August 2017

Sens Cory Gardner (R-CO) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH) introduced the Advancing Innovation and Reinvigorating Widespread Access to Viable Electromagnetic Spectrum (AIRWAVES) Act, which will encourage the federal government to continue to free up spectrum for commercial licensed and unlicensed use and leverage the success of spectrum auctions to help close the urban-rural divide.

First, the legislation establishes a spectrum pipeline that will provide more capacity for wireless providers to improve existing service and expand to new areas. The AIRWAVES Act aims to motivate industry and federal agencies to find ways to better utilize spectrum and avoid a spectrum crunch and lay the groundwork for 5G technologies. Second, this legislation requires 10 percent of all of the proceeds from spectrum auctions in the bill to go directly to wireless broadband infrastructure buildout in unserved and underserved areas throughout rural communities across the country.

Apparently, Bill Shine, a former co-president of Fox News and top lieutenant to the network’s founder, Roger Ailes, has spoken with White House officials about taking a position on President Donald Trump’s communications team. Shine has no political experience outside of producing cable news, and he was forced out of Fox News in May after his name surfaced in lawsuits that accused him of abetting Ailes’s harassing behavior toward women. (Shine has denied all wrongdoing, as did Ailes, who died in May.)

But Shine has an influential ally in the Fox News host Sean Hannity, an informal adviser to President Trump — and one of his most loyal on-air supporters — who dined with Shine, the president and the first lady at the White House the week of July 24. Shine’s job prospects are unclear now that Trump has fired his communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, who also attended last week’s dinner and worked with Shine during his tenure as a host on Fox News and the Fox Business Network. Shine’s association with Scaramucci may hinder his chances with some factions in the West Wing.

Every day American consumers report tens of thousands of illegal robocalls to the Federal Trade Commission, and now the FTC is helping put that information to work boosting industry efforts to stop unwanted calls before they reach consumers. Under a new initiative announced by the FTC, when consumers report Do Not Call or robocall violations to the agency, the robocaller phone numbers consumers provide will be released each day to telecommunications carriers and other industry partners that are implementing call-blocking solutions.

Unwanted and illegal robocalls are the FTC’s number-one complaint category, with more than 1.9 million complaints filed in the first five months of 2017 alone. By reporting illegal robocalls, consumers help law enforcement efforts to stop the violators behind these calls. In addition, under the initiative, the FTC is now taking steps to provide more data, more often to help power the industry solutions that block illegal calls. The consumer complaint data is crucial because many of today’s call-blocking solutions rely on “blacklists” -- databases of telephone numbers that have received significant consumer complaints -- as one way to determine which calls should be blocked or flagged before they reach consumers’ phones. The new data that FTC is making available also will include the date and time the unwanted call was received, the general subject matter of the call (such as debt reduction, energy, warranties, home security, etc.), and whether the call was a robocall.

In this Order, we provide relief to many small businesses offering satellite news and video services from the unanticipated replacement costs associated with compliance with the Digital Video Broadcasting–Carrier Identification (DVB CID) standard. Based on the record, we waive section 25.281(b) for digitally transmitting satellite news gathering vehicles, and other temporary-fixed earth stations, that use existing modulators that cannot be made compliant with the DVB-CID standard by a software upgrade. At the same time, we mitigate the potential for harmful interference into satellite operations by requiring earth stations with new modulators, or with existing modulators that can be made compliant through a software upgrade, to meet the DVB-CID standard by the current effective date of September 3, 2017.