FCC accused of colluding with Big Cable to game 5G legal challenge
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
1. Pai's commission pushed regulation fixing the cost of establishing 5G cell sites to the benefit of big telecom and economic dismay of cities--in particular, those known for their high cost of living.
2. Cities litigate in the Ninth Circuit, which has a history of overruling in favor of local governance.
3. Before the Ninth Circuit can reach a decision, the 4 largest telecom companies in the country file comparable yet independent suits in different circuits; their national presence suggests they could have filed anywhere. Their suits claim ommission of "deemed granted" provisions which would grant cell site auto-approval if cities fail to respond to permit requests within an allotted 3-month window, but eyebrows are still raised at why these companies would place direct legal backpressure against regulation that already favors their bottom line overwhelmingly.
4. Cases were consolidated, triggering a procedural lottery to determine which of 5 circuits--including the Ninth--these cases would be heard in. Tenth Circuit gets it and appellants were instructed to migrate accordingly.
5. A plea to delay the migration order was rejected by the Tenth Circuit; Commissioner Carr, a former legal advisor to Pai during his Verizon days, publicly cheers, dropping a hint of shrouded legal maneuvering.
6. Tenth Circuit nevertheless decides that the cases be moved to the Ninth Circuit. Telecom companies push back hard.
7. A Democrat-controlled House Commerce committee gets wind of the possibility that the FCC has leveraged its influence to game the judicial system by colluding with the companies that they oversee. A communications data dump and accomplice shit list is requested.
Not gonna lie...it's a dirty yet clever gambit.
I.e the corruption has become so blatant as to be more widely acknowledged. I think there's an interesting possibility of "hitting rock bottom" and recovering, vs the probably rampant but less overt corruption in past decades.
Drain the swamp was a campaign slogan and Trump repeated it a lot, but haven't really talked about systemic corruption. (See the rootstrikers movement for some serious effort on the topic.)
Corruption has seeped it's way to the highest office and some of the most important government organizations. What would be earth shattering 20 years ago is just business as usual these days.
Can we find our way back to the light?
a lot of what changed is that now people are a lot better at being corrupted leaving little or no evidence
That 20 years ago?
For the telecoms. They're only regulating how much municipalities can charge telecoms, not how much the telecoms can charge consumers. But I'm sure the benefits will trickle down.
*These are not hypotheticals, see Mill Valley, CA where cell phone towers cause cancer and 5g is persona non grata.
Since you mentioned 'fair value' for land -- why is it you are arguing FOR rent seeking? That's extortion, not fair valuation.
I have to concur. NIMBY groups (or cities that are effectively run by and for NIMBYs) makes building cell sites more difficult -> cell network operators need to spend more money building cell sites -> cell service is a bit more expensive and shittier for everyone (and it's far more difficult for newcomers to challenge incumbents). In US we have stupidly expensive (compared to many other countries) cell service with annoying data caps, and enabling NIMBYs to obstruct/make more expensive/block construction of new 5G (or LTE) cell sites will not help that.
If cities make it super difficult for cell operators to install cell sites, it's ordinary people with cell phones who suffer -- through increased service costs, worse service, and shorter battery life (the longer the distance between the phone and the cell site, the more power the phone needs to use).
I'm not some kind of telco industry shill; that industry does lots of things that I find sincerely loathsome -- between selling location data to the most hinky of "data brokers" and trying to do blatantly anti-competitive mergers -- but it's difficult for me to see how letting cities make it more difficult/expensive to install cell towers will help customers out.
NIMBY-ism and red tape is a problem, and it has real costs (paperwork and waiting for approval, getting rejected, fixing up the paperwork, licking butt, lobbying, resubmitting, waiting again are all expensive), but simply pushing this on cities is not going to help.