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 Briefing.
TELECOM
FCC
Lifeline
The FCC announced that the Office of Management and Budget has approved the revisions to its Lifeline rule that involves information collection requirements. TMI Briefing Service subscribers see Briefings dated 7/1/15 and 7/20/15. The revisions will become effective once the FCC announces the approval through publication in the Federal Register. That publication is expected to occur on or after February 4, 2016. The following rule will take effect once publication occurs:
Enforcement Activities
The FCC released the text of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s response to a letter from several members of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee expressing concern over the FCC’s enforcement actions. Chairman Wheeler said that one of his “main priorities as Chairman is that consumers are protected from such behaviors as intrusive robocalls, fraudulent charges from cramming and slamming, and 911 system outages.” Among other things, the Senators suggested that the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau (EB) is “aggressively pursuing substantial, unprecedented, and seemingly arbitrary fines against licensees and non-licensees alike.”
In addition to outlining the FCC’s statutory authority for various enforcement actions and the associated penalties, the response explains how the EB operates. Among other interesting information in the response is the following:
The FCC did not release tables responding to the Senators’ requests for information relating to all monetary penalties in excess of $1 million imposed over the last 10 years and the payment status of all forfeitures in excess of $100,000 proposed in notices of apparent liability since 2005.