The Regulatory Mix, TMI’s daily blog of regulatory activities, is a snapshot of PUC, FCC, legislative, and occasionally court, issues that our regulatory monitoring team uncovers each day. Depending on their significance, some items may be the subject of a TMI Regulatory Bulletin.
FCC
The FCC announced the 48 “next-in-line” bidders that successfully submitted the required financial and technical information to be considered to receive rural broadband experiment support if any of the provisionally accepted bidders default before the list of census blocks that will be offered to the price cap carriers for Phase II of the Connect America Fund is finalized. The FCC cautioned that the Public Notice does not determine which entities ultimately may be provisionally selected as next-in-line bidders. The FCC said that once it determined whether any additional funding is available due to the failure of any current provisionally selected bidders to file a commitment letter by the required deadline, it will announce which among those listed on the Attachment to the Public Notice are now provisionally selected bidders.
Special note:
FCC Chairman Wheeler Published in Wired Magazine
California
A new law in California will change the way surcharges and taxes are collected on prepaid wireless service effective January 1, 2016. The new law establishes a prepaid mobile telephony services telephone service surcharge that will include the separate assessments currently made on prepaid wireless service for the six California PUC telephone surcharges, the PUC reimbursement fee, and the 911 fee. The law also creates a local prepaid mobile telephony services charge which is a tiered rate structure that local authorities seeking to impose utility user taxes and local 911 taxes must conform to if they want to tax prepaid wireless services. The new prepaid wireless fee will be the combined total of the prepaid MTS surcharge and the applicable local charges. Remittance requirements vary depending on whether the seller collecting the fee is a provider or a retailer. See TMI Regulatory Bulletin dated 1/29/15, available here.
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