FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington, reacting to Saturday's assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, said Americans should “renounce the abuse of the vast reach of telecommunications to falsely describe political adversaries as threats to democracy, fascists, and by other false and hate-filled terms.” In a two-page statement Monday, Simington wrote that the FCC “has few or no powers to compel or limit political speech.” As such, he was making the request “not as an officer of the US government, but as a concerned citizen.” However, his remarks used the same letterhead as FCC news releases. They were released in the manner of official FCC commissioner statements. “It is no more than the truth to say that President Trump’s survival also saved the election’s legitimacy by preserving the political choices of tens of millions of Americans,” Simington wrote. "The image of President Trump, blood streaming down his face, on his feet and shaking his fist in regal defiance, became an instant classic of American history." FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr also reacted, posting on X that it's “past time for politicians that know better to stop fanning the false flames of fear.” Carr said he was “Praying for President Trump tonight and for any innocent loss of life in Butler, Pennsylvania.” The FCC's Democratic commissioners didn't release statements on the shooting.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily stayed the FCC's net neutrality order until Aug. 5. In an order Friday (docket 24-7000), Judges Jeffrey Sutton, Eric Clay and Stephanie Davis granted an administrative stay "to provide sufficient opportunity to consider the merits of the motion to stay" the order. The judges gave a July 19 deadline for filing supplemental briefs on the application of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 Brand X decision. The FCC didn't comment. "This is big," former FCC Commissioner Rob McDowell, now at Cooley, posted Friday on X. The stay decision "inherently signals the court’s determination of appellants’ likelihood of success on the merits against the FCC," he said.

Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., told us Thursday she plans to hold a follow-up meeting with members of that panel and the Armed Services Committee later this month on her Spectrum and National Security Act (S-4207). She’s hoping to jump-start stalled spectrum legislative talks after S-4207’s momentum appeared to stall amid a series of scuttled May and June Senate Commerce markups (see 2406180067). The Senate Armed Services-Commerce meeting will happen “when we get back” the week of July 22, after a week-long congressional recess to accommodate the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. “We had a call with some” Senate Armed Services and Commerce members before scheduling the canceled June 18 markup session, “but we didn’t get to communicate with everybody” before pulling the vote. She hoped to hold the follow-up meeting this week, "but everything that’s been transpiring” meant it’s been “pretty busy around here.” Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Roger Wicker of Mississippi and other Republicans in June blamed Cantwell’s lack of communication about behind-the-scenes revisions of S-4207 to secure backing from Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Biden administration-appointed military leaders as a major reason they couldn’t support the bill at that time (see 2406170066). Cantwell earlier this week cited a July 1 FCC report to Congress that found 40% of Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program participants lacked enough funding to complete removal and replacement of suspect network gear (see 2407020042) as a reason for Congress to move on S-4207.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel told Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., the FCC's study of fixed wireless use of the lower 12 GHz band continues with the agency drawing no conclusions so far. Proponents hope for a decision soon (see 2407030061). “Since the record in the proceeding closed, Commission staff has been carefully reviewing stakeholder submissions -- including technical feasibility studies and suggested coordination mechanisms -- with an eye to opening up this band for new services while protecting vital satellite services,” Rosenworcel said in a letter posted Thursday. “A wide range of FCC legal, technical, and policy experts are engaged in evaluating the complex questions raised in this record, which now includes competing technical analyses,” she said: The staff review “requires carefully examining the characteristics of this spectrum band -- including its propagation and capacity characteristics, the nature of in-band and adjacent band incumbent use, and the potential for international harmonization -- prior to determining technical feasibility and if harmful interference can be avoided.” Eshoo raised the issue in a letter to the FCC last year.

The FCC World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) Advisory Committee scheduled a second meeting for Aug. 5 where the group will consider status reports and recommendations from its informal working groups preparing for WRC-27 (see 2403210049). The FCC announced the meeting in a public notice Thursday. The in-person meeting will begin at 9:30 a.m. at the FCC.

Equitable broadband speed targets are "wise and worthy," but they must be attainable and nonarbitrary, Disruptive Analysis' Dean Bubley wrote Wednesday on LinkedIn. Arbitrary targets can exclude "perfectly good-enough solutions" that don't meet that threshold, he said. "'Gigabit connectivity' has a nice ring to it, which means almost nobody thinks to ask 'why not 700 Mbps or 1.3 Gbps?' when setting targets for broadband," he said. Broadband targets and metrics often haven't kept up with the development of low earth orbit satellite constellations, high-throughput geostationary satellites, high-performance fixed wireless access, and stratospheric or lower-altitude aerial platforms, he said. As a result, they often don't qualify for recognition, promotion or funding, Bubley wrote. Some governments, like Japan and the U.K., take satellite broadband seriously, he said.

The U.S. Supreme Court is "clear[ly] ... exasperated with the FCC's flip-flopping between Title I and Title II" classification of the internet, International Center for Law & Economics scholars blogged Wednesday. ICLE's Eric Fruits and Ben Sperry pointed to Justice Neil Gorsuch's concurrence in the Loper Bright decision. Gorsuch cited the FCC's changing Title II policies despite no changes in statutes governing those regulations as a weakness of Chevron deference. The current legal appeal of the agency's most-recent reclassification (see 2406030053) could be tied up in courts for years, Fruits and Sperry added. It's unclear if the FCC's most recent flip "was the last or if there will be one more."

The FCC activated the disaster information reporting system for six Texas counties affected by Hurricane Beryl, a public notice said late Monday. The alert encompasses Brazoria, Chambers, Fort Bend, Galveston, Harris and Matagorda counties. In addition, it activated the mandatory disaster response initiative for facilities-based mobile wireless providers in the affected area, which requires companies to allow reasonable roaming and cooperate in service restoration during disasters. Tuesday’s DIRS report shows 28.7% of cell sites down in the affected counties, and 803,501 cable and wireline subscribers without service. No TV stations were reported down, but two FM and two AM stations were listed as out of service. The FCC also issued public notices on priority communications services and emergency contact procedures for licensees that need special temporary authority. The Public Safety Bureau issued a reminder for entities clearing debris and repairing utilities to avoid damaging communications infrastructure. T-Mobile said in a news release Tuesday that it has deployed trucks and trailers equipped with Wi-Fi and device charging, and its emergency response team is at the Texas Department of Emergency Management (TDEM) State Emergency Operations Center in Austin.

T-Mobile challenged the FCC's 3-2 April decision (see 2404290044) fining the carrier for allegedly not safeguarding data on customers' real-time locations. The challenge was made at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Notices of apparent liability were proposed in 2020 against T-Mobile and other carriers under then-Chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican, but the commission’s two current Republicans, Brendan Carr and Nathan Simington, dissented in April. Carr voted for the NAL in 2020, but raised concerns at the time. “The majority held -- for the first time” that customer proprietary network information (CPNI) “encompasses mobile-device location information that is unrelated to voice calls,” T-Mobile said in challenging the order in docket 24-1224. The carrier was fined more than $91 million, plus $12 million for violations by Sprint, which it subsequently acquired (see 2404290044). The order is “unlawful, arbitrary and capricious, an abuse of discretion, and unconstitutional,” T-Mobile told the court. The location information cited “is not CPNI within the meaning of Section 222(h)(1)(A) [of the Telecommunications Act], as the statutory text, context, and Commission precedent make clear,” T-Mobile said: “At a minimum, the Commission failed to provide fair notice of its novel, expansive statutory and regulatory interpretations -- the Order punishes T-Mobile based on legal requirements that the majority adopted for the first time in this proceeding and retroactively applied to T-Mobile’s past conduct.” T-Mobile said it “adopted numerous safeguards to protect the privacy of its customers’ location data, and it acted promptly and decisively to stop rogue actors from misusing location data for unauthorized purposes.” On Monday, Jacob Lewis, FCC associate general counsel, filed to represent the agency in the case. T-Mobile also filed an appeal on behalf of Sprint in docket 24-1224.

The most important thing the FCC can do to improve the lives of the deaf and hard of hearing is “make sure our country has world-leading wired and wireless networks, and that everyone, everywhere is connected,” Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in remarks at the National Association of the Deaf Conference in Chicago July 3. “Beyond that, we need to mobilize the expertise of people with disabilities to develop and deploy new technologies,” she said, pointing to the agency’s Disability Advisory Committee and Disability Rights Office as examples. She touted the FCC’s recent initiatives to improve accessibility for emergency alerting and the upcoming meeting item on caption display setting accessibility (see 2406270068). Rosenworcel also discussed recent advances in mass market products that increase accessibility, such as a virtual reality headset that uses AI to generate real-time captions. These services are available not "because of some specialty assistive device designed and marketed exclusively to people who are deaf or blind,” she said, but because of applications that “run on devices that were made for everyone.” Rosenworcel said making new technology “built for all” is good for business. “We can make the digital future work for all of us -- the deaf and hard-of-hearing included.” The agency released her speech Monday.