Robocall Relief Springs Forward

 At our March meeting, the Federal Communications Commission will therefore vote on new rules requiring implementation of STIR/SHAKEN by June 30, 2021, a deadline set forth in the TRACED Act, which was recently passed by Congress. Under my proposal, the FCC would also seek public input on additional measures to combat spoofed robocalls, including other measures to implement the TRACED Act.

At our March meeting, we are looking not only to spur the deployment of new technologies to make phone service more consumer-friendly, but also to get outdated and unnecessary telephone regulations off the books. In light of the multitude of options that American consumers now have for voice service, I'm proposing to examine whether certain pricing and tariffing regulations that the FCC imposed on incumbent phone companies when they held a monopoly on local telephone service still make sense today. Specifically, I've circulated a proposal to deregulate and detariff what I'm calling "Telephone Access Charges," which are the last handful of interstate end-user charges that remain subject to FCC regulation. Under this proposal, the FCC would also prohibit all carriers from separately listing these charges—an alphabet soup of charges like the Subscriber Line Charge, the Access Recovery Charge, the Presubscribed Interexchange Carrier Charge, the Line Port Charge, and the Special Access Surcharge—on customers' bills. Eliminating these line-item charges would make it easier for consumers to understand their phone bills and compare prices among voice service providers as well as help ensure that a carrier's advertised prices are closer to the prices that consumers actually pay.

We will be rounding out our March agenda with a trio of items from our Media Bureau. The first is a proposal to make it easier for broadcast TV stations to use a distributed transmission system, or DTS. DTS uses multiple transmitter sites within a station's authorized service area, each operating on the same channel, in order to provide better service to the public. Next up, we'll consider a proposal to change the Commission's rules governing the resolution of program carriage disputes between video programming vendors and multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs). We propose modifications to time-limit requirements for filing complaints and effective dates for decisions by our Administrative Law Judge, which are designed to provide additional clarity to both potential complainants and defendants, as well as adjudicators. Finally, we'll take up a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to examine modernizing the methodology for determining whether a television broadcast station is "significantly viewed" in a community outside of its local television market and thus may be treated as a local station in that community for broadcast signal carriage purposes.