FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has announced the tentative agenda for the FCC’s December 12, 2019, Open Meeting. It includes the following items:
The FCC will also consider three (unspecified) enforcement items.
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The Regulatory Mix Today: FCC December Open Meeting , FCC’s Pai on Robocalling
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In a speech at the Robocall Symposium Of The New England States, FCC Chairman Pai reviewed the steps the FCC has taken to address the issue of robocalls, including allowing companies to establish call blocking services as a default setting, promoting better caller ID authentication (through expanding the reach of the FCC’s rules to include communications originating overseas and text messages) as well as its efforts to encourage the promotion of SHAKEN/STIR caller ID authentication. Concerning the industry’s voluntary implementation of SHAKEN/STIR by the end of 2019, Pai said: “I’ve generally been pleased by the progress reports on SHAKEN/STIR implementation. I’m grateful for the efforts carriers have made to date, and I saw that just this morning, T-Mobile, Comcast, and Inteliquent announced the completion of the first end-to-end SHAKEN/STIR call verification. But the reality is we are only seven weeks away from the end-of-the-year deadline, and we are not yet seeing sufficient implementation by all major voice providers. To any carriers out there who might not be treating this deadline with the urgency it deserves, I am putting them on notice now: at my direction, Commission staff is actively working on developing regulations to make this happen. If industry doesn’t get the job done on time, I will not hesitate to call an FCC vote on these new rules.”
He also noted that the FCC has taken aggressive enforcement action against bad actors, with fines totaling over $200 million. He also discussed the recently announced agreement on bi-partisan anti-robocalling legislation saying: “[w]ith a bipartisan, bicameral coalition like this, I believe that a law can and will be passed and signed by the President—even in this challenging
political environment.”
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The Regulatory Mix, Inteserra’s blog of telecom related 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 an Inteserra Briefing.