The FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau established the total funding requirement and approved contribution factors for the interstate telecommunications relay services (TRS) fund for a one-year period ending June 30, 2026. The FCC previously took comments (see 2506090018). Contribution factors determine the amounts that carriers and other covered service providers must contribute to the fund.
The FCC, Congress and others have been considering alternative funding mechanisms for USF, and now that the program's legality has been affirmed, they can move forward, Parks Associates analyst Kristen Hanich wrote Tuesday. The U.S. Supreme Court last month upheld the constitutionality of USF's contribution scheme (see 2506270054). With only 25% of U.S. internet households receiving phone service, USF "must evolve in order to meet the needs of Americans for the next 30 years," she said.
Wireless carriers urged the FCC to move with caution in response to a Further NPRM on wireless location accuracy, which commissioners approved 4-0 in March (see 2503270042). The FNPRM probes ways to improve accuracy and whether providers should be required to deliver vertical location information to 911 call centers measured in height above ground level (AGL), instead of height above ellipsoid (HAE). The notice also asks about ways to ensure that more public safety answering points receive dispatchable location (DL) as part of calls to 911. Reply comments were due Monday and mostly posted Tuesday in docket 07-114.
The FCC should expand the payor base of regulatory fees, said NAB and Telesat in comments filed in docket 25-190 by Monday’s comment deadline. NAB and satellite industry commenters were broadly supportive of the agency’s proposal to reclassify 61 indirect full-time equivalents (FTEs) as direct FTEs and collect $390,192,000 in fees, but some said industries that benefit from FCC processes should bear part of the fee burden.
As humans head to the moon and Mars, they're on the verge of being able to launch an interplanetary internet, raising policy questions about that network's architecture and governance, space and internet experts said Tuesday at the Internet Society's Interplanetary Networking Special Interest Group seminar. The group's founder, internet pioneer Vint Cerf, said there needs to be thought and planning now about those policy issues and the agreements and institutions to tackle them.
Sept. 30 is the deadline for MVPDs with six or more full-time workers to file Form 396-C equal employment opportunity program annual reports, the FCC Enforcement Bureau said Monday.
The FCC shouldn’t take up a proposal to give broadcasters expedited waivers of media ownership rules in exchange for their promises to reduce retransmission consent rates by 50% over three years, said Free State Foundation Senior Fellow Andrew Long in a post Monday. The proposal, from Cincinnati Bell Extended Territories and Hawaiian Telcom Services Co., was filed in the FCC’s “Delete” docket in June. It amounts to “forward-looking, government-imposed pricing mandates” on retransmission consent rates “that could persist for a decade or more,” Long wrote. The proposal would also use administrative contracts that couldn't be reviewed in court and would bind broadcasters and MVPDs, he said. “These so-called voluntary ‘social contracts’ would impose enforceable, multiyear pricing constraints -- effectively, rate regulation -- while circumventing judicial scrutiny.”
Gray Media and E.W. Scripps have agreed to a swap of TV stations that would involve seven stations in five markets and create new duopolies for both companies, said a Gray release Monday. Media brokers told us that a wave of such swaps has been anticipated (see 2505150056) since the FCC signaled in March a new willingness to waive its prohibition against top-four duopolies (see 2503120066). The Media Bureau approved a Sinclair deal involving a top-four waiver last week (see 2507010073).
Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler slammed current Chairman Brendan Carr’s handling of the Skydance/Paramount deal in an op-ed piece published Saturday by The Guardian. Wheeler said he expects the FCC to cease “slow-walking” the deal after CBS agreed last week to a $16 million settlement in President Donald Trump’s personal lawsuit against the network (see 2507020053). By holding up the deal over a news distortion complaint against CBS, Carr exceeded the FCC’s traditional authority, Wheeler said, adding that the chairman “has not been shy” about using FCC authority to achieve political goals. “It is time to unfurl the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner at the Federal Communications Commission,” Wheeler wrote. “What was once an independent, policy-based agency has been transformed into a performance-based agency, using any leverage it can discover or invent to further the Trump Maga message.”
Public interest groups, MVPD groups and low-power TV broadcasters opposed to NAB’s petition for a mandatory ATSC 3.0 transition are “protecting their turf” rather than the public interest, said NAB Chief Legal Officer Rick Kaplan in a blog post Monday. Kaplan was responding to a June ex parte filing from the Consumer Technology Association, NCTA, ACA Connects, Public Knowledge, the Advanced Television Alliance and the LPTV Broadcasters Association, which said NAB’s request goes against both the public interest and the Trump administration’s push for deregulation (see 2505090060).