The Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau and Office of General Counsel were consulted before the FCC adopted controversial changes the Enforcement Bureau proposed to its informal complaint process (see 1807120033), Chairman Ajit Pai told the chairmen of the House Commerce Committee and the Communications Subcommittee. CGB "concluded that the changes did not impact its role in assisting consumers with informal complaints, and the [OGC] concluded that the changes did not alter the Commission's authority to investigate and address the concerns raised in informal complaints," he wrote, answering questions from Reps. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., and Mike Doyle, D-Pa., posted Monday in docket 19-9. There's no "systemic backlog" and 36 employees and contractors are dealing with consumer informal complaints in FY 2019, compared with 35 in FY 2018, 32 in FY 2017, 37 in FY 2016 and 48 in FY 2015, Pai wrote. Separately, Pai said commissioners had voted on items "to fight unlawful robocalls and caller ID spoofing" at almost half of the 25 monthly meetings he's chaired. "I am committed to a multi-pronged attack on the problem -- through rulemaking, enforcement actions, consumer education, and collaboration with other government agencies and industry," he wrote, listing various actions in response to robocall concerns expressed by Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore. HBO's John Oliver slammed Pai Sunday for not doing enough here (see 1903110072).

The partial government shutdown delayed Commerce Department work on tech export controls, Bureau of Industry and Security officials told an event hosted by the American Bar Association Monday. A Nov. 19 Federal Register notice had sought comment by Dec. 19 “for identifying emerging technologies that are essential to U.S. national security,” with categories including artificial intelligence and machine learning technology. Director Hillary Hess of the BIS regulatory policy office said “we are behind where we thought we were gonna be.” BIS' Kirsten Mortimer and others also cited the number of submissions. Mortimer said BIS received 231 comments, including 215 pages of suggestions on robotics and 220 pages on “position, navigation and timing” equipment. “The shutdown was really not our friend,” Hess said. “We’re just really trying to scramble and get everything organized.”

“Digital companies” may have been too successful in avoiding regulation, former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler told the Brookings Institution Tuesday. The rollback of Wheeler’s net neutrality order by what he called “the Trump FCC” included disavowing jurisdiction over the internet, leaving room for states to step in with their own rules, Wheeler again (see 1903110063) said. Digital companies got what they wanted and maybe a little too much, he said. Wheeler said Facebook isn’t a neutral carrier of information but instead exercises editorial control over what users see. The company should release open application programming interfaces for how it gathers and publishes content, so consumers can see “what’s going in and going out,” Wheeler said. Current antitrust regulations can’t adequately constrain such companies because those rules are based on pricing and Facebook is free, he said. “The rules that have worked for industrial capitalism are no longer sufficient for internet capitalism.” The current wave of technological change isn’t unprecedented, and harkens back to similar shifts such as the development of the printing press, Wheeler said. His new book argues the internet hasn’t yet caused the same degree of upheaval, but it’s on the cusp of such an event, and the fast pace of technological change is short-circuiting democratic processes needed to digest the shift. That gap allows “authoritarians” to step up and offer “slogans instead of solutions,” said Wheeler, offering “The Wall” and Brexit as examples. Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Pa., also mentioned state telecom policy in his introduction of Wheeler, saying localities should be allowed to create their own municipal networks to compete with ISPs. Americans across the country unanimously support net neutrality, Doyle said. Facebook didn't comment.

Deere & Co. urged improving mobile broadband data collection and mapping to identify coverage gaps affecting agriculture. In meetings with aides to every FCC commissioner, company representatives discussed developing "potential mapping tools ... using Commission cell tower data" combined with public Agriculture Department crop information, plus cited state examples of using such tools. "Commission rules and support programs should recognize and address the growing unmet need for mobile broadband coverage ... in areas of agricultural operations," said a filing posted Monday docket 11-10. It also cited GPS' key role in "high precision agriculture and the benefits ... made possible through continuing access to Galileo satellites." USTelecom and telco members "stressed the importance of granular data to make federal funding programs, including CAF 3, as targeted as possible." The group's mapping proposal also would allow "auction participants to bid with the full knowledge of exactly how many locations in a census block require service and, importantly, exactly where those locations are," said a filing Friday on meetings with Rural Broadband Auctions Task Force and Office of Economic and Analytics. "Future funding programs should target all unserved locations, not just those previously defined as 'high cost,' because the market has failed to provide service regardless of predictions about their economic viability." The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association is "deeply concerned with potentially significant overstatement of fixed broadband deployment" due to current Form 477 guidelines, said a filing on a meeting Wireline Bureau staffers. "The issue of reporting of served locations within census blocks, particularly rural census blocks, is conflated unnecessarily with the challenges of identifying locations in rural census blocks. The two considerations are distinct and can and should be addressed separately."

T-Mobile promised to continue to offer Lifeline service, should it get the OK to buy Sprint. “New T-Mobile has no contemplated end date to its participation in the Lifeline program, and the company has no intention to stop offering Lifeline in any state where T-Mobile and Assurance currently offer it,” the buyer wrote Rep. Tony Cardenas, D-Calif. T-Mobile also countered Communications Workers of America complaints the company's buy of Iowa Wireless last year was bad for broadband in that state. CWA raised the issue in the context of the T-Mobile/Sprint deal. “IWireless’s 2G and 3G service was vastly inferior to the quality of T-Mobile’s mobile broadband,” T-Mobile told an aide to FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, said a filing posted Monday in docket 18-197. “IWireless had no low-band spectrum and relatively limited 4G LTE coverage. T-Mobile is already investing more than $70 million to transform the network by building out its 600 MHz spectrum and introducing 5G-ready sites throughout Iowa.” T-Mobile and Sprint engineering staff told the FCC team reviewing the deal the companies' "three-year network migration process was designed to minimize customer disruption and provide superior user experience at all stages of the migration.” They said their combination "would drive down the cost of capacity and coverage by making more efficient use of existing spectrum and other network assets.”

California's net neutrality law is "a consequence" of FCC deregulation, said ex-commission Chairman Tom Wheeler on C-SPAN: "If the federal government has stepped aside, and the agency responsible for America’s networks says, 'No, we don’t have this responsibility any more for internet networks,' and we are a federal system, then why should we be surprised if the states step up?" Under President Donald Trump, "those networks regulated by the FCC have gotten everything they want. And they turn around and they say, ‘Oh my goodness, there’s a void there, we need some kind of rules.’ So they turn around and they go to Congress and say, ‘We’ve got to pre-empt what California has done,'" Wheeler added. ISPs are discovering the truth of what Adam Smith wrote that markets can't work without rules, Wheeler told The Communicators, put online Friday and televised this week. "They had uniform set of rules on open internet … on privacy that got overturned in the Trump administration." Monday, the Internet Association and USTelecom didn't comment and the commission and NCTA declined to comment. Wheeler criticized the FCC on cybersecurity under Chairman Ajit Pai. "If the most important network is probably going to be the wireless network, now in shorthand described as 5G," Wheeler asked, "what are we doing now to get in front of the threats that we know are coming?" The agency under Wheeler sought to require standards for spectrum the agency is making available for fifth-generation wireless be able to prevent such attacks, and sought technical feedback from experts, he recalled. "When the Trump FCC came in, they shut down both of these activities." He said the examination of what 5G gear can be bought is "important," such as whether equipment can come from Chinese companies. "The first step in rebalancing between the people and the powerful begins with oversight of the dominant network" via net neutrality, Wheeler blogged Friday for the Brookings Institution. "The second step comes with the establishment of rules for those who ride on the internet." The Trump FTC, which declined comment Monday, "has made noises, but has yet to step up to this challenge," wrote Wheeler, a Brookings visiting fellow. "Today’s internet barons behave just as the industrial barons in [then-President Teddy] Roosevelt’s day."

Monday's release of President Donald Trump's FY 2020 $4.7 trillion federal budget proposal provided a limited picture of its potential impact on telecom and tech-centric federal agencies, with the FTC the only of those entities to release budget justification documents. The White House said it won't release an appendix of its full budget proposal figures until March 18. The FCC and Commerce Department didn't release their proposals. The administration is proposing $312.3 million in funding for the FTC, up from the almost $310 million it proposed in FY 2019 and the similar amount allocated in the federal spending law Trump signed last month (see 1902150055). The FTC's budget would keep staffing level from FY 2019 at 1,140 full-time equivalents. The agency plans to keep its division of labor unchanged, too, with 612 employees working in jobs aimed at consumer protection activities and 528 in competition-related roles. DOJ said it's allocating $166.8 million of its $29.2 billion proposed FY 2020 budget for the Antitrust Division and proposes increasing the division's staffing level by 39 positions. The White House's budget proposal again mentioned a perennial proposal to introduce a spectrum license user fee, which it estimates would generate about $4 billion revenue through 2029. FCC-administered spectrum auctions could generate $6.6 billion revenue through 2029, the White House said. The Trump administration also outlined infrastructure-related aspects of its budget proposal, which include $200 billion in funding for rural broadband and other non-transportation sectors.

The Senate Commerce Committee is eyeing March 27 as the date for a media marketplace hearing, several lobbyists told us Friday. The hearing is expected to be a likely precursor to Senate Commerce's debate on reauthorizing the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act, lobbyists said. The House Communications Subcommittee held a similar hearing in September (see 1809270062). Senate Commerce Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said in February he views STELA renewal as a "must-pass" measure despite lobbying by broadcasters against such action (see 1902270018). The committee is lining up witnesses for the potential hearing, lobbyists said. Senate Commerce didn't comment.

The final meeting Friday of the Communications, Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council under its current charter focused on next-generation 911 (NG911), network security, and recommendations for future CSRICs to pursue. The body is expected to be rechartered, said CSRIC’s designated FCC federal officer Jeffery Goldthorp. The group voted to approve a set of best practices for NG911 that included recommendations for testing the service, monitoring its use and preventing outages. NTCA CEO Shirley Bloomfield and American Cable Association Board Chair Robert Gessner expressed concerns that some of the best practices would be difficult for smaller carriers to implement. It would be “challenging” if some of the best practices “moved from a should to a must,” said Bloomfield. No CSRIC members voted against the best practices. The council also approved recommendations for future CSRICs to study aspects of network security for the Domain Name System and the Border Gateway Protocol. Future CSRICs may want to consider the effect on internet stability and fragility of alternative network systems, said Travis Russell, Oracle director-cybersecurity.

The FCC announced new E-rate and rural healthcare USF program caps for funding year 2019, adjusted for inflation of 2.2 percent. The E-rate cap will go from $4.06 billion to $4.15 billion and the rural healthcare cap will go from $581 million to $593.8 million, said a Wireline Bureau public notice Friday in dockets 02-6 and 02-60.