Minnesota’s attorney general supported revisiting LTD Broadband’s eligible telecom carrier (ETC) designation. So did some local governments and consumer and municipal broadband advocates, in comments due Wednesday in docket M-21-133 at the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission. LTD urged the PUC to reject the request by Minnesota Telecom Alliance (MTA) and Minnesota Rural Electric Association (MREA) to revoke the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) winner’s ETC status (see 2205170058).
Unintended consequences of the general data protection regulation (GDPR) are blocking access to Whois domain name registration, and Congress should consider acting to fix the problem, Rep. Bob Latta, R-Ohio, said Thursday. Whois data is a "public lands record for the internet," but an overly broad interpretation of the EU GDPR is preventing law enforcement, security experts and cybersecurity investigators from getting at bad actors, he said in a recorded statement for a Coalition for a Secure and Transparent Internet webinar. Consumers are also feeling vulnerable online and need to know their privacy and security will be protected, said House Consumer Protection Subcommittee Chair Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill. Panelists also urged legislative action.
A draft NPRM on preserving FM6 stations -- low-power channel 6 TV stations receivable by FM radios and focused on audio content -- is expected to be unanimously approved with few changes at Wednesday’s commissioners’ meeting, FCC and industry officials told us. The owners of the stations -- sometimes called “Franken FMs” after the fictional Frankenstein's monster -- are optimistic about the FCC allowing them to continue broadcasting but concerned about proposals in the draft to make their licenses nontransferable or bar new entrants. FM6 stations serve underserved communities, said FM6 broadcaster Paul Koplin, CEO of Venture Technologies Group: “Wouldn’t it be in the public interest to let as many people do this as possible?”
Two top Senate Communications Subcommittee members told us they intend to focus on NTIA’s rollout of $48 billion in connectivity money from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act during the subpanel’s upcoming NTIA oversight hearing. Senate Communications Chairman Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M., and ranking member John Thune, R-S.D., indicated interest in talking about NTIA’s recent notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) for the $42.5 billion broadband equity, access and deployment (BEAD) program (see 2205130054).
IEEE is taking a broad view of how 5G and the path to 6G are affected by broader trends in its International Network Generations Roadmap (INGR), speakers said during an IEEE webinar Wednesday. The program featured leaders of several of the working groups developing the road map. Experts agreed there are no easy answers and the challenges will require years of work to resolve.
The Supreme Court’s slim margin blocking Texas from enforcing a social media law surprised some court watchers. The action via a 5-4 emergency ruling Tuesday in NetChoice v. Paxton barred the law from being enforced while under consideration by the lower courts. Questions remain about where justices would stand in a case on the law’s merits, with Tuesday’s opinion shedding light only on three dissenting members’ views, said observers in interviews.
NAB and tech groups are preparing for a battle over the FCC’s upcoming collection of regulatory fees, said attorneys and advocates in interviews. Since regulatory fees must be collected by the fall, attorneys expect the agency to soon issue public notices on the 2022 fee collection. The NPRM on the 2021 fee collection was released in May 2021. NAB has had annual disagreements with the agency’s fee assessments for the past several years (see 2008210053), but broadcast attorneys and tech advocates said they expect the group to press the issue this year. NAB Chief Legal Officer Rick Kaplan at the 2022 NAB Show in April said the item is now “at the top of the list.”
Preliminary federal testing of possible incompatibility issues between airborne radar altimeter receivers in the 4200-4400 MHz band and 5G transmitters operating in the 3700-3980 MHz band isn't showing interference from the C-band 5G signals, Frank Sanders, senior technical fellow at NTIA's Institute for Telecommunication Sciences, told a connected aviation conference Wednesday in Reston, Virginia. He said if further testing does find interference, a technical fix appears to be available via filtering of the altimeters and/or the 5G transmitters.
The push of big tech companies into the automotive space will create a customer ownership conflict, said participants on an Xperi connected car webinar last week. “Is someone a supplier to Ford, or is someone ultimately competing with Ford for ownership of the customer?” said Jeff Jury, general manager, Xperi’s Connected Car unit. “Whose product is it?”
Local officials and E-rate groups asked the FCC to heed calls to abandon its proposed centralized online competitive bidding portal for the program, said reply comments in docket 21-455 (see 2204280051). Many said the record showed such a change would hurt smaller E-rate participants and remains unnecessary. Some advocated for updates to the Universal Service Administrative Co.'s training and how it shares information with participants.