FCC Seeks Comment on Closing 2,057 'Dormant' Proceedings
The FCC sought comment Friday on eliminating 2,057 docketed proceedings as dormant. A sampling studied by Communications Daily found many smaller, limited dockets, often in which few, if any, filings had been made. The FCC said it closed almost 100 other dockets “administratively” in advance of the release. The notice from the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau (CGB) isn’t tied to the ongoing “Delete” proceeding, the agency said. Comment deadlines will come in a Federal Register notice.
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“Although the FCC has moved to close dormant proceedings before, this is far and away the largest number of dormant dockets the FCC has ever sought to remove in a single proceeding with the oldest docket teed up for termination dating back to 1991,” said a news release. The FCC launches dockets “in order to categorize public comments around certain interrelated policy questions,” it said. “While this is an important tool in the agency’s policymaking and public engagement efforts, too often there is not a commensurate effort to close out a docket after it becomes dormant, moot, or no longer useful.”
Eliminating the dockets “will free up staff resources to focus on the agency’s core mission and provide the regulatory certainty that allows providers to invest and build,” said FCC Chairman Brendan Carr: “It is time for these deadwood proceedings to go.”
The notice said the FCC is following procedures from a 2011 order, which gave the CGB chief authority “to periodically review all open dockets and, in consultation with the responsible Bureaus or Offices, to identify those dockets that appear to be candidates for termination.” The order stated that “these candidates may include dockets in which no further action is required or contemplated as well as those in which no pleadings or other documents have been filed for several years, but it specified that proceedings in which petitions addressing the merits are pending should not be terminated, absent the parties’ consent.”
One example of the dockets listed is RM-11721, which asks whether railroad police should be given access to various channels, including in TV spectrum, so they can communicate with other public safety officials (see 1509010044). The National Public Safety Telecommunications Council had asked the FCC to make railroad police eligible to use the interoperability channels. The docket saw 19 filings, not including Friday’s elimination notice. The last was in 2018.
Another example is RM-11857, examining a 2020 Consumer Technology Association petition asking the first Trump administration to allow conditional sales of devices to consumers and limited importation of devices before they’re approved through the FCC equipment authorization process. In June 2021, the FCC approved revised authorization rules in a unanimous vote (see 2106170051). The most recent filing in RM-11857 was in 2020.
Many of the dockets examine copper retirements and requests to terminate services under FCC rules, proceedings which have become dormant. Other dockets involve the transfer of control of regulated facilities from one company to another.
Docket 21-375 last had a filing in May 2022, regarding the transfer of Intelsat licenses to a reorganized Intelsat as part of its Chapter 11 restructuring, which wrapped up in early 2022. Docket 19-385 remains open four-plus years after the FCC Media Bureau issued an order granting Comcast and Cox Communications petitions that they face effective competition in parts of Massachusetts. Not counting express comments unrelated to the docket but filed there anyway, docket 96-132 -- regarding mobile satellite service spectrum rules in the L band -- last saw a standard filing in June 2010. The most recent standard filing in docket 99-217 -- concerning telecommunications providers' access to customers in multi-tenant environments -- dates from June 2009.