that the ad market is extremely fluid and changing month to month,” the report said, noting “a strong move by major ad networks such as Google, Quantcast and Open X” -- which were formerly in the top 10 list -- “as well as ad agencies like Group M and Omnicom to block Pirate sites.”