NAB and Telesat Push for Expanding Regulatory Fee Payor Base
The FCC should expand the payor base of regulatory fees, said NAB and Telesat in comments filed in docket 25-190 by Monday’s comment deadline. NAB and satellite industry commenters were broadly supportive of the agency’s proposal to reclassify 61 indirect full-time equivalents (FTEs) as direct FTEs and collect $390,192,000 in fees, but some said industries that benefit from FCC processes should bear part of the fee burden.
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The agency “should expand the base of fee payors to include other beneficiaries of significant amounts of the Commission’s work, regardless of where in the Commission the work is performed,” NAB said. That should include “Big Tech,” a proposal that the trade group has raised in previous regulatory fee proceedings (see 2207060064). FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has also said in the past that tech companies should pay FCC's regulatory fees (see 2108260050).
Broadband service providers, equipment authorization holders and major technology companies “benefit significantly from the Commission’s oversight, rulemaking, and spectrum management functions,” NAB said. "There is no valid legal, policy, or practical justification for exempting them from the cost of supporting these functions.”
Telesat said the FCC should collect fees from equipment authorization, along with holders of experimental licenses and the administrators of the databases used by unlicensed devices to allow operation without harming other services.
Both NAB and Telesat noted that the FCC has authority to expand the payor base. “In many cases involving new regulatory fee categories, the question of the Commission’s authority is an unnecessary distraction, because the Commission already exercises jurisdiction over the parties in question,” Telesat said. The Communications Act also gives the agency authority to collect fees to cover its activities, and the courts have said that authority isn’t limited to FCC licensees, Telesat said. NAB similarly said the FCC “possesses both the legal authority and the responsibility to expand the pool of fee payors beyond licensees to other entities that plainly benefit from the Commission’s activities.”
NAB said that to facilitate extending reg fees to new industries in future fiscal years, the agency should convene roundtables with staff and stakeholders “well in advance of the next annual regulatory fee proceeding.” Such a forum would provide “a structured opportunity to explore practical, equitable approaches to adding new fee categories” and enable the agency to share “internal FTE data,” which reg fee commenters haven’t had access to in the past and could lead to more detailed and viable proposals.
While most commenters said they supported the FCC’s regulatory fee proposals, Amazon-owned Kuiper said the agency needs to change the methodology for space regulatory fees to prevent “extremely burdensome fees for American space companies.” The FCC’s Space Regulatory Fees order “approximately doubles the fees on larger [non-geostationary orbit] operators,” and the commission should mitigate that issue before fees are due in September, Kuiper said. In addition, Kuiper, Telesat and Kineis all said the FCC should switch to an alternative methodology in 2026 that doesn’t distinguish between non-geostationary and geostationary satellites for collecting satellite industry fees.