ITTA and USTelecom asked the FCC to ease business data service regulations for some rural telcos by allowing them to opt into recently adopted relief for price-cap carriers. "Rate-of-return carriers that receive universal service fund ('USF') support based on theoretical cost models (termed 'model-based rate-of-return carriers) must comply with legacy regulation only for their BDS offerings," said a petition for rulemaking Thursday. "Costs of such rate-of-return regulations for these carriers now outweigh the benefits of the regulation." The petition "requests that model-based rate-of-return carriers be permitted to opt into existing price cap regulation for their provision of BDS, subject to certain conditions. ... Continued compliance with rate-[of]-return-based rate regulation, including tariffing, tariff review plans, cost studies, and associated requirements, entails significant costs that are difficult for model-based rate-of-return carriers to recover in the competitive marketplace."
Fourteen people who said comments were submitted to the FCC fraudulently under their names in support of a rollback of Communications Act Title II regulation of broadband service are demanding the agency investigate. In a letter to Chairman Ajit Pai and Chief Information Officer David Bray released Thursday by Fight for the Future, the 14 said the agency should remove the fraudulent comments from the docket, publicly disclose any information it has about whoever is behind what it says are more than 450,000 fake comments and notify others whose names and addressed were used fraudulently. "While it may be convenient for you to ignore this, given that it was done in an attempt to support your position, it cannot be the case that the FCC moves forward on such a major public debate without properly investigating this known attack," the letter said. The FCC didn't comment.
FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly said the U.S. government's October Internet Assigned Numbers Authority oversight transition (see 1609300065 and 1610030042) failed to stop China, Russia and other countries from increasing government involvement in internet governance. O'Rielly said in April the U.S. needs to continue to play a leading role in fostering multistakeholder internet governance, saying the IANA handoff was a failed “appeasement strategy” amid policy moves and statements from the ITU, China and Russia (see 1704210062). O'Rielly again noted his concerns about China and the ITU in a new opinion piece in the New Hampshire Union Leader, saying the U.S.' “fancy strategy didn't appease anyone” already opposed to multistakeholderism. O'Rielly also cited April ITU study meetings in which Russia and several African countries sought to define OTT content providers, which he called a “veiled attempt to expand ITU jurisdiction to the internet, as well as to get its grips into popular consumer uses, such as Netflix, Skype, and WhatsApp.” The U.S. “should learn from the ICANN aftermath and redouble our efforts to quash continuous and systemic assaults on the internet by foreign governments, using all appropriate means,” O'Rielly said.
FCC staff partially granted a Windstream waiver petition seeking added compensation to make up for intrastate access charges it billed to Halo Wireless in 2010-11 but was unable to collect (see 1509020059). The Wireline Bureau said it was acting "consistent with precedent" to allow Windstream to recover through intercarrier compensation (ICC) certain funds that it wasn't able to collect from Halo "due to an access charge avoidance scheme and subsequent bankruptcy" filing. "Windstream demonstrates good cause to include in its recovery calculations revenue associated with traffic eligible for compensation that was terminated during [FY 2011] and that otherwise meets the criteria spelled out in our revenue recovery rules," said a bureau order Wednesday in docket 01-92. "Including such revenue in Windstream’s revenue calculations, subject to [certain] conditions ... conforms to the policies underlying the recovery mechanism" adopted in a 2011 USF/ICC overhaul order, said the bureau. The 2011 order set terminating access-charge rates on a downward path to zero. Windstream welcomed the waiver. It enables the company "to recover important universal service funding withheld because of an improper avoidance scheme by Halo Wireless," emailed Senior Vice President Eric Einhorn. "We are pleased that the Commission agreed that Halo’s ploy to disguise traffic should not deny Windstream of vital and valid universal service support.”
Google is working on “a secret project” in virtual reality by partnering “deeply” with a “leading OLED manufacturer” to create a VR-capable display “with 10X more pixels," said Clay Bavor, vice president-VR, at a Society for Information Display conference in Los Angeles. He later declined to answer our question to identify the company. A representative then physically restrained us from a follow-up query. Better VR displays may have the “horrifying” result of requiring 100 Gbps, Bavor told the conference Tuesday. “Not only can you not render that much data, you can’t even transfer it,” he said. “You can’t even move it around the device.” Google didn't reply to our requests for comment Tuesday or Wednesday.
A civil rights attorney for Cleveland broadband consumers threatened a class-action lawsuit against AT&T over alleged income-based discrimination in the city as described by a National Digital Inclusion Alliance report. In a Tuesday letter, Parks and Crump attorney Daryl Parks said the Cleveland consumers will file an FCC complaint and advise state governors to consider the alleged AT&T income discrimination as state executives weigh AT&T’s FirstNet plans this year. Parks notified AT&T about the “redlining” concerns last month (see 1704270045). In a May 5 letter, AT&T Assistant General Counsel James Meza disagreed that the company violated the civil rights section (Section 706) of the Telecom Act. “This study is flawed and its conclusions are specious,” said Meza. AT&T is spending large amounts of money in Ohio and has a “targeted effort to promote broadband adoption by low-income customers,” he said. In the new letter, Parks said the ISP defined “redlining in such a way that only an extreme racial bigot could ever be found to be redlining” and interpreted Section 706 “in a manner that would render the statute completely impotent.” The company's “amount of aggregate investment is irrelevant to discrimination in the placement of investments,” Parks said. An AT&T spokesman and FirstNet didn’t comment further.
The FCC’s current landlord may want a 20 percent premium over the current rent to extend the agency’s lease, the commission said in its 2018 budget request. The FCC needs the extension because its lease will expire in October, but its new building won’t be ready until FY 2019, and current landlord Parcel 49C’s protest of the General Service Administration’s award of the bid for the new headquarters to Trammell Crow is pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals, the budget papers said. GSA is negotiating the extension, the document said. The 20 percent rent increase would be an extra $9 million per year, the budget said. “The first six months after the lease award is critical as the Commission will be required to meet design and construction timetables established by the GSA and the new lessor,” the budget said. “The FCC is also required to provide the details related to specialized areas and requirements related to electrical, heating, air conditioning, floor loading, specialized construction and the equipment to support them.” The commission also wants to use auction funds to create “public facing” and internal spectrum visualization tools, the budget said. The visualization tools would aid in helping the public and the agency understand “who has the rights to different spectrum bands at different locations,” the budget request said. The FCC also will be working to transition its systems “100 percent” to the cloud, the budget document said. “The FCC will proactively engage security engineers and architects to ensure the modernization of systems in the cloud are secure and adhere to Federal mandates and regulations to include two factor authentication.”
The FCC posted a rulemaking notice on its proposed $356.7 million in regulatory fees for FY 2017. Comments are due June 22, replies July 7, said the NPRM in docket 17-134 released Tuesday.
The FCC reviewed and processed 916,117 applications and complaints last fiscal year, meeting its speed of disposal (SOD) goals 98 percent of the time, said its FY 2016 performance report Tuesday. That was the same percentage for FY 2015, and the FCC said it met its SOD goal of 96 percent in six of the past seven years. Both the Media and International bureaus saw improvements in SOD, with the former going from 85 percent in FY 2015 to 91 percent in FY 2016, while the latter went from 76 percent to 82 percent, the FCC said. The offices of Consumer and Governmental Affairs and of Engineering Technology and the Wireline and Public Safety and Homeland Security bureaus all were in the 99th percentile, while the Wireless Bureau was in the 98th.
Fight for the Future is calling a cease-and-desist letter it received for FFTF's Comcastroturf.com "exactly why we need Title II net neutrality protections that ban blocking, throttling, and censorship." The letter, which says it is from LookingGlass Cyber Security Center on behalf of Comcast, says the Comcastroturf.com domain is too close to "Comcast," violating the company's trademark, and the site should be reassigned to the cable operator. The site allows people to search if their names were attached to comments filed with the FCC in favor of a Communications Act Title II regulation of broadband rollback and to sign a petition demanding an investigation. FFTF said in a news release Tuesday if such a rollback happens, "there would be nothing preventing Comcast from simply blocking sites like Comcastroturf.com that are critical of their corporate policies. It also makes you wonder what Comcast is so afraid of? Are their lobbying dollars funding the astroturfing effort flooding the FCC with fake comments that we are encouraging Internet users to investigate?” FFTF, Demand Progress and Free Press are behind the Battle for the Net website that sends a form letter to the FCC opposing the Title II rollback. Comcast said it "supports strong, legally enforceable net neutrality rules and does not and will not block websites or content. Title II does not equal net neutrality." It also said, "Like most major brand owners, Comcast protects our company and brand names from being used improperly on the Internet by third parties. We use an established outside vendor to monitor for websites that use our name and brands without authorization, and the vendor routinely sends out notices to those sites. That is what happened here. This particular site also raised other legal issues supporting further investigation (for example, the site appears to collect personal information and has no posted privacy policy). After reviewing the site further, we do not plan additional action at this time.”