All five FCC Commissioners recently testified before the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, covering a variety of broad issues concerning “Oversight of the FCC.” On November 1, the Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law held its own hearing with the FCC, this time on “Net Neutrality and the Role of Antitrust.”
In its October Open Meeting, the Commission adopted seven items, ranging from complete number portability among all service providers, to allowing law enforcement to access blocked caller ID information when required to identify threatening callers. .
It added eight items for consideration to its November Open Meeting agenda, including the blocking of robocalls, proposed measures to close the digital divide for Lifeline customers, and changes to pole attachment rules.
The Wireline Competition Bureau approved NECA’s 2018 Modifications of the Average Schedule HCLS Formulas.
The Commission received the Federal-State Joint Board’s Recommended Decision on modifying its Jurisdictional Cost Separations rules for consistency with Part 32 revisions.
Many other Comments and Reply Comments are due, or continue to be filed for review, concerning data collection, Lifeline support, and a myriad of other important subjects. There are a wealth NPRMs, FNPRMs, NOIs, R&Os, MO&Os and Petitions somewhere in the pipeline.
The FCC is certainly busy addressing and solving a variety of key regulatory issues.
What it has not done, however, is ANYTHING of substance to fix the severe shortfall in high cost USF funding for the nation’s smallest RoR RLECs. To us, this should be a very high priority. Unfortunately, the Commission doesn’t appear to see it that way.
