NGSO Concerned, DBS Fights With Cable on FCC Fees
Regulatory fees for non-geostationary orbit satellites and a fight between cable and direct broadcast satellite operators dominated comments posted at the FCC Friday in docket 21-190 on proposed changes to regulatory fees. SpaceX slammed the FCC for trying to “allocate increased NGSO regulatory fees based on the 12 GHz rulemaking proceeding, which the NGSO operators strongly urged the Commission not to initiate.” Allocating fees “to the victims of such an effort” would be “inequitable” and “set a precedent that encourages speculation and gamesmanship,” SpaceX said.
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Drop a proposal for different categories of NGSO fees, said SES Americom and O3b. “Advocates for revamping NGSO fees face a high burden,” they said: “The Commission has made clear that it will adopt new fee categories only when there is a sufficient basis to do so and only if the changes serve the Commission’s goal of ensuring that regulatory fees are ‘fair, administrable, and sustainable.’”
Amazon Web Services asked that the formula for NGSO payments be changed from a proposal of 20% from less-complex systems and 80% from other systems, to 10/90. That would “better reflect the agency labor required to regulate these systems,” AWS said. Myriota urged that integrated NGSO systems authorized under multiple call signs be considered “part of same system subject to a single regulatory fee.”
The methodology for calculating submarine cable regulatory fees “remains unlawful,” the Submarine Cable Coalition commented. It suggested recognizing a "payor's network capacity is not equivalent to the benefits it receives from the International Bureau's activities.” IB staff doesn't "engage in more regulatory work simply because a submarine cable system has 6,500 Gbps of capacity as opposed to 500 Gbps,” it noted.
NCTA and ACA Connects supported the FCC proposal that IPTV and DBS providers pay “equal” regulatory fees for FY 2021. "Section 9 of the Communications Act requires that the Commission bring the regulatory fee level for DBS providers into parity with the regulatory fee imposed on providers in the cable/IPTV fee category,” they said.
Dish Network and DirecTV slammed that proposal. Regulatory fees on a category "must bear some rational relation to the costs that these regulatees, in turn, impose on the Commission,” they said: The FCC “reached the appropriate level of regulatory parity, as reflected by the DBS and cable per subscriber rates, several years ago.”