The FCC Wireline Bureau approved two companies' applications using the commission’s streamlined procedures for interconnected VoIP numbering authorization, said a Friday notice. The companies were Ahoi and Cornfield Voice.
Senate Communications Subcommittee ranking member Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., are urging Republican FCC Commissioner Olivia Trusty to “insist that the FCC conduct” its review of Skydance’s proposed $8 billion acquisition of Paramount Global “with the utmost transparency, including holding a full Commission vote on any order to approve the merger.” Some observers believe Paramount recently agreed to a $16 million settlement of President Donald Trump's lawsuit against CBS, which challenged its editing of a 60 Minutes interview last October with former Vice President Kamala Harris during the election, to ease the path to FCC approval of the deal. Paramount has refuted those claims (see 2507020053).
Since its 2024 net neutrality rules have never gone into effect, the FCC Wireline Bureau said Friday it's restoring sections of its rules to the language they would use absent the net neutrality order. Chairman Brendan Carr said the move was part of his "Delete" agenda and called it "the latest step the FCC is taking to follow the Trump Administration’s effort to usher in prosperity through deregulation." The agency said the moves axed 41 rules or "utility-style burdens."
Congress should revamp the Communications Act to account for the “Digital Age,” doing away with the siloing of different industries at the FCC and replacing the public interest standard, wrote Free State Foundation President Randolph May in an op-ed Friday for Real Clear Markets. The FCC’s separation of industries into different bureaus -- which May called “the stovepipe regulatory framework” -- is “woefully outdated,” he said. “These regulatory stovepipes don't make sense in today's digital environment characterized by relentless technological innovation and marketplace convergence” and “impede efforts to allow comparable services to compete with each other without unfair advantages conferred by outdated regulatory distinctions.”
The FCC could investigate public media stations for running ads against legislation that would rescind federal funding from NPR and PBS, said FCC Chairman Brendan Carr in a post on X Thursday night. Carr’s post came a little more than an hour after President Donald Trump said on Truth Social that he wouldn’t endorse Republican lawmakers who voted to support funding for PBS and NPR.
T-Mobile’s purchase of wireless assets from UScellular, which has been pending since May of last year, got two key clearances in two days. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced Friday (see 2507110065) that the Wireless Bureau approved the transaction. Late Thursday, DOJ announced it won’t oppose the deal, which includes about 30% of UScellular's spectrum and all its wireless customers and stores.
Tegna has agreed to a $222,500 settlement with the FCC over an Oct. 2021 incident where a 13-second clip of pornographic material was played on a monitor visible behind an anchor during an evening news weather segment, said an order and consent decree in Thursday’s Daily Digest. Tegna told the FCC that an unknown person used the monitor’s screencasting feature to transmit and display the material while on a legacy wireless network that, unknown to the station's IT team, didn’t require a password. After the incident, Tegna deactivated the network, disabled screencasting on all monitors at all its stations and began requiring that all new monitors be installed without Wi-Fi capabilities, the consent decree said. Under its terms, Tegna agreed to create a compliance plan and file compliance reports with the FCC for the next three years. In 2016, then-Schurz-owned WDBJ Roanoke, Virginia, paid a $325,000 FCC forfeiture after it aired an image that contained pornography during a news story about a firefighter’s adult film career (see 1604040057). Schurz appealed the amount but eventually paid in order to close its sale to Gray Television.
Fourteen groups signed a letter Thursday urging the FCC to reject NAB’s push for an ATSC 3.0 tuner mandate. The groups -- which include Digital Liberty, Americans for Tax Reform, the James Madison Institute and the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, as well as two individual signers -- said ATSC 3.0 already reaches three out of four Americans. “By any reasonable standard this is a success,” and broadcaster arguments that the 3.0 transition is in jeopardy without FCC intervention are “flimsy.” The agency “should maintain its voluntary, market driven adoption policy that has reached the vast majority of Americans, not embrace a mandate just to reach the small minority of markets broadcasters have struggled to penetrate,” the letter said. “While broadcasters operate under the strain of onerous regulations dating from the Second World War, new mandates on other technologies are not the solution.”
NextNav filed at the FCC a supplement to its early engineering report, addressing interference issues raised by the company’s proposal that the FCC reconfigure the 902-928 MHz band “to enable a high-quality, terrestrial complement” to GPS for positioning, navigation and timing services (see 2503030023). The supplement filing, posted Thursday in docket 25-110, slammed critics of the earlier report (see 2504280045).
GCI representatives met with an aide to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr concerning the company’s petition seeking clarity of the agency's Alaska Connect Fund mobile requirements (see 2501310053). Part of the filing, posted Thursday in docket 23-328, was redacted. As GCI and the Alaska Remote Carrier Coalition “have made clear, it is not possible to extend 5G-[new radio] at 7/1 or 35/3 Mbps to the edge of the voice service areas reached by the Alaska Plan,” the filing said. “Even excluding voice-only areas, Alaska providers will need significant flexibility and, as such, the general expectations should be more realistically calibrated in light of the nature of Alaska’s communities and the realities of wireless signal propagation and attenuation.”