Action on a proposal to revive FCC collection of equal employment opportunity workforce diversity data using Form 395-B isn’t expected soon despite recent calls from public interest and diversity groups for swift action, industry and FCC officials told us. The National Urban League, Common Cause, the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council and others said in recent joint supplementary comments in docket 98-204 that the agency needs to act within six months to produce useful reports by mid-2024, but industry and FCC officials said they don’t anticipate action on the matter while the FCC is without a Democratic majority.
Ad-supported streaming services are gaining a larger share of consumers' wallets in connected TV, but consumers’ attitudes toward commercials that air during programming vary and are sometimes contradictory, a July report from Infillion shows.
The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission should have hearings in its Lumen service-quality investigation, said Minnesota Commerce and Attorney General offices and Communications Workers of America in a Tuesday letter in docket C-20-432. The three intervenors said, after eight months of settlement talks with Lumen’s CenturyLink with no resolution, they “have concerns with the pace and scope of the discussion and believe other action may be appropriate.” Intervenors “are concerned that consumers may be experiencing problems with CenturyLink’s service that are beyond the scope of the originally filed complaint,” they added. The PUC should have at least six hearings in different parts of the state to collect comments from consumers, local officials and others about service-quality problems, intervenors said. The PUC paused the probe in December to allow for settlement talks (see 2112150049). Lumen has “been working cooperatively" with the intervenors to resolve their concerns, said a spokesperson."We are disappointed that they have moved in this direction."
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Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, urged the commerce secretary to talk to First Solar, which is headquartered in his state, before finalizing the rule to temporarily waive duties or deposit collection on imported solar panels and cells from Southeast Asia. Auxin Solar, a small solar panel producer, is asking Commerce to find that those panels are really Chinese in origin, and should be subject to antidumping and countervailing duty orders against Chinese solar products.
About quarter of the comments on how to implement an executive order on possible anti-circumvention duties on solar panel and cell imports say that the executive order is illegal or, at best, legally strained, and that Commerce cannot waive duty collections because that is contrary to its mission to protect domestic manufacturing through trade remedies.
Industry sought improved coordination and transparency through the FCC, USDA and NTIA’s interagency agreement established under the Broadband Interagency Coordination Act of 2020. Some asked the agencies to make the shared information available publicly and to increase reliance on the FCC’s maps when coordinating broadband programs, in comments posted Tuesday in docket 22-251.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted an FCC motion to extend abeyance on a lawsuit by the League of California Cities challenging the FCC’s June 2020 wireless infrastructure declaratory ruling. Proceedings are stayed until Nov. 14, the court said Thursday. The FCC sought more time to get to five commissioners (see 2207130052).
The Lifeline minimum service standard for fixed broadband data will be 1,280 GB per month, beginning Dec. 1, said an FCC Wireline Bureau public notice Friday in docket 11-42. The bureau extended its pause on the mobile broadband data minimum service standard until "at least" Dec. 1, 2023. The indexed budget for Lifeline beginning Jan. 1 will be $2.6 billion.
Although President Joe Biden criticized President Donald Trump's China tariffs on the campaign trail, Peterson Institute for International Economics Senior Fellow Chad Bown said he always thought it was unlikely Biden would roll any of them back, because there are "huge political costs" to doing so, because opponents could label you as "weak on China."