Press Release

The agenda for the Federal Communications Commission's April open meeting:

House Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) and Consumer Protection Subcommittee Chair Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) wrote to the Federal Trade Commission asking how it would use additional resources to protect consumer privacy and increase data security enforcement activity. The Committee leaders asked how the FTC would deploy resources under three different scenarios – if it received an additional $50, $75 or $100 million for consumer protection and privacy. Chairmen Pallone and Schakowsky requested responses from the FTC to a series of questions by April 3, 2019, including:

The European Commission has fined Google €1.49 billion for breaching European Union antitrust rules. Google has abused its market dominance by imposing a number of restrictive clauses in contracts with third-party websites which prevented Google's rivals from placing their search adverts on these websites.

Apple announced a new initiative in support of leading nonprofit organizations in the US and Europe that offer nonpartisan, independent media literacy programs. The News Literacy Project (NLP) and Common Sense in the US and Osservatorio Permanente Giovani-Editori in Italy will each receive support from Apple to advance their efforts in empowering young people with the critical thinking skills necessary in today’s digital age.

After last week’s deadly white-nationalist domestic terror attack on two New Zealand mosques, and the shooter’s concurrent live-stream of the attack, House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS), has written a letter to the CEOs of four major technology companies (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Microsoft) urging them to prioritize the immediate removal of violent terrorist content, including that of far-right, domestic terrorists.

For Fiscal Year 2020, the Federal Communications Commission is requesting the budget and personnel amounts that are summarized in the bullets below:

Using new authority granted by Congress, the Federal Communications Commission took additional steps to combat the persistent problem of long-distance calls placed to rural America failing to reach their destination. Under the Improving Call Quality and Reliability (RCC) Act of 2017 and rules set by the FCC in 2018, “intermediate providers” must register with the FCC, and certain carriers that originate long-distance calls, called “covered providers,” may not hand off calls to an unregistered intermediate provider.

The Federal Communications Commission opened a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to develop a record on whether the existing partitioning, disaggregation, and spectrum leasing rules have succeeded and to evaluate whether they could be modified. Specifically, the Notice:

The Federal Communications Commission proposed to help first responders more accurately locate people who make wireless 911 calls from multistory buildings. The proposal would assist 911 call centers in identifying the floor level where the 911 call occurred, which can reduce emergency response times and ultimately save lives. The FCC proposed a vertical (or “z-axis”) location accuracy metric of plus or minus three meters relative to the handset for 80% of indoor wireless 911 calls.

The Federal Communications Commission adopted new rules to encourage the development of new communications technologies and expedite the deployment of new services in the spectrum above 95 GHz. Prior to this decision, the FCC had no rules for authorizing communications above 95 GHz, other than by amateur operators or through experiments of limited duration and scope. To enable innovators and entrepreneurs to most readily access this spectrum, the Spectrum Horizons First Report and Order creates a new category of experimental licenses for use of frequencies between 95 GHz and 3 THz.