Telecom Infrastructure Legislation, Other Issues on Commerce Committees' Radar
House and Senate Commerce leaders told us they aim to continue work on telecom infrastructure legislation and tackle a raft of other communications policy issues, after their success just before the recess in enacting a range of telecom policy provisions as part of the $1.3 trillion FY 2018 omnibus spending bill (see 1803210041, 1803210068, 1803220048 and 1803230038). How the committees will prioritize those issues remained unclear last week, though the lawmakers and lobbyists acknowledged that follow-up on last week’s twin hearings with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the Cambridge Analytica data privacy controversy (see 1804100054 and 1804110065) could be a lingering factor. It’s beginning to look increasingly less likely that Capitol Hill will be able to produce any communications legislation of the same scope as what lawmakers accomplished in the omnibus, in part because of the dwindling legislative timeline before the November midterm elections, lobbyists said.
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Senate Commerce Chairman John Thune, R-S.D., and Senate Communications Subcommittee ranking member Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, independently said they see rural broadband issues, and particularly continued work to finalize their bill to ease barriers to 5G and other broadband deployments, as the committee’s top telecom priorities in the short term. Rural broadband “is something we’ve been working on for a long time” and the 5G small cells bill is likely the “next thing that we would try to queue up,” Thune said. The senators first circulated a draft in October (see 1710310057).
Thune and Schatz acknowledged local and municipal government stakeholders are continuing to criticize the small-cells bill over language that would pre-empt state, local and tribal laws seen as barriers to deployments. Those disagreements were repeatedly cited as a major factor hindering the bill’s formal introduction (see 1711240024, 1711240024, 1712060061 and 1712070075). State and local stakeholders are still operating based on the existing draft text and their past conversations with aides to Thune and Schatz, since they “haven’t seen” new bill text “in months,” a telecom lobbyist said. The draft bill also could have trouble advancing given perceptions that “the wind is coming out of the sails” for small-cell bills at the state level, the lobbyist said. State-level legislation was enacted in 16 states, but local government opponents to the bills claimed spring wins in eight other states (see 1804100036 and 1804120045)
Other issues are also on Senate Commerce’s radar, including robocalls and legislation on the emergency alert system (EAS) highlighted during a January false alarm about a possible ballistic missile headed for Hawaii (see 1801160054 and 1803160042). Schatz told us he’s aiming to file his Reliable Emergency Alert Distribution Improvement Act “during this work period,” which runs through the end of April. The bill, which Schatz previewed during a hearing earlier this month, would require the FCC to set best practices for delivering emergency alerts in a bid to streamline the alerting process. It would also update the process for creating and approving state EAS plans and examine the feasibility of expanding EAS to also distribute warnings to online streaming services (see 1804050055).
Senate Commerce and the House Digital Commerce Subcommittee plan hearings this week on robocalls (see 1804120062), with the House Digital Commerce panel to examine the FCC’s recent work on at least one reassigned numbers database to help businesses avoid calling reassigned numbers (see 1803220028 and 1803230056), said House Commerce Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore. House Commerce has been “getting a lot of interest” in exploring possible updates to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, he said. The House Digital Commerce hearing is to explore the issue further, with the committee not set to file any legislation in the immediate future, Walden said.
"Moving forward on spectrum” reallocations “remains a priority" for House Commerce, Walden said. Passage of the Repack Airwaves Yielding Better Access for Users of Modern Services (Ray Baum's) Act FCC reauthorization and spectrum legislative package (HR-4986) in the omnibus should “solve” several spectrum-related issues, including allowing the FCC to place bidders' deposits for future spectrum auctions in a Treasury Department fund, Walden said. The FCC can now “move forward” with planned auctions of the 24 GHz and 28 GHz bands later this year (see 1802260047) “and we expect them to.” House Commerce will also be “watching how the repack goes” now that Congress allocated $1 billion more to the Broadcaster Relocation Fund via the omnibus, he said. The committee may also further examine white spaces, he said.
House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., told us the subcommittee is still shifting through a set of broadband infrastructure-related bills it considered during a January subcommittee hearing (see 1801300051) to form a package in response to President Donald Trump's infrastructure legislative proposal. Language from five of those bills made it into the omnibus (see 1803290046) and House Communications’ goal is still to see “if we can pull together” the remaining bills into bipartisan legislation, Blackburn said.
It’s still possible for the Hill to enact some minor infrastructure bills this year, but “I don’t know that anything large” on the scale of what Trump proposed in February (see 1802120001) “is still going to be possible,” a telecom lobbyist said. “The time for a comprehensive, broad bill on anything infrastructure related is probably past now. The omnibus was the type of vehicle” that Congress could use to pass such legislation at this point in the Hill’s calendar. “You won’t see Congress bring out anything major again until after the election,” the lobbyist said.
Walden, Blackburn and House Communications ranking member Mike Doyle, D-Pa., cited the subcommittee’s Tuesday hearing on paid prioritization and other forms of data prioritization (see 1804100057) as a sign of House Commerce’s continued interest in net neutrality legislation. High Tech Forum founder Richard Bennett, Aira Tech Director-Public Policy and Strategic Alliance Paul Schroeder, Rysavy Research President Peter Rysavy and Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood are to testify at the hearing, House Commerce said. Blackburn and Walden said they're also exploring a possible additional hearing on algorithms and their effect on consumer privacy and online content choices, which would follow up on a similar November hearing (see 1711280059 and 1711290041).
All five lawmakers said they were still sorting through how to follow up on issues explored during the Zuckerberg hearings, given the implications of the Cambridge Analytica controversy. Hill scrutiny of Facebook was “sucking every bit of oxygen out of the room” for tech policy stakeholders during the recent recess and last week, which made it difficult to prioritize other issues, one communications lobbyist said. The data privacy issues in the Cambridge Analytica controversy are “being thrown at Congress now in a way they can’t ignore,” another lobbyist said.
Zuckerberg’s testimony “is going to influence the way we look at things” but that doesn’t mean Senate Commerce won’t be able to prioritize other telecom and tech issues, Schatz said: “We can still walk and chew gum at the same time.” Blackburn cited the “tremendous amount of interest” amid the scandal in her Balancing the Rights of Web Surfers Equally and Responsibly Act (HR-2520), which House Commerce Democrats strongly opposed last year (see 1706280058). Doyle said he will watch “how much [Blackburn] is going to push” HR-2520 “in light of the hearings.”
Doyle said he didn’t anticipate “anything else major” on telecom policy making it through Capitol Hill “for the rest of this session” because of the “closing legislative window” and “the politics of midterms being such that the [Republican] majority is now scrambling and is focused on other things” that will more directly affect their electoral prospects. Congress “isn’t in session all that much longer” given the August recess and limited work periods after Labor Day to accommodate lawmakers’ election campaigns, a telecom lobbyist said. “That doesn’t lend itself to anything big moving” through the Hill.