FCC Plans to Focus on Deleting Regulations at June 26 Meeting
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said Wednesday that the FCC will consider three items during its June 26 open meeting, though he acknowledged in his blog the uncertainty about whether any votes could occur. Leading the proposed items is an order that would eliminate a “dated and reticulated” group of cable TV rate regulations, consistent with the FCC’s “Delete” proceeding.
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Carr noted the pending departures of Commissioners Nathan Simington and Geoffrey Starks, which will mean a commission without a quorum for the moment (see 2506040073). “As the saying goes, the show must go on,” Carr wrote. “There’s a lot of time between now and our scheduled … meeting. So I wanted to lay out a couple of items that I would like to get done at the meeting if we can.”
The FCC will consider an order that would delete cable TV rate regulations that “have been overtaken by events and in many cases no longer serve any purpose at all,” Carr said. “If adopted, we would remove 77 rules and requirements that have no meaningful application today.”
Eliminating cable rate regulation rules was one of the issues raised in submissions to the agency’s “Delete” docket. The Free State Foundation said then that the agency should get rid of such rules because MVPDs face effective video competition from streaming services and social media (see 2504140063).
Also on the agenda is an order ending a requirement that a certified professional engineer verify and certify a company's broadband data before it's submitted through the FCC's broadband data collection (see 2411060045). The agency should address “needless rules that have raised the costs” of the data collection, “which serves as the foundation of the FCC’s broadband maps,” Carr wrote.
The chairman noted that the FCC has been waiving the requirement since it was imposed. “There is a lack of engineers who both specialize in RF engineering and broadband network design and also have completed the educational and testing requirements to get ‘certified’ by a state licensure board.”
Commissioners also plan to tackle a rule requiring providers of text telephone-based telecom relay services to offer a service capable of communicating with devices using the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) format (see 2411250037). Carr wrote, "That rule might have made sense in the early 1990s when ASCII was considered ‘a superior technology’ for TTY transmission.” It no longer makes sense “when ASCII calls account for approximately 0.01% of TTY-based communications.” In 2022, T-Mobile asked that the FCC to eliminate the rule because it's "an obsolete and infrequently used format.”