John Eggerton

Diane Rinaldo, acting head of the National Telecommunications & Information Administration, says that thanks to government policies that emphasize collaboration with industry, the US, as promised, winning the race to 5G. 

You may be old enough to remember the “vast wasteland” moniker that JFK’s Federal Communications Commission Chairman, Newton Minow, applied to broadcast TV’s handful of channels in the early 1960s. Well, a new generation of Minow has come up with a label for the new generation of multiplatform video. “Toxic Swamp.”

Senate Financial Services Subcommittee Chairman John Kennedy (R-LA) lit into Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai for even considering private spectrum deals with foreign owned satellite companies, which say they can free up C-Band spectrum for 5G faster than an FCC auction. Chairman Kennedy told Chairman Pai that his mind could be changed, but he was currently biased for a public auction so that the American taxpayer, not "Luxembourg" (where some of the satellite operators are based) should reap the profits from repurposing some of the band for 5G.

A number of civil rights groups have struck an agreement with T-Mobile-Sprint to expand on the companies' diversity initiatives significantly if the two close on their merger.

Gigi Sohn, former adviser to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler, supports legislation to clarify the FCC's authority over broadband, but that unless that bill returns oversight of the market to the FCC, that is not likely to happen. She said the fight over such legislation will hinge on whether the FCC is going to oversee the market.

Cable operators are telling the Federal Communications Commission to use its new broadband deployment data regime for just that, collecting deployment data, rather than use it as a vehicle for collecting data on latency or price, as some have argued it should do.

According to top Federal Communications Commission officials (paraphrased from a background call), these were the seven key victories for the FCC in the decision by the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit:

Broadband providers and virtually everyone else is calling for Congress to finally step in and clarify just what authority the Federal Communications Commission has and should use over internet access. The FCC has to come back to the court with a better justification for its assertion that its deregulatory moves would not adversely affect public safety, pole-attachment regulations and Lifeline broadband subsidies. FCC officials said they had no concerns about providing those explanations.

The House Communications Subcommittee considered a handful of bills Sept. 27 at the hearing "Legislating to Secure America's Wireless Future" -- the thrust of which were to protect 5G networks from foreign intruders looking to spy on the US, as well as to efficiently manage spectrum. Bills being considered at the hearing were: 

The Senate Antitrust Subcommittee heard from various parties on whether Big Tech companies have been allowed to become serial innovation killers, buying up tech start-up competitors before those competitors are large enough to raise red flags with regulators. A Federal Trade Commission witness said the agency was definitely retrospectively reviewing such "killer acqs" (acquisitions), and could break up or shake up already-merged companies if that is the appropriate structural remedy.