Industry Opposes New Pleading Submission Requirement

The CEA, CTIA, NAB and six other associations jointly said the rule would be “unnecessarily burdensome and unlikely to further Commission objectives.” They said the FCC should instead “encourage parties to include complete and accessible citations in their filings and/or establish internal procedures or practices to ensure prompt placement in the record of non-record materials on which the Commission intends to rely.” Rural telco groups also filed joint comments.

The FCBA offered its assistance in creating alternatives to help reach the FCC’s efficiency and transparency goals. The group said the proposed rule would “impose substantial administrative burdens on parties and might well frustrate, rather than improve, the efficiency and transparency of the Commission’s rulemaking processes.” When the public notice was released late last year, industry and nonprofit officials told us the new rules would be more burdensome than the benefits that would accrue to the public by having all cited materials available in one document.

AT&T is “baffled by the Commission’s proposal,” the company said. It’s a solution looking for a problem, and the FCC failed to make a case that there was a problem needing solving or that the solution would increase transparency, the telco said. AT&T also said the proposal violates the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) and the recent executive order of President Barack Obama that federal agencies remove or lessen regulatory burdens.

Verizon and Verizon Wireless also said the rule would conflict with Obama’s executive order. The requirement “would make filings harder to navigate, and therefore less useful,” the companies said. They said the FCC has already increased transparency and efficiency with current process changes, making this new change unnecessary. “This process would be time-consuming and potentially expensive for participants -- and it would dramatically increase the demands placed on the Commission’s electronic filing system,” the landline and wireless carriers said.

The NTCA paired with the OPASTCO to say the FCC should set aside any thought of putting into place the new filing requirements, which would create magnified burdens for parties. “The Commission’s proposal … conflicts directly with the Commission’s stated intent to impose the ‘least possible burden on filers,'” the groups said. CenturyLink asked that the FCC offer guidance rather than a rule. The agency could suggest or request that filing parties submit the cited materials, rather than require it, which “appropriately leaves to filing parties the decision as to how much effort they will expend to persuade the Commission to their positions,” the telco said.

NPR spoke of the FCC’s principle of increasing efficiency and transparency and said the rule “barely advances that principle, if at all.” NPR also said the real problem lies in materials not being included in the dockets of particular proceedings. It said this new filing requirement would not resolve that issue. Newly formed law firm Telecommunications Law Professionals said the proposal would unfairly burden small businesses who may not have the resources to comply. It proposed that the FCC exclude from obligations materials which are freely and publicly available on the Internet, available on a widely-used legal search engine or part of an industry publication which FCC practitioners commonly subscribe to. In comments submitted to the FCC’s blog and posted in the docket, University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Cary Coglianese said a new rule would “take two significant steps backwards in terms of the administrative process.