Rep. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., is still collecting lawmaker signatures on his draft letter to the FCC pushing stand-alone broadband USF support, an aide to Cramer said Friday. In recent weeks, Cramer, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune, R-S.D., and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., have quietly sought support from colleagues for a pair of such bicameral draft letters (see 1504210033). NTCA framed the letters’ goal as a lobbying priority and recently hosted several of its members in Washington to lobby lawmakers. Cramer initially set Friday as a tentative deadline for gathering signatures but he has extended that to May 8, the aide said. Last Congress, a similar House letter snagged several scores of lawmaker signatures.
ISPs likely will follow many net neutrality rules, even if February's FCC order (see 1504100046) is overturned by a court or overridden by Congress, said two lawyers on different sides of the issue. The order's prohibition on blocking or throttling likely will be followed by broadband providers even absent rules, said Center for Democracy & Technology General Counsel Erik Stallman, who supports the order, and Convergence Law Institute Vice President Solveig Singleton, who calls herself skeptical of net neutrality. Speaking Thursday at a Reed College legal network event, they said experimentation with paid prioritization might happen without the order, which bans it unless a waiver allows certain content to receive higher priority. Real-time video could be subject to such experimentation if allowed, Singleton said. ISPs "view the Internet as essentially a two-sided market, and they would like the ability to charge both sides of the market" through paid prioritization, Stallman said.
The FCC could be headed for a vote at its June 18 meeting on a rulemaking reshaping the Lifeline program, including providing support for Internet access, agency and industry officials said. With a light agenda at both the April and May meetings, Chairman Tom Wheeler appears likely to take on a bigger, more controversial issue in June, and Lifeline changes could be ready for a vote, the officials said.
Charles Benton, 84, died at home in Evanston, Illinois, Wednesday of cancer. He chaired the Benton Foundation, which he founded in 1981 with a grant from his father. At the foundation, he advocated for regulation on media and telecom matters such as broadcast ownership and the USF. President Jimmy Carter named Benton chairman of the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science and of the first White House conference on library and information services. President Bill Clinton appointed him to the Presidential Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters. And President Barack Obama named him to the board of the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Benton is survived by his wife, two children, including daughter Adrianne Furniss, who is the Benton Foundation's executive director, a sister and five grandchildren. Funeral and other arrangements are pending.
The U.S. needs universal service support for broadband-only lines to avoid significant customer rate increases, WTA said in a meeting Monday with the FCC Wireline Bureau about the data connection service plan proposal, according to an ex parte filing posted Thursday in docket 10-90. WTA said it expressed concerns about the potential ways in which limitations on capital and operating expenses can satisfy FCC principles and goals regarding the use of forward-looking costs in its universal service mechanisms. Wednesday, the FCC said it would give 10 telcos up to $10.1 billion over six years for deploying broadband to rural areas under USF (see 1504300029 and 1504290066).
Windstream joined other telcos offered as much as $10.1 billion total over six years from the FCC to deploy broadband to rural areas in saying it's analyzing the USF offers (see 1504290066). "In the coming days and months Windstream will be busy analyzing the statewide offers to determine where its own investment combined with the offered support is sufficient to meet the program’s obligations or where Windstream instead will be compelled by economics to move to the competitive bidding stage," said Senior Vice President-Government Affairs Eric Einhorn in a statement Wednesday. The telcos have until Aug. 27 to decide whether to accept the money state by state, and where they decline, subsidies will be offered on what the agency called a competitive basis. "The task of extending broadband networks to these remote areas will take some years," said USTelecom President Walter McCormick.
USTelecom urged the FCC to reconsider parts of its December E-rate order, particularly rules allowing self-provisioning by schools and libraries and the need for additional safeguards to ensure efficient spending in the USF program. USTelecom said it agrees with many of the questions raised about the order by Cox Communications in a March petition for reconsideration. The Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition defended the order, saying allowing schools and libraries to receive money to lease dark fiber or build their own facilities was a badly needed innovation. The filings were posted in docket 13-184.
The FCC’s USF strike force is “actively investigating Lifeline service providers suspected of violating program rules and federal law,” Chairman Tom Wheeler told Sen. David Vitter, R-La., a prominent critic of the Lifeline program. Wheeler described how Lifeline disbursements have fallen in recent years along with changes to the program, writing to Vitter in an April 21 letter released Tuesday.
The FCC offered 10 telcos a total of up to $10.1 billion over six years to extend broadband to almost 9 million rural residents. If the companies accept the full amount of the Connect America Fund Phase II USF money, at $1.68 billion annually, they would have to build out service of at least 10 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream by the end of 2020, the agency said Wednesday. The telcos have until Aug. 27 to decide whether to accept the CAF Phase II offers state by state, and in states where the price-cap carriers decline, "the subsidies will be offered to providers on a competitive basis," according to a commission news release and Wireline Bureau public notice (see here and here).
Any Communications Act overhaul probably won't advance as comprehensive legislation, a key backer of the GOP initiative told us this week, addressing a long-running question of whether the telecom rewrite may be piecemeal or in one larger package. Nearly 18 months have passed since House Republicans first outlined plans to overhaul the act, comparing the effort to the comprehensive overhaul that created the 1996 Telecom Act.