Reg Fees Order Includes Some COVID-19 Relief, Rejects Broadcaster Asks
The FCC won’t freeze radio regulatory fees or change the way it calculates them, and will continue phasing in fees for satellite providers, said an order and Further NPRM on FY 2020 regulatory assessments released Monday. Direct full-time equivalent employee…
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allocations “best reflect the benefits provided to the payor,” the order said. The item, unanimously approved by the full FCC, includes measures intended to provide relief during the COVID-19 pandemic but doesn’t go as far as some broadcast commenters had requested. The agency can’t waive 2020 fees or late payments, or suspend fee increases over the current lack of advertising, the order said. Instead, the order streamlines the process of seeking hardship reductions or waivers, lowers the interest rate for installment payments of regulatory fees, and allows “red light” licensees to seek such relief. The agency will issue public notices with greater detail. The order adopts the population-based fees for TV broadcasters proposed in an earlier NPRM. “The population-based metric better conforms with the actual service authorized here -- broadcasting television to the American people,” the order said. “We disagree with the radio broadcasters that we should ignore our long-standing methodology in order to freeze regulatory fees for (and thus benefit) radio broadcasters at the expense of other regulatees,” said the order. “Because the Commission is statutorily obligated to recover the amount of its appropriation through regulatory fees, these fees are a zero-sum situation.” The agency also collect regulatory fees from most non-U.S. licensed space stations that have U.S. market access, the order said. Assessing the same regulatory amount on those stations as on U.S. licensed space stations “will better reflect the benefits received by these operators through the Commission’s adjudicatory, enforcement, regulatory, and international coordination activities,” the order said. The FNPRM seeks comment on methods for calculating fees for non-geostationary orbit satellites.