The FCC on Monday announced lower prices to check the agency’s reassigned numbers database. The agency said it cut the costs of all existing subscription tiers by 20% and added two new tiers “to better meet industry needs.” The database is “designed to prevent a consumer from getting calls intended for someone who previously held their phone number,” it said: “Subscribers use the database to determine whether a telephone number may have been reassigned so they can avoid calling the wrong consumer.” The changes should “make it easier for callers to check large volumes of numbers before calling them, potentially reducing misdirected calls from reaching consumers.”

The Large Public Power Council filed Friday in support of a petition by the Edison Electric Institute asking the FCC to clarify that utilities have “prior express consent” under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act to send “demand response calls and texts” to their customers (see 2503100047). “LPPC agrees with EEI that there is good ground for the Commission to clarify that utility customers have implicitly granted prior consent to communications from utilities eliciting demand response, that these communications are closely related to utility service, and that these communications are in the public interest,” said a filing in docket 02-278.

The FCC Office of Inspector General released its inaugural strategic plan for 2025-29 on Friday, focusing on enhancing FCC oversight and safeguarding communications services from fraud and abuse. The plan emphasizes four priorities: OIG will conduct "impactful oversight" to protect FCC programs; build and maintain relationships with stakeholders to enhance public awareness; strengthen operations to ensure accountability on a timely basis; and enhance workforce capacity and engagement internally. "Our success in fulfilling our critical mission is dependent upon our ability to assess current and future priorities and challenges and marshal our resources and skills to best address them," said Inspector General Fara Damelin. She noted that the plan was based on "critical input from all FCC OIG professionals" and feedback from external stakeholders. "We are committed to engaging in ongoing assessments of our goals and objectives and to identifying and employing effective measures to hold ourselves accountable."

The FCC is no longer seeking an 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals en banc rehearing regarding the court's decision on a 2023 FCC robocall and robotext order, so allowing proposed intervenors to become parties would only keep litigation going that the government has decided to quit pursuing, the FCC told the court Friday in docket 24-10277. In an opposition to a motion to intervene, the FCC said allowing those parties to become intervenors "would undermine the government’s prerogative to direct the course of this case." The agency also argued that the motion to intervene, filed by the National Consumer Law Center and Public Justice (see 2503100070), was untimely. A three-judge 11th Circuit panel ruled earlier this year that the agency overstepped its statutory boundaries in part of its implementation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (see 2501240068).

Don't worry that any georouting of text messages to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline will give a sender's exact physical location, Lifeline administrator Vibrant Emotional Health said Thursday (docket 18-336). Pointing to privacy concerns regarding those texting, Vibrant said it would implement a georouting solution that sends messages to the nearest appropriate crisis center, using the same or similar boundaries as those in place for georouted voice calls to minimize user-specific data. "User confidentiality will remain a priority, with strict adherence to data handling protocols," Vibrant said. It said the platform it makes available to crisis contact centers complies with national best practices regarding data, privacy and security. Counselors at the crisis contact centers don't have access to an individual's exact location for georouting voice calls, and georouting of texts will be handled the same way, it added.

The FCC has issued a consumer alert about scam calls targeting the Chinese American community, an issue called out by Commissioner Anna Gomez in an X post Friday (see 2503280056). The FCC “is alerting consumers that scam robocalls are targeting Chinese speakers in the San Francisco community and beyond,” the alert said. The calls involve scammers impersonating Chinese law enforcement, federal employes and health care officials and have led to some victims handing over tens of thousands of dollars, it said. In a public warning Friday, the San Francisco Police Department said one of the callers had pretended to be a Chinese-speaking FCC employee. “The FCC will never call consumers and request payment over the phone and the FCC does not make outbound calls in Chinese,” Monday’s alert said.

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez is asking the Enforcement Bureau to investigate scam calls targeting San Francisco’s Chinese community, one of which involved a scammer posing as a Mandarin-speaking FCC employee. “This is why it's so important for government to continue to reach communities who may be targets of these sophisticated scams in the languages they speak,” Gomez posted Friday on X. The call is part of a wave of scams in March involving callers posing as police officers and health care providers, said the San Francisco Police Department in an online warning. In many instances, the caller posed as a Chinese health care provider and convinced the recipient that someone had submitted their personal data to make a health care claim in China. "The suspects then transferred the calls to other suspects, who claimed to be police officers from a city in China. The suspects claimed they wanted to file police reports for the victims’ compromised personal information,” SFPD said. This eventually led to callers being persuaded to use apps like Skype for video calls with people dressed as police officers as part of the scam, it said. In the incident with the false FCC employee, the scammer connected the victim “to several suspects posing as different Chinese police officers in multiple Chinese cities,” and the victim was eventually persuaded to wire $23,000 to clear their name of a supposed crime.

Provider DQE Communications on Friday urged the FCC to look closely at whether E-rate services should be subject to the USF contribution factor. DQE filed in docket 25-133, the FCC’s “Delete, Delete, Delete” docket. “In a paradoxical loop that only a bureaucrat would love: The Federal government uses USF funds to provide heavy discounts for E-Rate services, then levies a 36.6% tax against those same schools and libraries, all in the name of funding USF so it can be used in part to provide the subsidies to the schools that have been overcharged,” the provider said. The FCC should “act to eliminate this ridiculous Catch-22 situation by exempting all E-Rate services from the USF levy.”

The FCC Enforcement Bureau on Thursday asked voice service providers and USTelecom’s Industry Traceback Group to file information by May 1 on “private-led efforts to trace back the origin of suspected unlawful robocalls necessary for the Commission’s annual report.” The reporting period for the request is all of 2024. “Unlawful prerecorded or artificial voice message calls -- robocalls -- plague the American public,” the bureau said in a notice in docket 20-195. “Spoofed caller ID makes it more difficult to identify the source of the call.”

Traditional telecommunications service providers can't rely on their physical infrastructure for competitive differentiation, as the growth of disruptive market entrants means "anyone can now launch a telecom company in a matter of days," management consultancy Arthur D. Little said Wednesday. Those new competitors include big cloud and streaming providers like Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft, as well as mobile virtual network operators, it said in a report. Traditional telecommunications service providers must differentiate at the product and service level, it added. The report predicted that traditional companies will pivot from what have been core products and services and focus on such business approaches as being a no-frills connectivity provider or an AI-enabled digital life assistant that's integrated with numerous applications and platforms. It said some traditional telecommunications service providers might also opt to become bundlers of connectivity content, entertainment, cloud and cybersecurity.