Year: 2017

By Ernesto Falcon, November 3, 2017; Link to original article.

After lobbying Congress to repeal consumer privacy protections over ISPs, Verizon wants the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to do it a favor and preempt states from restoring their privacy rights. While Congress repealed the previous FCC’s privacy rule, it left the underlying Section 222 intact. As a result, dozens of state bills were then introduced to restore broadband privacy, mirroring Section 222 of the Communications Act.

Verizon’s two-pronged attack on privacy protections for Internet users would require the FCC to not only abandon federal privacy protections (which is part of their Title II common carrier obligations), but to also prohibit states from protecting the privacy of their residents.

The states, however, have a vital role to play in protecting Internet subscribers, particularly given the rollback of federal protections. It would be unwise for the FCC to attempt to block such protections at Verizon’s behest, and it would be on shaky legal footing if it tried to do so.

Legally, Congress has the power to override state laws that interfere with federal regulation, subject to important limits set forth in the Constitution. This power is called "preemption" – Congress can "preempt" state law. Since preemption interferes with states’ ability to govern conduct within their borders, courts do not simply assume that all action by federal regulators can overturn state laws. Contrary to Verizon’s claims that the FCC has clear authority to preempt on privacy, it would be legally unwise and potentially unlawful for the FCC to preempt the states.

Continue reading “Verizon Asks FCC to Prohibit States from Protecting Privacy”

By Susan Crawford 3/29/17, 12:00 am; Link to original article

CARRIERS ARE PUSHING STATES AND THE FCC TO CONSTRAIN PUBLIC RIGHTS.
THEY SAY IT’S FOR THE MYTHICAL "5G." WE SHOULD BE VERY SKEPTICAL.

It’s good to be one of the handful of companies controlling data transmission in America. It’s even better — from their perspective — to avoid oversight. And it’s best of all to be a carrier that gets government to actually stop existing oversight.

The stagnant telecommunications industry in America has long pursued the second of those goals — avoiding oversight, or even long-range thinking that would favor the interests of all other businesses and all other Americans over those of AT&T, Verizon, Charter, and Comcast — by proclaiming that there is something really magnificent coming any day now from the industry that will make anything regulators are worrying about irrelevant. And now that technique is at the heart of achieving Goal Three—wiping out oversight.

Case in point: Right now, plans are being implemented at the FCC and at least 17 state legislatures to block cities from constraining uses of their rights-of-way by private cellular companies for 4G/5G deployments that — you guessed it — are coming any day now. In other words, if a city wants to set up a fair and competitive system that favors competitors, citizens, and long-range goals instead of the interests of a single big company—well, that would be illegal. This nationwide effort is aimed at, effectively, privatizing public rights of way.

What’s the justification? Here’s the argument the cellular industry — itself mostly a duopoly of AT&T and Verizon, with Sprint and T-Mobile together accounting for about 30 percent of the market — is making at every level:

• We’re in a big hurry to lower the costs of deployment of advanced wireless systems, nicknamed 5G;

• If you could stop these cities from constraining uses of their public rights-of-way, we could save money when we do these installations;

• If we saved money by getting these pesky localities out of the way, we’d be free to invest more in high-speed internet access, including in rural areas;

• In fact, if we installed more 5G we’d solve all your internet access problems — who needs wires when we’ve got wireless?

Every step of this argument is misleading. And the whole widespread, multi-level, fast-moving effort is a distraction from the country’s real internet access problems. But it takes a couple of sentences to explain why, and so in the meantime credulous state legislators are falling all over themselves passing bills aimed at wiping out the future ability of a city to control its own data destiny.

There is an alternative that makes much more sense. Cities need to figure out — quickly — how to require neutral wireless infrastructure to be shared by all industry players, at a reasonable, neutral cost to any requestor. Cities need to ensure that they have ample dark fiber available at a reasonable cost for all of those wireless interconnection points and for all wired competitors — like they did in Westminster, MD.

6/21/17 House Committee on Energy and Commerce:

Defining and Mapping Broadband Coverage in America
View at 42:57: Dr. Robert Wack from Westminster, MD (town of 18,000)
re: public/private partnership for publicly owned fiber-optic network,
providing 1,000 Mbps for everyone: urban, suburban and rural

Continue reading “Handcuffing Cities to Help Telecom Giants”

Key 2017 Hearings of House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology

Part of House Committee on Energy and Commerce

The videos of the Hearings, listed below, are worth your time to view. They provide the background to understand which Telecom bills are getting traction in both the House and the Senate, and which are not. The bills on this list, appear as 2017 Bills, but many have been introduced in earlier legislative sessions, but not forwarded by the current Republican leadership in the House or Senate or not taken up by the other Chamber. Each of the bills is like a kid waiting to be picked to play in the game: that’s why there are so many similar bills, each is trying to get the right “secret sauce” (language, compromises, bi-partisan support) to get selected and sent into the game. Not surprisingly, bills authored by Republicans get picked more often in this Republican administration, because being the Majority has real privileges. Listen to the frustration of the Democrat Representatives in these videos to get a sense of this process.

• 6/21/17 Video of Hearing on Defining and Mapping Broadband Coverage in America
• 10/11/17 Video of Hearing on Markup of Draft Bill to Reauthorize the Federal Communications Commission (‘FCC’)
• 10/25/17 Video of Hearing on Oversight of the FCC

Continue reading “US House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology”

FCC BDAC Working Group: Model Code for Municipalities

Part of the FCC Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee

Item Voted by BDAC to the FCC Commissioners at the 11/9/17 Meeting

The FCC Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee, Model Code for Municipalities Working Group ("Working Group") was charged with developing a model code for local governments across the country to act as a non-binding, flexible guideline to help to speed broadband deployment across the United States. There are over 39,000 local governments (including townships, counties, and other municipalities) in the United States, with enormous diversity based on geography, size, resources, aesthetics, existing infrastructure, regulatory and legal framework, history, culture, and community priorities.

In light of the FCC’s charge, and given the importance of broadband deployment to America’s economic competitiveness as well as creating educational and employment opportunities for our population, the Working Group developed the following set of guiding principles to focus its work.

Continue reading “November, 2017 FCC BDAC Working Group Reports”

by Bruce Kushnick, 11/09/2017 04:55 am ET; Link to original Huffington Post article

This analysis is being presented in two parts.

Part II lays out the rest of the insidious, very under-the-radar plan. The FCC has created a series of 15 to 20+ separate, but interconnected proposed rules, regulations and actions to directly help AT&T and Verizon. And though it is not obvious from the outside, each proceeding (currently underway) is designed to work in concert. Unfortunately, the companies have helped to maneuver this takeover and so we now have an FCC voting block in place where only one party, defending the companies, can win. Killing off net neutrality is just one of many planned harms. We discuss, below, some of the implications and will connect many dots in Part II.

Part 1: The Takeover of the FCC and Creation of a Voting Block

In every industry we hear horror stories of how the government agencies that are supposed to provide oversight of the companies and protect the public interest have been taken over by the industries they are supposed to regulate. (Note: this was reported fully in Norm Alster’s book from Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics: "Captured Agency: How the FCC is Dominated by the Industries It Presumably Regulates").

Continue reading “Corporate Takeover of the Trump-FCC Is Complete”

So-Called Small Cell Towers Are About Life and Death

Letter from Ronald M. Powell, Ph.D. to the Montgomery County Council, Maryland.

October 31, 2017

To:
Roger Berliner, President
Hans Riemer, Vice President
Montgomery County Council
Montgomery County, Maryland

Dear President Berliner and Vice President Riemer,

My thanks to both of you gentlemen for your responses to my earlier email messages opposing small cell towers. Both of you cited factors of importance when considering the installation of these towers in Montgomery County. However, I was left uncertain about your own views of small cell towers. At present, do you favor the installation of small cell towers in Montgomery County, or not?

A. If You Favor Installation

If you favor installation and your goal is limited to maintaining control of the zoning requirements at the County level, then I can understand why County officials keep deflecting the substantial Daubert-rule admissible evidence about health hazards caused by exposures to pulsed, data-modulated, Radiofrequency Microwave (RF/MW) Radiation that have been entered into the public record by County residents. Hence the frequent references to the "environmental effects" exclusion in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which has been incorrectly interpreted to be a "health effects" exclusion:

“No State or local government or instrumentality thereof may regulate the placement, construction, and modification of personal wireless service facilities on the basis of the environmental effects of radio frequency emissions to the extent that such facilities comply with the Commission’s regulations concerning such emissions.”

In the above quotation, the “Commission” is, of course, the Federal Communications Commission.

Continue reading “Dr. Ronald M. Powell, Ph.D. Opposes Small Cell Towers”

Broadband-Boosting Bill Draft Circulated

Would seek to level playing field for wired buildouts
http://www.multichannel.com/news/congress/broadband-boosting-bill-draft-circulated/416257
By John Eggerton, 10/31/2017 @ 12:59 PM ET

We located the full text of this DRAFT bill. You can read the full text here.

Senate Commerce Committee chair John Thune (R-S.D.) and Communications Subcommittee ranking member Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) have circulated the draft of a bill that would speed the deployment of 5G, just one a host of moves to goose the buildout of high-speed [Wireless] broadband.

The bill would limit the ability of state and local governments to restrict access to poles and rights of way except in specific circumstances — insufficient capacity, safety and reasonable concealment, for example — according to a copy of the discussion draft.

It also includes help for cable franchise buildouts and their accompanying broadband component so governments are equal-opportunity [Wireless] broadband facilitators.

The bill would limit state and local governments’ ability to impose a "de facto" moratorium on accepting or processing permits, or their ability to make it harder for tech or capacity upgrades, and addresses other "regulations by a state or local government … that prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting the provision of wireless services," according to the draft.

It also imposes a shot clock of 90 days on government decisions regarding various requests.
"By modernizing how wireless networks are deployed, this draft bill would help enable the wireless industry to invest hundreds of billions of dollars to win the global race to 5G," said Kelly Cole, SVP for government affairs for CTIA. "We look forward to its quick passage."

The issue is a hot one inside the Beltway, including other legislation, proposed FCC action to speed the process, and a just-released study that says the massive upgrades needed for 5G mobile broadband require government facilitators.

Continue reading “Recent Federal Pro-Wireless Bills Demand a Response”

A mere two days separated these two critically important events the week of October 16, 2017 . . . there is a huge disconnect here, folks.

1. TRUTH — October 17, 2017: Supreme Court Rally: The Public Has a Right To Know About the Health Hazards of 4G/5G Wireless and the Internet of Things (IoT)

On October 17, 2017, the National Coalition for Responsible Technology gathered in front of the US Supreme Court for a rally. As part of the EPA’s Children’s Health Month, the rally drew attention to the growing use of wireless devices by children and the disastrous proliferation of small cell 4G/5G wireless antennas in residential zones across the United States.

The Coalition called on the federal government to take action to safeguard the public with effective and protective electromagnetic and microwave exposure policies based on the substantial scientific evidence of harm from exposures to pulsed, data-modulated microwave radiation at output power that is millions of times lower than the current federal electromagnetic and microwave exposure guidelines:

• Halt 5G deployment until long term safety is assured
• Place a moratorium on cell towers and cell antennas near homes, hospitals, schools, and children’s recreation areas
• Replace the nonsensical and scientifically disproven Federal Communications Commission Radiofrequency Microwave Radiation human exposure guidelines with effective health and safety standards
• Use the existing safe radiation-free technology in schools and public institutions (fiber optic and Ethernet cables)

Continue reading “Juxtaposed Microwave Radiation Events”

A. Wireless Industry: 77 Cell Towers Failed in the First Hours of The Oct 2017 Fires in Northern California

From 10/16/17: Piedmont, CA City Council Meeting || 9/30/17: No Significant Gap in Verizon Coverage:

In the first video, above, at a 10/16/17 Piedmont, CA City Council meeting, a Crown Castle/Verizon representative tells the truth on the record.. The Wireless alerts failed to get through. Residents with copper, legacy landline phones received the reverse-911 warnings to evacuate.

Continue reading “Cell Coverage Failed in October 2017 California Fires”

From the League of California Cities:

While over 300 cities opposed SB 649 (Hueso), the telecom bill, the Governor’s decision was uncertain until midnight on Sunday, Oct. 15. City officials were relieved to discover the Governor vetoed the measure stating: “I believe that the interest which localities have in managing rights of way requires a more balanced solution than the one achieved in this bill.”  The League thanks the Governor for recognizing the value of local authority in this important policy area. We also thank the many legislators who abstained or voted against the bill.

From the San Jose Mercury News:

California: Gov. Jerry Brown Vetoes Bill Easing Permits on Cell Phone Towers

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/16/california-gov-jerry-brown-vetoes-bill-easing-permits-on-cell-phone-towers/

By TRACY SEIPEL | tseipel@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: October 16, 2017 at 12:25 am | UPDATED: October 16, 2017 at 10:50 am

Continue reading “SB.649 Vetoed by Gov. Brown”