Press Release

A broad-based coalition of nonprofit groups [including the Benton Foundation] filed a letter calling on the Federal Communications Commission to reject a proposal from the cellular industry, filed by CTIA on June 16, to re-open and revise the rules finalized more than a year ago for a new Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) that opens a large frequency band of unused Navy spectrum for small area, high-capacity broadband innovation. The coalition represents consumers, public institutions and small business users of broadband, and includes the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition, Next Century Cities, Engine, the R Street Institute, the American Library Association and the National Hispanic Media Coalition. The coalition asks the FCC to instead move rapidly to complete implementation of this historic innovation in spectrum policy, which opens unused military spectrum for sharing with Priority Access Licenses that are available for small areas (census tracts) and short terms, thereby making them more useful and affordable to smaller operators and to venues for indoor use.

Venable LLP announced that Philip L. Verveer has joined the firm's Regulatory practice as senior counsel in Washington (DC) where he will focus on antitrust and domestic and international communications law and policy. Most recently, Verveer served in two separate capacities during the Obama Administration, as Senior Counselor to the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 2013 to 2017 and as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and US Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy, with ambassadorial rank, from 2009 to 2013. Verveer earned his JD from the University of Chicago Law School and his BSFS from Georgetown University. He also served in the US Army as a captain in military intelligence.

[Commentary] My cousin Charlie is serving time in an upstate New York prison. On June 13, a federal appeals court struck down several provisions in the Federal Communications Commission’s recent decisions to cap the cost of prison- and jail-phone calls. This ruling is a real blow to my family and many others like mine across the country. It’s also a huge step backward.

In late 2015, the FCC voted to reduce the steep cost of prison-phone calls charged to incarcerated people and their families. Many inmates and their families had spent years fighting to cap these calls, which can run to more than a dollar per minute. When the FCC voted to implement the caps I felt a sense of relief knowing that Charlie would be able to afford to call my grandmother on a more regular basis without worrying that he’d deplete his commissary on just phone calls. But soon after these rules were adopted the prison-phone industry sued the agency. In February 2017, Donald Trump’s newly appointed FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, said the agency’s lawyers wouldn’t defend key aspects of these rules in court — paving the way for Tuesday’s decision.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced that he intends to appoint Donald Stockdale to serve as chief of the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau.

Stockdale is an economist and attorney with extensive FCC and private-sector experience. Stockdale will be working closely with Nese Guendelsberger who, having served as acting bureau chief, will continue to help lead the Bureau as senior deputy bureau chief. Meanwhile, Chairman Pai intends to appoint James Schlichting, who currently serves as senior deputy bureau chief in the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, to the same position in the International Bureau. Stockdale rejoins the Commission from Bates White Economic Consulting where he has been a partner. Prior to that, he worked on telecom regulatory and antitrust issues as a partner at Mayer Brown LLP. Mr. Stockdale first joined the FCC’s then-Common Carrier Bureau (now the Wireline Competition Bureau) in 1994 as an attorney advisor and later as deputy division chief and associate bureau chief for economics. He later served as director of research in the Office of Policy and Planning and finally as deputy bureau chief and chief economist for the Wireline Competition Bureau until he left the agency in 2011. He earned his doctorate in economics and
law degree from Yale University and bachelors degrees from Cambridge University and Yale.

The Open Technology Institute team is expanding!

Rachel Adler is an intern working on internet security issues who just finished her junior year at Princeton University. Andres Bascumbe is the program manager of TechCongress. Taliesin Gabriel is working on open internet issues. Jo Johnson is the new operations and communications associate with OTI, after interning with New America's central communications department for the past five months. Michael Lahanas, our summer communications intern, is a rising junior, political science major at Kenyon College, with a strong interest in the intersection of politics and tech. Mia Little is a rising 3L at the Washington College of Law at American University, and she's currently working in OTI as a Google Public Policy Fellow. Andrew Manley, working on open internet issues this summer, is a rising third year law student at the University of Colorado. Amir Nasr is a program associate working on broadband policies including net neutrality, municipal broadband and broadband deployment as well as wireless policy such as increasing the availability of unlicensed spectrum. Paul St. Clair, interning with Wireless Future, is a rising 2L at the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law. Joseph Jai-sung Yoo, Ranking Digital Rights' Annenberg Fellow, is a Ph.D candidate in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

Benton is happy to hear that Jessica Rosenworcel could return to the Federal Communications Commission. As a commissioner, Rosenworcel was a leader on a number of issues. She worked to give new meaning to the FCC’s public safety mandate in the Digital Age. She helped modernize the E-rate program to ensure that all students have access to the latest education tools made possible by fast, affordable broadband. She recognized that those students also need reliable, robust broadband access at home so they can complete school assignments. Rosenworcel’s experience and leadership make her an ideal candidate to help shape the future of telecommunication policy.

[Commentary] On June 12 I was speaking to a veteran Senate reporter about the increasing number of journalists flooding the halls of the Capitol. This reporter felt that the crowd size would “inevitably” lead to the end of the open press access the media has long enjoyed. This reporter was not the first that I’d heard that from. It was not the first time that I’d thought about it, either.

There’s a vague sense among many members of the Capitol Hill press corps that some sort of crackdown is coming and that the incredible access to national lawmakers that reporters enjoy could be curtailed. If senators truly are concerned about the size of reporter mobs and their safety, they could be more forthcoming with information about, say, their health care bill, perhaps with regular press conferences. Reporters wouldn’t have to be quite so creative in their methods, then.

Winners in the 11th annual Mirror Awards competition honoring excellence in media industry reporting were announced June 13 at a ceremony in New York City, hosted by Syracuse University’s SI Newhouse School of Public Communications. “Today” show contributing correspondent Jenna Bush Hager emceed the luncheon event, which was held at Cipriani 42nd Street. The winners, chosen by a group of journalists and journalism educators, are:

Best Profile: Sarah Esther Maslin, “A light in the underworld” for Columbia Journalism Review
Best Single Story: Soraya Chemaly and Catherine Buni, “The secret rules of the internet” for The Verge
Best Commentary: Eric Alterman, “How False Equivalence Is Distorting the 2016 Election Coverage” for The Nation
John M. Higgins Award for Best In-Depth/Enterprise Reporting: Gabriel Sherman for New York magazine

The US Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has awarded $38.5 million to 33 research and development (R&D) projects aimed at advancing broadband communications technologies for first responders. The multiyear grants are intended to help modernize public safety communications and operations by supporting the migration of data, video and voice communications from mobile radio to a nationwide public safety broadband network, as well as accelerating critical technologies related to indoor location tracking and public safety analytics.

Today’s DC Circuit decision is deeply disappointing, not just for me and the many advocates who have fought for more than a decade to bring about much needed reform in the inmate calling services regime...it is a sad day for the more than 2.7 million children in this country with at least one incarcerated parent. But the families who have experienced the pain, anguish and financial burden of trying to communicate with a loved one in jail or prison, are still counting on us, so we will press on.

I remain committed to doing everything I can from working with my colleagues at the Commission, to supporting the efforts of Congress and those in the states to bring relief to millions who continue to suffer from the greatest form of regulatory injustice I have seen in my 18 years as a regulator in the communications space.