FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler took off a few items on the agenda for the Open Meeting that occurred yesterday. The FCC did not vote on the new bidding procedures for the inventive auction that is supposed to take place in 2016. These items are now slated to be voted on at the Commission’s August 6 meeting. This decision came after House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Michigan) and Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chair Greg Walden (R-Oregon) ask the Commission to delay the vote. “The revised timeline and additional data place into the record limits the commissioner’s’ ability to participate during the open meeting or make an informed vote, casting a shadow over an innovative and novel auction that could be this commission’s legacy,” the two lawmakers wrote to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. “We urge the commission to remedy this error in process by delaying the commission vote to [a] later date,” they said. (The Hill)
However, the FCC did approve reforms to the Designated Entity (DE) program that allows small businesses to receive discounts. This is the program that allowed Dish Network to secure $3 billion in discounts when they used two smaller companies to do their bidding. The Hill reported, “In a party-line vote, the commission approved a proposal to reform the discount program…The order prohibits agreements between small and large companies to coordinate bidding strategies during an auction, as Dish did with the two smaller companies. There will also be a cap on the amount of credits that a business can claim. In the 2016 auction, small businesses will be limited to $150 million in credits, and providers in smaller markets will be capped at $10 million. It also creates a new bidding credit for rural providers with fewer than 250,000 customers.” Commissioner Ajit Pai said this would allow DE’s to engage in “regulatory arbitrage” because they could lease the spectrum to any of the major carriers. Pai wanted the order to include rules to stop wealthy owners from claiming the credits and stop the use of multiple shell companies to evade the caps.
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