Colorado joined Mississippi in dropping out of state attorneys general lawsuit against T-Mobile/Sprint after signing state-specific agreements. New York and Minnesota AGs said they’re moving ahead with litigation that now counts 16 AGs as plaintiffs at U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. In addition to the state case, the deal faces a Tunney Act challenge in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and opponents are expected to challenge the FCC’s approval order in federal court (see 1910170028). Opponents said the New York challenge is the most likely to derail the transaction.
Country of origin cases
USTelecom sought clarification from the FCC and Universal Service Administrative Co. about how USF compliance might be called into question if participants in the high cost universal broadband portal edit their broadband mapping data as geocoding technologies improve. USTelecom said "a change to the fourth digit of a geocoded decimal (representing a change in accuracy of about 10 meters) would be a workable demarcation point for determining a change that required a deletion." Deleting and resubmitting a location would erase the year a broadband location was originally deployed, it said. "If a carrier 'deleted' a number of locations for a certain year and then those same locations were re-uploaded in the HUBB with a different deployment year, it could retroactively call into question the carrier's compliance." USTelecom with members AT&T, CenturyLink, Consolidated, Frontier and Windstream met with USAC and the FCC Wireline Bureau staff Wednesday, and the association said, posted Monday in docket 10-90, it "understood that if the carrier had previously met a deployment year's milestone, and then, by virtue of 'deleting' and resubmitting locations with better geocodes, fell under the milestone for a particular year," there would be no penalty "as long as the cumulative number of locations submitted to date for the life of the program remained above the current threshold."
Technology neutrality and convincing regulators about spectrum needs are among challenges the commercial satellite communications industry faces, satcom regulatory officials said at a University of Nebraska space law conference Friday. Lack of regulatory certainty for new space ventures was bemoaned.
The FCC won't extend by a few weeks comment deadlines on an NPRM about improving low-power FM technical rules. REC Networks, "the original proponent of the LPFM rulemaking proceeding," made a "late-filed Extension Request ... submitted only five days before the comment deadline," said Media Bureau Chief Michelle Carey's order, released Friday. She said the group doesn't "present any emergency or other persuasive reason." Comments remain due Oct. 21, replies Nov. 4, on docket 19-193. REC's request was posted there Thursday. It sought more time because MB took eight days from "when the NPRM was published in the Federal Register to the time when the public notice was issued," emailed founder Michelle Bradley Friday. "Reaching out to LPFM stations is somewhat like reaching out to consumers, you have to be more proactive." MB denied her motion "on a technicality because I filed it too late for their standards, yet the Media Bureau can be 8 days late on informing the public of a comment deadline period," Bradley added.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology sought comment by Nov. 15 on a revised draft of Federal Information Security Modernization Act-mandated guidance for technologies that improve security and robustness of interdomain traffic exchange. NIST recommends resource public key infrastructure, border gateway protocol origin validation, and prefix filtering. The agency recommends preventing IP address spoofing using source address validation with access control lists, and unicast reverse path forwarding to prevent and mitigate distributed denial-of-service attacks. NIST recommends remotely triggered black hole filtering, flow specification, and response rate limiting.
Google hires Scott Deutchman, ex-Neustar, as senior policy adviser-telecom, spectrum, export controls, privacy and intellectual property ... At new joint venture between Public Safety Network and P3 North America, Allerio PSN founders TJ Kennedy and Jason Karp, both ex-FirstNet, CEO and general counsel, respectively; also names to board Kennedy, Karp and P3 executives Samit Ghosh and Marc Althoff.
Broadcasters aren't expected to have to make sweeping changes to how they maintain political files after an FCC order made clearer what information needs to be in them. The clarification could make it easier to get compliance from advertising agencies that sometimes provide incomplete information. That order and a related one were ostensibly released Wednesday afternoon but not available online that night. The agency said at a little past noon Thursday that the links were working.
Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson asked where the revenue is going to originate to justify carrier investments in 5G. Moffett told investors Thursday he isn’t hearing any real answers. “Most of the use cases we’ve heard don’t make sense, yet the capital requirements for densifying networks are very real,” he said: “Simply using more data at higher and higher speeds -- we’ve all heard about the dream of downloading a full season of Game of Thrones in seconds before boarding a plane -- has, up to now, been a dry well for wireless revenue generation.” There are problems with most use cases, he said. Driverless cars are commonly cited, “but would anyone really make steering, accelerating and braking, the most mission-critical functions of a driverless car, dependent on ubiquitous network connectivity?” Moffett asked. The factory of the future is likely to be broadly connected, but private networks could cut out carriers, he said: “Won’t low frequency mesh networks like Amazon Sidewalk siphon off lots of the simpler narrowband IoT network use cases?”
The Copyright Office is proposing significant increases in filing fees to take effect in the spring. Thursday’s announcement said the proposed fee schedule shows large increases for “registration of a claim in an original work of authorship,” including a nearly 500 percent increase for a paperwork filing involving “registration of updates and revisions to a database that predominantly consists of nonphotographic works.” The fee for that paperwork filing would increase from $85 to $500. CO proposes an electronic filing for registering a claim in an original work of authorship would increase from $55 to $250, for paper filing, $65 to $250. Some fee schedules are reduced by about 20 percent, and other increases range from 15-180 percent.
House Consumer Protection Subcommittee ranking member Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., “largely” agrees the tech industry should have to earn its content liability protection. After Wednesday’s hearing on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (see 1910150058), she told reporters it’s important Congress finds the best way to ensure content is “managed appropriately.”