Today:  Court Upholds FCC Pole Attachment Order,  FTC Announces Robocall Initiative 

Court Upholds FCC Pole Attachment Order

The US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit rejected challenges to the FCC’s 2015 Order revising the formula for calculating pole attachment rates for telecom carriers.  The FCC’s Order was intended to ensure that pole attachment rates for telecom providers, including BIAS providers, approximate the rates paid by cable companies.  TMI Briefing Service subscribers see Briefing dated 12/4/15.  The Court found that the FCC’s Order constituted a reasonable interpretation of the relevant section of the Communications Act (§224(e)) and that the statute “permits, but does not require” that the cable and telecom rates divulge.  The Court said: ” The FCC sought to eliminate the disparity between the Cable and Telecom Rates in order to avoid subjecting cable providers offering broadband service to the higher Telecom Rate, and to avoid rate disparity between states whose pole attachment rates are regulated by the FCC and those states that had elected to regulate pole attachment rates using the Cable Rate even for telecommunications providers. Finding that the April 2011 Order’s presumptions of five attachers in urban areas and three attachers in non-urban areas were inadequate to achieve these goals, the FCC adopted the multiple cost allocators set forth in the November 2015 Order. This approach represents a “reasonable policy” choice, and thus we defer to the FCC’s interpretation.”

FTC Announces Robocall Initiative

The Federal Trade Commission announced a new initiative to help stop robocalls.  When consumers report Do Not Call or robocall violations to the agency, the robocaller phone numbers consumers provide will be released each day to telecommunications carriers and other industry partners that are implementing call blocking solutions.  The data made available by the FTC will also include the date and time the unwanted call was received, the general subject matter of the call (such as debt reduction, energy, warranties, home security, etc.), and whether the call was a robocall.   The data is posted to the FTC website every weekday, with Monday postings including weekend data, and is available on the Do Not Call (DNC) Reported Calls Data webpage.  Unwanted and illegal robocalls are the FTC’s number-one complaint category, with more than 1.9 million complaints filed in the first five months of 2017 alone.

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The Regulatory Mix, TMI’s daily 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 a TMI Briefing.