Broadcasters should seek a deal with the recording industry on performance royalties due to current “political realities,” said House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher in a keynote at an NAB conference Tuesday. Broadcasters in the audience objected strongly to the concept. Boucher also praised the FCC’s proposed voluntary approach for taking broadcast spectrum, and said spectrum inventory legislation is nearing a full committee vote.
SAN FRANCISCO -- The FCC is making “the hard decision” with the National Broadband Plan to shift universal service money toward broadband from current “less productive” uses, instead of creating a new fund at consumers’ expense as the industry would prefer, said Blair Levin, who runs the commission’s staff work on the plan. Most of the lines that don’t support broadband belong to AT&T, Qwest and Verizon, and under the high-cost USF system, “they have no incentive to upgrade,” he said late Wednesday at a Goldman Sachs conference.
The National Broadband Plan will contain many specific recommendations on “all of the areas you would expect,” said Edward Lazarus, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s chief of staff, in a keynote at Catholic University’s Communications Symposium Wednesday.
The National Broadband Plan will contain many specific recommendations on “all of the areas you would expect,” said Edward Lazarus, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s chief of staff, in a keynote at Catholic University’s Communications Symposium Wednesday.
The National Broadband Plan should include a “significant discussion” of FCC “authority and jurisdiction issues,” representatives of public-interest groups said at a meeting with Chairman Julius Genachowski and aides. “On several different issues core to the NBP, including major USF and consumer protection issues, many commenters have either highlighted the inadequacies of Title I jurisdiction or argued that a Title II classification (with appropriate forbearance) would be a superior path,” said an ex parte filing. “Because the goals in the NBP require a sound legal foundation, the question of jurisdiction is paramount.” Representatives of the Media Access Project, Consumers Union, the Consumer Federation of America, Free Press, the New America Foundation and Public Knowledge attended the meeting.
Concern at the national level about switched access fees is likely to outlive the defeat of her bill to outlaw fee splitting in South Dakota, state Rep. Deb Peters (R-Hartford) told us. “The national regulators have begun to move on the issue of access stimulation,” Peters said Friday in an e- mail. “There have been letters from the U.S. Congress to the three South Dakota companies requesting information.”
Small rural telcos must answer questions about practices that large carriers call traffic pumping to increase access revenue, Democratic leaders of the House Commerce Committee told the companies in 24 letters sent late Tuesday. The inquiries follow up on October letters (CD Oct 15 p13) to AT&T, Verizon, Qwest and Sprint Nextel. An attorney for addressees of the new letter said he expects the rural carriers to be eager to cooperate.
As VoIP evolves, states and the FCC should exercise regulatory control, with the understanding that IP-based telecom and older modalities will co-exist for a long time, said panelists at the winter meeting of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners in Washington, D.C. VoIP is telecom’s future, but its proliferation will be matched only by its malleability and capacity to spawn new technologies, they said Monday.
The keys to running a successful state universal service fund are clarity of purpose and clarity of process, said panelists at the winter meeting of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. In a Tuesday session, consultants Peter Bluhm of Rolka, Loube, Salzer Associates and Eric Seguin, vice president corporate development with contract fund administrator Solix, joined Elizabeth Barnes, a lawyer with the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, in parsing the best methods for managing a fund.
Universal Service Fund legislation by Reps. Rick Boucher, D-Va., and Lee Terry, D-Neb., could win more urban support by integrating aspects of two other USF bills introduced by Reps. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Doris Matsui, D-Calif., said industry officials. But some warned that a combination could simultaneously cost the support of current backers of the Boucher-Terry legislation. The urban legislators’ bills, proposing new E-Rate and Lifeline programs to spur broadband adoption, may be at odds with the cost-saving focus of the Boucher bill, they said.