A federal court of appeals denied the National Telecommunications Cooperative...

U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said it was “not convinced that petitioner has carried its burden of showing that the circumstances justify an exercise of the court’s discretion to enter a stay in this matter.” The court also declined to order the FCC to rule on NTCA’s pending application for review before implementing the new reimbursement limits. NTCA had argued the new capping methodology would violate the commission’s statutory mandate to deploy predictable and sufficient mechanisms to advance universal service (CD July 2 p12). NTCA had also argued that inaccuracies in the data set used to designate geographic boundary areas and to compute the formulas’ coefficients’ and retroactive application to limit reimbursements for expenses incurred in past years. In a statement Tuesday, NTCA Senior Vice President-Policy Michael Romano said the association had recognized the “high procedural hurdle” to obtaining a stay, but the “pervasive and paralyzing uncertainty” of the caps justified the effort. “We anticipate that once the court has the full opportunity to consider how the FCC’s caps retroactively cut support for past investments and are undermining incentives to invest in broadband moving forward, the court will find that these caps are contrary to the fundamental statutory requirements of universal service,” he said.