A telco bid for rural carrier business data service relief at the FCC drew opposition from Sprint, support from TDS Telecommunications and proposals for changes from Smithville Telephone of Mississippi. Sprint said the commission should deny the ITTA and USTelecom rulemaking petition (see 1705250065) to permit rate-of-return telcos receiving model-based USF support to opt into new, relaxed price-cap BDS rules. The rural telcos "would be allowed to raise the going-in BDS rates, to thereafter provide BDS on a largely deregulated basis, and to retain the guaranteed support provided under rate of return regulation of switched access service," said Sprint comments posted Thursday in docket 17-144. Sprint said the proposals are "remarkably one-sided in favor of the rate-of-return ILECs," allowing them "to pick the best of both worlds: freedom to offer BDS on whatever terms they choose, including at increased prices, with minimal or no regulatory oversight, while retaining the revenue assurances" from "more generous" rate-of-return USF and intercarrier compensation (ICC) transition mechanisms. TDS said the rate-of-return BDS burdens for model-based carriers often outweigh the benefits. Updating the regulations would allow "carriers like TDS Telecom the flexibility to compete in the BDS marketplace with other entities that are not subject to cumbersome, legacy regulations," said its comments. Removing burdens would serve "rural broadband goals by providing greater flexibility to invest in new infrastructure," said TDS, which also agreed with the proposal to keep certain USF-ICC transition mechanisms. Smithville Telephone, with seven employees, said it's subject to BDS competition of the sort identified in the price-cap rulemaking, but wouldn't get relief under the petition as written. Its comments "suggest ways to recognize this actual existing competitive situation for Smithville, and likely for other small carriers, so that full deregulated status can be obtained."

AT&T said a recent GAO report on Lifeline highlights the need to improve the efficiency and performance of the FCC's USF subsidy program for low-income consumers. The findings of the report (see 1706290037) "are both expected and surprising -- expected in that the report highlights areas of weakness in the program of which we have long been aware; surprising in that the investigation suggests that the waste and abuse could be much worse than we ever imagined," said Joan Marsh, senior vice president, in a Thursday blog post. "For example, in Michigan a whopping 67.5% of subscribers who enrolled for Lifeline relying on asserted SNAP participation could not be verified by the GAO investigators," she said, referring to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The FCC's new national verifier should help, but it won't be fully implemented until 2019, she said, raising questions about whether new enrollments should be restricted in the meantime. "Equally troubling were the report’s observations about the effectiveness of the Lifeline program," she said. "Lifeline participation rates are low compared to the percentage of low income households that pay for phone service. According to the FCC, the participation rate shows that millions of Lifeline-eligible households are obtaining voice service without the Lifeline discount. This is not surprising given how affordable and accessible many market-based services have become." The GAO report points to the difficulties the FCC has in extending "a Reagan-era telephone subsidy to cover broadband access," said Daniel Lyons, an American Enterprise Institute visiting scholar, in another blog post. "Unquestionably, the government should offer assistance to low-income consumers at risk of falling on the wrong end of the digital divide. But that assistance should be designed from the ground up, tailored to the needs of the population it seeks to serve, with controls to protect against fraud and abuse. ... Lifeline needs revolutionary, not evolutionary, change."

Satellite broadband operators' tiered approach to earth station siting "would lock out too many people" from upper microwave flexible use systems (UMFUS) because of earth station interference, said the Fixed Wireless Communications Coalition (FWCC). In a docket 14-177 filing posted Wednesday, FWCC said the FCC's spectrum frontiers earth station siting rule expressly allows interference to terrestrial users, but it didn't object because the alternative effectively would have ruled out satellite operations completely. But the FCC shouldn't allow satellite interests to expand that interference beyond either the spectrum frontier rule or the alternate tiered approach proposed by FWCC, the group said. They said satellite interest arguments (see 1706120006 and 1705050056) give no details on how their tiering proposal would affect UMFUS users broadly or how many license areas would fall into their proposed tiers. The satellite interests didn't comment.

Tad Lipsky, acting director of the FTC Competition Bureau since March 6 (see 1702160071), retired effective Monday and was replaced by acting deputy director Markus Meier, said acting FTC Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen in a Wednesday news release. She added that Alan Devlin, who was an acting deputy director in the Competition Bureau, left the commission Monday for private practice. Meier has been an acting deputy director in the Competition Bureau since November 2015. Ohlhausen also appointed her former attorney adviser Haidee Schwartz an acting deputy director within the bureau.

The Communications Workers of America "strongly opposes" an NCTA-USTelecom petition for FCC clarification of broadband speed disclosure rules to ensure regulatory harmonization and industry flexibility in light of state mandates (see 1705160063). CWA said the commission lacks authority and policy justification to issue a declaratory ruling. "Such a ruling would result in considerable harm to consumers by allowing broadband providers to make inaccurate or misleading statements about their network performance and capabilities," said the union in reply comments Thursday in docket 17-131. It said it joined a "broad consensus in opposition" to the petition, which drew objections from 35 state attorneys general and some consumer groups in initial comments (see 1706190050). But NCTA and USTelecom said the record "reflects broad support" for the petition, filed by the "leading" cable and telco trade associations and backed by the American Cable Association, Adtran and CenturyLink. The opponents "fundamentally misapprehend the scope of the Petition as a request for complete preemption of state consumer protection laws," said a joint reply, which denied they made such a request: "[I]t does not ask the Commission to issue a broad 'field preemption' ruling; rather, it seeks to confirm the primacy of federal law where, as here, there is a direct conflict between state efforts to require [broadband internet access service] providers to measure and describe their BIAS offerings based on idiosyncratic standards and the Commission’s requirements for how those offerings are measured and described under its uniform national framework for broadband disclosures."

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai appointed Jerry Ellig, an economist at the free-market-oriented Mercatus Center, as chief economist. Pai is hoping to put more emphasis on economic analysis at the FCC and in April proposed the creation of a new Office of Economics and Data (see 1704050047). Ellig has been affiliated with the George Mason University-based center since 1996, though from 2001 to 2003 he was deputy director of the FTC Office of Policy Planning. Ellig recently published “a series of papers that assess the quality and use of regulatory impact analysis in both executive branch and independent agencies,” the FCC said in a Wednesday news release. “These papers identify best practices, shortcomings, and reasons for variation in the quality of agencies’ analysis.” The new chief economist will help the FCC establish the new economics office, the FCC said. Former FTC Commissioner Joshua Wright, now a professor at GMU, tweeted: “Fantastic choice. Well done.” But Dwayne Winseck, communications professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, tweeted the choice represents the "triumph of ideology over reason.”

Updated files on the post-incentive auction transition are available on the FCC’s website, said the Media Bureau and the Incentive Auction Task Force in a public notice Monday. “The files will be updated on a rolling basis whenever there is a phase change request granted,” the PN said.

The FTC is backing FCC efforts to give telecommunications providers the ability to block illegal calls at the network level. In a Monday news release, the FTC said it voted 2-0 to submit a comment to docket 17-59 on the FCC's NPRM seeking two types of provider-based call blocking. One is when "the subscriber to a particular telephone number requests that telecommunications providers block calls originating from that number," the release said. The second is when the "originating number is invalid, unallocated, or unassigned." The FTC's release said provider-based call blocking at the network level is the most effective type of blocking since it stops calls before they get to consumers. The FTC also said the problem goes beyond illegal robocalls and includes those made by a live operator "that are abusive, fraudulent, or unlawful," which should be clarified by the FCC. The FTC also said providers need to resolve how to address illegal caller ID spoofing or when they inadvertently block a consumer or business phone number. The FTC told the FCC to provide flexible standards in helping providers deal with blocking "presumptively illegal" calls.

The FCC pre-empted an exclusive license of Sandwich Isles Communications that the agency said, in effect, bars telecom competition in the Hawaiian home lands. Citing its authority under Section 253 of the Communications Act, the commission unanimously pre-empted enforcement of an exclusivity provision of a telecom license granted by Hawaii's Department of Hawaiian Home Lands to Waimana Enterprises and then assigned to its subsidiary, Sandwich Isles, said a Monday order in docket 10-90. A draft order recently circulated (see 1706280032). Commissioner Mignon Clyburn issued a statement saying the order "highlights the importance of section 253 of the Communications Act in enabling competition. And how useless it will likely be in a broadband-only world, if the Commission’s majority moves forward with its plan to reclassify broadband as an information service. Breaking down barriers to infrastructure deployment without Title II is about as effective demolishing a wall by staring at it. Without a Title II telecommunications service at issue, today’s Order would not have been possible." Sandwich Isles didn't comment.

The FCC didn't act by Friday on a request to stay its recent business data service order, said an agency spokesman Monday. He said the issue remains under consideration. Windstream, BT Americas, Incompas and the Ad Hoc Telecom Users Committee had asked the commission to act by June 30 or they would consider inaction a denial (see 1706260054). The FCC rarely grants such requests, but parties are required to seek regulatory relief before asking courts for a stay. Challenges to the deregulatory order are before the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Various parties asked that the case be transferred to the D.C. Circuit.