Multichannel News

The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has decided that not every smartphone is an autodialer subject to the restrictions of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). In a decision released March 16, the court reversed a 2015 Federal Communications Commission decision that robocalls to numbers of consenting parties that were subsequently transferred to nonconsenting parties violated the TCPA as well as the FCC's definition of the autodialers (automatic telephone dialing system, or ATDS) that can't be used without the call (or text) recipient's prior permission.

Citizens Against Government Waste has a bone to pick with President Donald Trump's infrastructure plan, which leaves the distribution of $50 billion in rural infrastructure seed money to the states and localities. In a letter to Office of Manqagement and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, CAGW, joined by Americans for Tax Reform and others, said that while they generally support states spending money over the feds, they are worried about the potential for waste, fraud and abuse and duplication of spending given the focus on rural broadband.

In a move likely in response to the Justice Department, Sinclair has once again amended its June 2017 deal to purchase Tribune Media's stations, this time adjusting last week's amended filing to cut Harrisburg-Lancaster-Lebanon-York (PA) from the markets where it sought to own two of the top four stations to take advantage of the Federal Communications Commission's new case-by-case waiver of the prohibition on such ownership. Sinclair will now sell one of the two stations in that market rather than try for an exemption.