As the FCC commissioners voted up a trio of regulatory items Thursday, Chairman Brendan Carr was predicting "a very, very busy" July and August, with a greater focus on accelerating infrastructure buildouts and freeing up spectrum. Approved at the agency's June meeting were orders streamlining cable TV rate regulation and axing the professional engineer certification requirement for the biannual broadband data collection filings, as well as an NPRM proposing to end the requirement that telecommunications relay services providers support the now-obsolete ASCII transmission format. Thursday's meeting was the first for Republican Commissioner Olivia Trusty, who was sworn in Monday (see 2506230057). With Carr now having a two-person Republican majority, agency watchers anticipate that it will ramp up more substantive work aligned with his agenda (see 2506200052).
With the cost of space travel decreasing, regulatory hang-ups are starting to eclipse launch costs as the biggest barrier to commercial space, SpaceX Vice President of Satellite Policy David Goldman said Wednesday. Regulatory challenges are "where the bottleneck is," he said at a space and spectrum conference at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder.
A U.S. offer this week to host the 2027 World Radiocommunication Conference is probably a long shot, WRC experts and watchers told us. In a letter dated Monday to ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's offer doesn't specify a U.S. location for WRC-27, saying it could be "any number of cities," including Washington.
New satellite entrants struggle in the face of incumbent operators taking up geostationary orbital slots with old satellites that barely operate anymore, said Kimberly Baum, regulatory head for Astranis, at a space and spectrum conference Tuesday at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder. The related challenge of mini payloads on satellites that don't provide commercial service -- but nonetheless get licensed -- can stifle spectrum access for new entrants, she said. She called for the FCC to look at changing how it licenses payloads or older satellites that can't provide commercial services.
Telephone Consumer Protection Act and marketing lawyers see Friday's U.S. Supreme Court decision on the deference that lower courts are to give the FCC over telemarketing issues (see 2506200053) as potentially resetting decades of TCPA precedence by the agency.
Expect more litigation from content companies targeting generative AI platforms over their use of images and video, both as inputs and outputs, copyright and intellectual property experts told us. Earlier this month, Disney and Universal sued AI platform Midjourney, alleging that the company uses the studios' intellectual property in its training data and the images that its platform produces (see 2506110043).
The video distribution marketplace is in the midst of rapid and massive upheaval, but video rules experts were divided in a panel talk Monday about what needs to be done in response. At the Congressional Internet Caucus Academy event, former FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly called for eliminating the vast majority of the rules governing video distribution. Localities lawyer Cheryl Leanza of Best Best warned of the tendency of a "knee-jerk reaction" to deregulate without looking at why existing rules were adopted. Some archaic rules need to be done away with, she said, but rules that promote democracy and civic discourse must be maintained.
Ligado and Viasat's Inmarsat have struck a deal that ends Inmarsat's objections to Ligado's plan to get out of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Inmarsat had fought Ligado's plan to lease its L-band spectrum to AST SpaceMobile (see 2504280047). AST, meanwhile, has asked the FCC to commence commercial supplemental coverage from space (SCS) service.
What the apparent collapse of a previously tight relationship between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump means for Musk's SpaceX is uncertain, space industry and FCC watchers told us. Some believe SpaceX will face a chillier reception from regulatory agencies, including for FCC proceedings that SpaceX is intensely interested in, such as the agency's probes into EchoStar's use of the 2 GHz band and its terrestrial 5G network buildout (see 2505130003). Others don't see the feud meaning much. The FCC and FAA -- which regulates SpaceX's launch operations -- didn't comment.
SpaceX is taking another stab at obtaining FCC approval to operate in the 1.6/2.4 GHz bands, but it's unlikely the commission will act quickly, if at all, space spectrum experts told us.