The Universal Service Fund should be shut down, but until then a temporary cap on USF outlays would be a good stop-gap, the National Taxpayers Union said Tuesday in a letter to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. The USF “is a textbook example of taxation and redistribution via regulation,” the group said. USF disbursements are “part of a multi-billion- dollar wealth transfer,” the group said.

NARUC urged House Appropriations Committee leaders to adopt language in a Senate bill to extend an exemption for the Universal Service Fund from Antideficiency Act controls. Without the exemption, phone rates could rise “unnecessarily,” Tony Clark, chairman of NARUC’s Telecommunications Committee, wrote Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., and Ranking Member Jerry Lewis, R-Cal. The Universal Service Administrative Co. could “lose millions in safe government-backed securities” and the E-rate program could be disrupted for nearly six months, said NARUC’s letter Friday. Congress has passed temporary exemptions for three years, and the current one expires Dec. 31, the letter said. The Senate version of the fiscal 2008 Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill would extend the exemption a year, but the House version has no exemption, Clark wrote. “Allowing the temporary exemption of USF from the Antideficiency Act to lapse could unnecessarily complicate efforts underway at the FCC to enact comprehensive reform of the Universal Service program.”

The fixed satellite services industry may be done with the private-equity frenzy once Intelsat’s BC Partners deal closes, Near Earth CEO Hoyt Davidson told a Society of Satellite Professionals International panel Thursday. “There is not much more that you can do except to have the three or four larger players buy the 60 smaller regional players,” Davidson said. Politics and nationalism have complicated efforts to buy out smaller operators, he said. The Telesat-Loral deal recently concluded may be the last for a while, he said.

Wireless carriers shouldn’t be able to decide on their own whether to send emergency alerts to areas smaller than counties, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said Thursday. “In the end it’s not just up to the carrier,” Martin told reporters. Before his speech, industry officials offered regulators recommendations and predictions in a Practising Law Institute conference panel.

FCC file room security needs beefing up, the agency’s Office of Inspector General said in a report based on six months of investigations that ended in September. The inquiry came after news reports on a file containing “non- confidential contract documents” relating to telecommunications service between the U.S. and Haiti was lost from the FCC’s Reference Information Center, the IG said.

There aren’t enough supporters at the FCC to adopt an interim cap on Universal Service Fund subsidies to competitive rural carriers, according to analysts at Stifel Nicolaus. Lobbying is focused on two commissioners on the fence -- Robert McDowell and Jonathan Adelstein, the analysts said in a report. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and Commissioner Deborah Tate support it, while Commissioner Michael Copps opposes a cap, said Stifel Nicolaus. “While it’s unclear which way they will go, the fact that there are two possible third votes to form a majority appears to help give proponents of an interim cap a slight edge,” said analysts.

Happy with the Internet Protocol version 4 now in use and with no money for upgrades, federal agencies were slow to take seriously the Bush administration’s order to redo their networks for IPv6, the government’s IPv6 chief told the IEEE Globecom conference Thursday. But they're increasingly taking heed as vendors caterwaul over yet- unwritten compliance requirements for selling routers and the like to the government, said Peter Tseronis, chairman of the Federal IPv6 Working Group. His day job is network services director for the Education Department.

The Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service issued long-awaited recommendations for reforming the Universal Service Fund late Tuesday that generally followed an outline released in September. The goal of the wide- ranging group of proposals is to reform the high-cost portion of the USF, which subsidizes service in rural areas. The FCC has a year to act on the recommendations.

The group representing state utility consumer advocates urged Congress to kill or curb FCC ability to exempt telecom carriers from Telecom Act requirements meant to level the competitive playing field and protect consumers. The group, the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates also called at its recent annual meeting in California for changes in carrier-transfer verification to protect consumers from deceptions and for the FCC to ensure that consumers see benefits from any changes in charging universal-service fees. NASUCA said members of Congress have contested FCC’s use of its authority to forbear from enforcing Telecom Act rules on carriers and how it handles petitions for forbearance. NASUCA also urged changing verification of carrier change orders to protect consumers from being slammed through deceptive sales pitches. It suggested requiring recording of the entire sales solicitation made before the third-party verification, or authorizing the FCC to punish carriers misrepresenting facts to get consumers to change carriers. NASUCA said that before the FCC changes how consumers pay into the federal universal-service fund, it should investigate how consumers will benefit or at least not suffer harm. The group said proposals such as basing consumer contributions on a flat fee per number could mean much larger universal-service fees for consumers who make few long- distance calls.

Trans World Entertainment CEO Robert Higgins’ proposal to take the retailer private would end a 21-year run as a public company. Trans World has bought many competitors that struggled with the shift in music sales from CDs to digital downloads.