Lawmakers Hammer FCC's Carr Over 5G Deployment Order

On March 22, the Federal Communications Commission will vote on an order to streamline environmental and historic preservation reviews for 5G facilities deployment. Reps. Frank Pallone (D-NJ), Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Raul Ruiz (D-CA) wrote FCC Commissioner Brandan Carr, who is spearheading the FCC proposal, to ask him to reconsider, saying the order will short-circuit safeguards for tribal lands. The proposed order would render the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) toothless when it comes to protecting "tribally-significant" sites. They also argue that what remains of NHPA shifts burdens from corporations to cash-strapped tribes. "The proposed order claims these small wireless facilities are the size of a pizza box, but the wireless industry notes that hundreds of thousands of these sites will need to be deployed to meet consumer demand for new 5G networks," they told Commissioner Carr. "If the FCC were to carve out small wireless facilities from NHPA, the Commission could be subjecting culturally significant sites to death by hundreds of thousands of small-cell cuts."

More broadly, they said the item reflects an FCC culture under Chairman Ajit Pai to "act always at the behest of industry again and again at the expense of consumers, localities, and otherwise marginalized and disenfranchised communities who are in the most need of their government to look out for them."