The Phoenix Center said Tuesday that President Donald Trump's administration is proving to be more focused on regulating industry than he promised during his campaign last year. “A disturbing number” of Trump appointees “are refusing to heed his message, targeting technology firms with aggressive antitrust enforcements, regulations, and even the sorts of jawboning coercion used during the Biden Administration to curtail constitutionally protected private speech,” the center's new report said.

EchoStar’s decision Friday not to make a $326 million cash interest payment due that day on corporate debt that matures in 2029 (see 2505300001) could give the company more leverage to negotiate over spectrum with the FCC, New Street’s Blair Levin told investors Monday. New Street believes FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s strategy “is to put a cloud over the value of [EchoStar’s] assets while using procedural maneuvers to keep [EchoStar] from challenging those actions in the Court of Appeals,” Levin wrote. The company also told the SEC on Monday that it wasn't making an $183 million interest payment due that day on notes that mature in 2026, 2028 and 2029.

The FCC’s “bad labs” order and Further NPRM, approved by commissioners 4-0 last week and posted this week, contains a lengthy cost-of-benefit analysis weighing the costs and risks of not moving forward with the rules. FCC officials noted last week that this was the only major change from the draft (see 2505220056), though the agency also added a paragraph on DOJ's concerns. Other changes were mostly cosmetic, based on a side-by-side comparison.

The FCC Public Safety Bureau on Wednesday denied a petition for reconsideration by China Unicom Americas, which asked the agency to rethink its 2022 decision revoking the company’s Section 214 authority to operate in the U.S. (see 2201270030). The order rejected each of CUA’s arguments. In December, the 9th U.S. Circuit Appeals Court turned down a petition for review from CUA that sought to overturn the 2022 decision (see 2412240032).

Members of the House this week asked FCC Chairman Brendan Carr to send to the Federal Register for publication rules for new multilingual templates for wireless emergency alerts (WEA), which the Public Safety Bureau released in January (see 2501080029).

Efforts by the White House and FCC to chill speech are succeeding, Commissioner Anna Gomez said at an event Wednesday afternoon in Los Angeles, hosted by Free Press. It marked the first stop outside Washington, D.C., for Gomez’s “First Amendment Tour.” She said broadcasters have told her that they're warning reporters to tread carefully when covering the current administration. “That’s exactly what I don’t want to see." Using “the raised eyebrow,” the FCC is intimidating the corporate parents of journalistic organizations, she said. “It is so dangerous. We all need to understand what is happening.” The government telling private companies how to moderate their websites doesn’t comport with the First Amendment, she added. Gomez called for the FCC to pivot away from “sham investigations” and focus on actions that can help Americans, noting that Congress hasn’t given the FCC authority over Section 230 of the Communications Act.

A U.S. district court judge ruled Friday that a White House executive order targeting Jenner & Block was “doubly violative of the Constitution” and granted a motion for summary judgment and a preliminary injunction blocking it (see 2504280022). “Retaliating against firms for the views embodied in their legal work -- and thereby seeking to muzzle them going forward -- violates the First Amendment’s central command that government may not ‘use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression,’” U.S. District Court Judge John Bates wrote in the opinion. The executive order “casts a chill over the whole of the legal profession, leaving lawyers around the country weighing the necessity of vigorous representation against the peril of crossing the federal government.” Bates ordered the White House and federal agencies to rescind all guidance and direction on barring Jenner attorneys from federal facilities, reviewing security clearances and requiring federal contractors to disclose relationships with the firm. DOJ and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission must also cease any related investigations of Jenner. The White House is expected to appeal the ruling.

Rather than focusing on deleting certain regulations, the Trump administration should consider shuttering the FCC, wrote Thomas Lenard, a senior fellow at the Technology Policy Institute. “The White House is closing and shrinking other agencies, and it should consider doing the same to the FCC -- as the administration has a responsibility to evaluate whether the agency has outlived its raison d’etre,” Lenard said this week in The Wall Street Journal.

The FCC made limited changes to an NPRM on foreign-ownership rules, as agency officials indicated at last week's meeting, where commissioners approved the item 4-0 (see 2505220056). The FCC posted the NPRM on Tuesday.

The FCC questioning the progress of EchoStar's 5G network deployment (see 2505120074) could set the stage for a clash with White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Director Michael Kratsios, analyst Tim McDonald wrote Thursday in a blog post. Kratsios could interpret the FCC action as a direct challenge to his strategy of promoting and protecting emerging technologies in which the U.S. could be preeminent, McDonald said. While the FCC might see what it's doing as providing market certainty by enforcing its rules, he added, OSTP very well could view the FCC action as jeopardizing the idea that EchoStar's open radio access network deployment shows that the U.S. can build telecom infrastructure without Chinese vendors.