A U.S. offer this week to host the 2027 World Radiocommunication Conference is probably a long shot, WRC experts and watchers told us. In a letter dated Monday to ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's offer doesn't specify a U.S. location for WRC-27, saying it could be "any number of cities," including Washington.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, appeared highly skeptical during a Wednesday hearing about President Donald Trump’s proposal that Congress rescind $1.1 billion of CPB’s advance funding for FY 2026 and FY 2027 (see 2506030065). Panel member Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., also voiced concerns about parts of the CPB rescission plan but told White House OMB Director Russell Vought he wants to find a compromise. The House passed its 2025 Rescissions Act (HR-4) earlier this month with the CPB funding clawback intact, despite some Republicans’ misgivings (see 2506130025). Rounds is among a handful of Senate Republicans who have raised questions about defunding CPB (see 2506050063).

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, locked down support Wednesday from a pair of top Armed Services Committee Republicans for the panel’s spectrum budget reconciliation package language after strengthening the original proposal’s exclusion of the 3.1-3.45 GHz and 7.4-8.4 GHz bands from potential FCC auction or other reallocation (see 2506060029). Cruz’s office also reemphasized his view that the revised proposal’s language to encourage states to pause enforcement of AI laws no longer threatens jurisdictions’ eligibility for the enacted $42.5 billion in BEAD funding (see 2506230043) in the face of Democratic assertions to the contrary.

States are grappling with the limited amount of time available to restructure their BEAD plans and undergo a new round of grant applications under NTIA's revised rules governing the program (see 2506060052). In light of the years of work that states have already spent to comply with the rules set when the program was created, some broadband officials said they plan to continue with business as usual, while others worry that the shift from fiber priority to tech neutrality, along with narrowed community anchor institution eligibility, will hinder their efforts to bridge the digital divide.

New satellite entrants struggle in the face of incumbent operators taking up geostationary orbital slots with old satellites that barely operate anymore, said Kimberly Baum, regulatory head for Astranis, at a space and spectrum conference Tuesday at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder. The related challenge of mini payloads on satellites that don't provide commercial service -- but nonetheless get licensed -- can stifle spectrum access for new entrants, she said. She called for the FCC to look at changing how it licenses payloads or older satellites that can't provide commercial services.

The North American Numbering Council said Tuesday that it wouldn't be rechartered after its final meeting that day, and its functions will be absorbed into the FCC. The advisory committee has operated since 1995, and its charter expires Sept. 8.

House Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., said Tuesday that it’s “time to have a real conversation and update the 1992 Cable Act,” a revamp that would likely take aim at retransmission consent, must-carry and network non-duplication rules, lobbyists said. The lawmaker announced plans to revisit the statute during a Media Institute event, saying it was part of a broader “modernization” of U.S. media laws, in tandem with the FCC Media Bureau’s move to seek comment on relaxing national broadcast-ownership limits (see 2506200052).

Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough on Saturday cleared a revised version of Commerce Committee Republicans’ budget reconciliation proposal for a freeze on enforcing state-level AI rules in a way that backers claim doesn't directly threaten funding from NTIA’s $42.5 billion BEAD program (see 2506060029). However, Senate Democratic aides told us they believe it would still put all states’ BEAD allocations at risk. The measure is an apparent alternative to language in the House-passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act (HR-1) that would impose a 10-year federal preemption of such laws (see 2505220064).

Telephone Consumer Protection Act and marketing lawyers see Friday's U.S. Supreme Court decision on the deference that lower courts are to give the FCC over telemarketing issues (see 2506200053) as potentially resetting decades of TCPA precedence by the agency.

Expect more litigation from content companies targeting generative AI platforms over their use of images and video, both as inputs and outputs, copyright and intellectual property experts told us. Earlier this month, Disney and Universal sued AI platform Midjourney, alleging that the company uses the studios' intellectual property in its training data and the images that its platform produces (see 2506110043).