CommLawBlog

The deregulatory changes the Federal Communications Commission recently adopted to its media ownership rules are due to take effect on Feb. 7. Prometheus Radio Project and Media Mobilizing Project, however, have filed an appeal of those rule changes in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and, as expected, have now asked the Court to delay the FCC’s implementation of those changes.

Since Chairman Ajit Pai took over the leadership of the Federal Communications Commission, he has emphasized that one of his main goals has been to “close the digital divide and bring the benefits of the Internet age to all Americans.” So it comes as no surprise that the FCC has taken several measures recently to overhaul the Lifeline program under the tagline “Bridging the Digital Divide for Low-Income Consumers.” The November changes to the Lifeline Program were mainly cutbacks; reducing available subsidies, as well as limiting eligible participants and carriers.

Lately, there has been a lot of news about all the political jockeying at the Federal Communications Commission over who will stay and who will go, plus who must leave and who will be appointed. So we thought a primer on how the FCC works might be in order.

When Donald Trump was elected, he could not just throw out the Democrats because they are appointed for a fixed term, although he can change who the Chair will be. Currently, bets are that the senior Republican Ajit Pai will be the Acting Chair until President Trump selects a permanent Chair. Mignon Clyburn is serving a second five-year term on the Commission which will officially expire on June 30 of 2017. However, there’s a grace period, called a “holdover,” after an FCC commissioner’s term expires, which ends when a replacement is confirmed, or at the end of the congressional session in the year following expiration of their term, whichever comes first. The holdover period for Clyburn ends December 2018. Ajit Pai is the senior Republican on the FCC; he was nominated by President Obama and his term expired on June 30, 2016; his holdover ends this December. Michael O’Rielly, the other Republican and the newest commissioner, was also nominated by President Obama. His term expires in December 2019 and his holdover period ends in December 2020.

On Jan 7, after the sun had set and the Federal Communications Commission’s doors were locked for the night, the agency released two decisions addressing complaints that a dozen TV stations did not provide sufficiently complete information about political advertising in their public inspection files during the 2016 Presidential campaign. That sounds kind of like a “controversial” FCC decision, and we thought that the FCC was going to hold off on controversial decisions until after next week’s Presidential Inauguration. To get around that unofficial moratorium, the Media Bureau Staff, rather than the full Commission, issued the two Orders, an approach used in a few other situations where the Wheeler FCC has wanted to get decisions out before the Chairman departs next week. The political public file requirements are pretty detailed, and it’s not always easy to pry some of the required information out of political sponsors, let alone get it all uploaded immediately into a station’s online political public file. Complaints were filed during the campaign, often by public interest groups, attempting to expose the sources of money behind political advertising where the sponsor preferred to remain in the shadows.