Martin Cancels Dec. 18 FCC Meeting; No Decision Soon on AWS-3
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s decision to cancel Thursday’s scheduled FCC meeting appears to leave key issues like AWS-3 and WCS/SDARS dead in the water and the FCC unlikely to act on anything but DTV issues in the near future, industry officials said. The decision came late Friday in response to a letter from lawmakers asking the FCC to act just on DTV transition issues between now and the Obama inauguration (CD Dec 15 p1). Martin acted without polling other commissioner offices and they were caught by surprise, agency officials said Monday. Items already on circulation for the meeting, including rules for a proposed AWS-3 auction, appear all but dead under the current FCC, officials said.
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“AWS-3 looks dead and WCS/SDARS looks dead for now,” said one agency official. “It’s all cancelled until the chairman schedules a meeting. Keep in mind next week is Christmas week and a lot of people have vacation plans.” A second agency official said action is unlikely on any items of note until after the DTV transition deadline. “My guess is nothing that is on that meeting [agenda] is going to get done, with the exception of the minor DTV items, while Kevin Martin is around,” the official said.
Martin had scheduled votes on a proposal to use the AWS- 3 spectrum for a free broadband service, as well as on E911 location accuracy requirements and a regulatory framework for coexistence of SDARS and WCS service.
The FCC is required to meet at regular intervals, not less frequently than once each calendar month, under Sect. 5 (d) of the Communications Act. Martin will address this requirement, said FCC spokesman Robert Kenny. “The chairman will discuss this with other offices and then will decide how best to move forward,” he said. “No decision has been made yet.” Kenny said in a statement released Friday evening the various proposals “remain on circulation and the Commissioners can still vote on them.” Martin pulled the plug on the meeting after he received a letter from incoming House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and incoming Senate Commerce Chairman John Rockefeller, D-W.Va., asking the agency to concentrate on just the DTV transition in future weeks (CD Dec 15 p1).
Agency and industry officials said Monday if the FCC does not meet in December, it would be a violation of the Communications Act, but the chairman would not face any legal sanctions. “I am not aware of any consequences of a failure to meet,” said an industry attorney. “I guess someone could bring a mandamus action to ask the courts to force them to meet -- but that seems odd since … they would not have to vote anything specific.”
The meeting was expected to be Commissioner Deborah Tate’s last. If the FCC does not meet before she departs, commissioners may not have a chance to say their public good byes, officials said.
The cancelled meeting also opens office doors on the eighth floor to more lobbying on all of the items scheduled for vote because the “sunshine” restrictions associated with an open meeting are now lifted. But advocates of some of the proposals that had been slated for a vote Thursday are unsure about how to proceed, said Parul Desai, Media Access Project associate director. “The angle that most people would take is to say, ‘This is not controversial and there’s a large coalition of support behind it,'” she said. But it’s not clear whether those efforts would pay off, she said. “No one really has a sense right now.”