The Senate leadership is trying to find floor time next week for Republicans’ resolution against the FCC net neutrality order, a senior Senate aide said. A “hotline” was running Thursday in the Senate to get an agreement from all senators on the exact time, the aide said. The Senate is “hopefully set next week to vote” on killing the FCC net neutrality order, Commerce Committee Ranking Member Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, said at a press conference Thursday about Republican senators’ efforts to create jobs. Under the Congressional Review Act procedure, Hutchison has enough signatures to skip the Commerce Committee and force a floor vote on SJ Res 6 (CD Nov 3 p12). “With such an arbitrary standard” as the FCC net neutrality order, “companies are going to be forced to err on the side of caution,” Hutchison said. “Forcing broadband companies to say, ‘Mother may I?’ to the federal government is going to delay the implementation of the new products and services getting to the market; it’s going to increase costs to consumers.”
Unlicensed spectrum should not be set for auction in spectrum reform legislation, the Wireless Innovation Alliance said Thursday. Companies who want spectrum for unlicensed use don’t have the scale to compete in an auction with carriers who seek licensed frequencies, said Peter Cramton, economics professor at the University of Maryland, and an expert on auction theory. While it may seem counterintuitive, giving away some spectrum for unlicensed use may raise more revenue during the auctions of the remaining spectrum, Cramton said. When less spectrum is available in auctions, bidders pay more for it, he said. Also, unlicensed spectrum -- which powers Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology -- increases the value of licensed spectrum, he said. Unlicensed spectrum is “conducive to innovation” because entry barriers are “very low,” said Assaf Eilat, a senior economist with Compass Lexecon. And the value of unlicensed spectrum to the economy is in the tens of billions of dollars per year, he said. The benefits to consumers outweigh what revenue is initially lost by the U.S. Treasury, he said. The Alliance released a paper Thursday by Eilat and two other economists on the benefits of unlicensed spectrum. It was commissioned by Google. The role of unlicensed spectrum has been an ongoing debate in the House Commerce Committee (CD Oct 20 p2).
The House Communications Subcommittee plans to vote Nov. 16 on FCC process reform legislation, and won’t take up spectrum until after Thanksgiving at the earliest, Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., said at a press conference Wednesday. As expected (CD Nov 2 p8), Walden and Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., introduced two reform bills Wednesday in each the House and Senate. One FCC reform bill includes broad process changes first proposed in Walden’s draft bill from earlier this summer. A second bill would reduce the number and consolidate many of the reports the FCC is required to send to Congress.
FCC process reform legislation will be introduced Wednesday simultaneously in the House and Senate, a spokesman for Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., said Tuesday. House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., and Heller plan to unveil FCC reform bills at a 10:30 a.m. press conference in the Senate Press Gallery, the House Commerce Committee said. While Walden’s subcommittee had multiple hearings on FCC reform this year, Heller is the only member of the Senate Commerce Committee who has yet to publicly show interest in the subject. He is the committee’s newest member, replacing Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., earlier this year. Walden and Heller each plan to introduce two bills. The Senate versions circulated among lobbyists Tuesday. One includes process reforms first seen in Walden’s draft bill from earlier this summer (CD June 21 p7). The second aims to reduce and consolidate many of the reports the FCC is required to send to Congress. The latter would require the FCC to publish a “Communications Marketplace Report” in the last quarter of every even-numbered year. The bill would repeal the Orbit Act and satellite competition reports, and consolidate several other reports including on international broadband data, video competition, cable industry prices, market barriers for small businesses, the Section 706 report on broadband deployment and mobile competition. The new communications report would assess the state of competition across the market, including competition for voice, video and data among telecom, mobile, Internet service and satellite providers, multi-channel video programming distributors and broadcast stations. The FCC also would have to determine whether any laws, regulations or regulatory practices “pose a barrier to competitive entry” of new companies or “competitive expansion” of existing ones. Also, the commission would have to describe its agenda for the next two years and discuss how it did on its previous two-year agenda. It’s possible only one of the House bills will be introduced Wednesday, a Walden spokeswoman said. And other members may be listed as cosponsors, she said. The broader FCC process reforms were based on this summer’s draft, but are not identical, she said. “We have been working with Democrats and stakeholders since then to refine the proposal."
The Senate is likely to approve two FCC nominations by year-end, probably alongside many other pending nominations, commission officials and industry lobbyists said Tuesday. President Barack Obama late Monday as expected nominated Jessica Rosenworcel (CD April 19 p2), telecom aide to Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Ajit Pai (CD June 20 p1), a communications litigator for Jenner & Block and former FCC staffer. Rosenworcel, a Democrat, would replace Commissioner Michael Copps who must leave the agency when the current session of Congress ends. Pai would take the Republican seat left vacant by Meredith Baker, who left the commission earlier this year for a job at Comcast’s NBCUniversal.
Spectrum auctions appeared in a summary of a plan by Republicans on the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. Democrats and Republicans presented proposals last week behind closed doors. The GOP plan “did include spectrum sales, but no specifics, and lumped it in with other items that would raise several billion dollars,” said Vince Jesaitis, government relations director of the Information Technology Industry Council. Spectrum was not mentioned in the summary of the Democratic plan, “but I know they consider it to be in the mix,” he said. He predicted that details on spectrum won’t be fleshed out “until the broader framework” is developed. The recent spectrum letter by four super committee members (CD Oct 11 p4) to President Barack Obama “is a clear sign that they are seriously considering including additional auction authority,” he said.
Consumer groups are up in arms over a bill to relax requirements on calls to cellphones contained in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The House Communications Subcommittee scheduled a hearing this Friday on HR-3035 to ask whether the TCPA went too far in restrictions on calls to wireless numbers. The subcommittee plans to ask whether the telemarketing rules’ mobile restrictions “are inadvertently preventing Americans who rely on wireless phones from receiving useful information, such as alerting consumers of harmful activity on their bank accounts, data breaches, and other pertinent data affecting them directly,” the Commerce Committee said. But consumer groups said the changes could reduce people’s privacy.
The House likely will vote Tuesday on the Wireless Tax Fairness Act (HR-1002), Hill and wireless industry officials said. The Act would place a five-year moratorium on new state and local taxes for wireless. The House will take up the bill under suspension of the rules, a fast-track procedure that prevents amendments and requires a two-thirds majority for passage. Next week’s floor schedule hasn’t been announced, said a spokeswoman for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va.
Public safety believes it has enough GOP votes on the House Communications Subcommittee to approve an amendment there that would give them the 700 MHz D-block, a top Public Safety Alliance official said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. Dick Mirgon, the immediate past president of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials, and John Walsh from America’s Most Wanted urged Commerce Committee leaders to stop delaying a spectrum markup in the Communications Subcommittee. “There is no reason” for the messing around that’s going on with this, Walsh said.
Senators urged a federal investigation of mobile “stalking apps.” Sens. Al Franken, D-Minn., Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and seven others from both parties made the request in a letter Tuesday to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. The apps allow the user to secretly track someone’s GPS location. More than 26,000 people are victims of GPS stalking each year, said the senators, citing 2006 data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. They said the agencies should “investigate whether the developers and distributors of stalking apps are in compliance with all applicable federal criminal and consumer protection laws.” Many of the apps advertise themselves as a way for parents to keep track of their children, but “their design and marketing suggests that this is an attempt to legitimize an otherwise suspect activity,” the senators said. “We believe that in most cases, stalking apps’ intrusion into victims’ privacy and their potential for abuse will far outweigh any legitimate purpose that these apps may serve.” The Association for Competitive Technology, representing app developers, shares the senators’ concerns about apps made for stalking but the association doesn’t support casting a net that could also capture lawful location-based apps, said ACT Executive Director Morgan Reed in an interview. Law enforcement should not target the “technology” behind the apps but rather the “behavior” with which the apps are used, Reed said. The stalker and not the app used should be punished if, for example, the stalker is using an app designed for parents to legally monitor their children, he said. ACT plans to contact the senators, the FTC and the Justice Department to make its case, he said.