Thursday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision limiting the scope of environmental reviews could ease permitting for infrastructure projects, including broadband buildout, said advocacy groups and policy analysts.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Commerce Committee ranking member Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Communications Subcommittee ranking member Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M., pressed the Trump administration Friday to immediately release the $42.5 billion Congress allocated to NTIA’s BEAD program. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in March began a “rigorous review” of BEAD aimed at revamping the program (see 2503050067). Meanwhile, National Lifeline Association Chairman David Dorwart marked the one-year anniversary of the formal lapse of the FCC’s affordable connectivity program (see 2405310070).
Federal budget-cutting could mean degraded quality and timeliness of emergency alerts during major storms and disasters, emergency response and weather experts tell us. A number of advocacy groups, from the Urban Institute to the Natural Resources Defense Council, have raised concerns about budget cuts for the Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster response. Others say budgetary issues won't harm emergency alerting, and the system remains robust.
The New York office of the FCC Enforcement Bureau sent a warning to Ray Dolph Brown and Wilsonia Brown about pirate radio broadcasts emanating from their property in the Bronx, said an agency notice in Thursday’s Daily Digest. EB agents found unauthorized radio broadcasts coming from the property in February, the notice said. It warned that the landowners could face up to a $2.4 million penalty.
The FCC’s Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council will meet June 12 at 1 p.m. at FCC headquarters, the agency said Thursday. This is the second CSRIC meeting under FCC Chairman Brendan Carr; the first was in March (see 2503190051).
Representatives of the ioXt Alliance, an IoT security group, met with Public Safety Bureau staff about the FCC’s nascent voluntary cyber trust mark program. They “provided a general overview of how ioXt’s own certified products registry operates and offered insights on challenges and opportunities associated with the design and development of the registry for the Commission’s IoT Cybersecurity Labeling Program,” said a filing posted Thursday in docket 23-239.
The FCC defended its 50% upward adjustment of a fine it imposed on Verizon for data violations, bringing the total penalty to $46.9 million, in a brief filed Wednesday at the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. The court heard Verizon’s challenge of the fine in April (docket 24-1733), with judges appearing skeptical of the carrier’s arguments (see 2504290060). This week, they asked both sides about the adjustment as they near a decision. The FCC defended the fine even though now-Chairman Brendan Carr and Commissioner Nathan Simington had opposed it (see 2504250062).
The Enterprise Wireless Alliance asked the FCC to clarify the regulatory status of 800/900 MHz specialized mobile radio service systems not interconnected with the public switched telephone network. They should be considered private mobile systems that “may not be classified or regulated as common carriers for any purpose under the Communications Act,” the group said in an undocketed filing posted Wednesday.
The FCC Wireline Bureau on Thursday authorized carriers to “grandfather” interconnected VoIP services provisioned over copper lines and waived an “associated requirement to file an application with the Commission” under agency discontinuance rules. The bureau also waived for two years “the need for carriers applying for section 214(a) discontinuance authority to follow the testing methodology and parameters described in the 2016 Technology Transitions Order and its Technical Appendix.”
The FCC Wireline Bureau announced Thursday the interim required locations lists for the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, the Bringing Puerto Rico Together Fund, and the Connect U.S. Virgin Islands Fund. The release is tied to the FCC’s shifting carriers from reporting USF high-cost program data using latitude/longitude/address information to reporting deployment using fabric locations IDs, the bureau said. The FCC previously committed to releasing an interim required locations list this month for RDOF carriers using the latest version of the “fabric.”