FCC’s bromance with mobile lobbyists shines through in briefs. Court briefs, that is

5 September 2019 by Steve Blum
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The FCC’s subservience to the telecommunications companies it’s supposed to regulating – or at least the grovelling of its republican majority – is highlighted by the industry’s defence of sweeping preemptions issued by the commission last year. In a brief filed with the San Francisco-based ninth circuit federal appeals court, carriers and their lobbyists effectively admit they were gaming the judicial system when they tried to steer the case to a friendlier court, with the collusion of the FCC. Four cell companies filed the same argument – that the FCC committed a heinous error by not automatically granting construction permits when shot clocks expire – in four different appellate courts.

In this latest reply, which is signed by two of the four, Verizon and Sprint, mobile industry mouthpieces said the FCC’s “authority to interpret and apply the Communications Act” is “well-established”, and the rules it adopted were “common-sense interpretations of the statutes as they apply to all telecommunications services, an action clearly within its statutory discretion”.

They go even further, and say flat out that requiring carriers to go to court to get permission to build once a shot clock runs out is “reasonable” and “the commission’s decision to take a more moderate tack is thus more than justified by the record”.

That’s not what they said when they went judge shopping.

Although mobile carriers won the judicial lottery – the case was first assigned to Sprint’s favored judges in the Denver-based tenth circuit – the wheels of judicial procedure continued to grind, and an earlier challenge mounted by the City of Portland was given precedence. As a result, all the cases filed by cities and carriers were bundled into one big proceeding in San Francisco.

The tight relationship between industry lobbyists and republican commissioners was made crystal clear during the FCC’s broadband deployment advisory committee charade. That was enough to get a wish list published, but it will take more than a bromance to convince federal judges.