FCC Abides By GOP Request To Stop What It's Doing, Deletes Everything From Meeting Agenda (arstechnica.com)

One day after republicans from the house and senate sent letters to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, urging him to avoid passing regulations before Donald Trump's inauguration as president, Wheeler appears to have complied with the request. The FCC today "announced the deletion of all items that were originally scheduled to be presented and voted on at tomorrow's meeting." Ars Technica reports: Before the change, the agenda included votes on price caps for "special access" business data services; Universal Service funding to expand mobile broadband networks; wireless roaming obligations; and requirements for audio description of TV programming for blind and visually impaired people. The only item not deleted from tomorrow's meeting is part of the "consent agenda," which means it is routine and wasn't going to be presented individually. Of the major items, the business data services proposal had received the most attention. These are dedicated wireline circuits provided by traditional phone companies like AT&T and Verizon; the services supply bandwidth for cellular data networks, indirectly affecting the price consumers pay for wireless service. The business data services are also used by banks and retailers to connect ATM machines and credit card readers, by government and corporate users to connect branch offices and data centers, and to support public safety operations and health care facilities. The now-deleted agenda item would have phased in price cap decreases of 11 percent over three years to account for "over a decade of efficiency gains" since the last price cap adjustment.

Comments

Howard Stern

[Anonymous Coward]

Trump should appoint Howard Stern as the FCC Chairman.

Re:Howard Stern

[Tablizer]

Why is that modded "funny"? Would be the most rational appointment T's made

Interesting problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Should you,
do you do what you boss says (obama)
or wait till your soon to be boss shows up. (trump)

I think you always work for the current President.
The next guy can wait till he shows up.
Not a nice job, but it is the job you signed up to do.

Not quite what happened.
Perhaps there was some discussion with the incomming administration to head us this way?
(A congress critter is not the same.)

Re:Interesting problem

[Plus1Entropy]

Because it forces the next person to actively undo them, which can potentially be a news story with political backlash. Instead, the next person now doesn't have to do anything and they get their way, and no one will remember when it just doesn't happen.

Re:Interesting problem

[theid0]

Yes, this request was made in 2008: "At a time when serious questions are being raised about transition readiness, it would be counterproductive for the FCC to consider unrelated items, especially complex and controversial items that the new Congress and new Administration will have an interest in reviewing." http://commerce.senate.gov/pub...

I'm suspicious

[Notabadguy]

I'm suspicious of every article I see posted by BeauHD these days regardless of content, almost to the point of avoiding reading anything he posts - simply because of his tailored anti-Trump agenda, including his legendary twitter account posts that would have him twitter banned for hate speech if twitter uniformly applied their anti-hate rhetoric across political lines.

I only posted this because I just realized that I've been avoiding a good chunk of slashdot to avoid this garbage.

And now I'm sad.

Re: I'm suspicious

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't even begin to fathom the level of ignorance and sheer stupidity that prompts a comment like this.

Yes, encouraging people to educate themselves and research the validity of the news stories they read is a big ploy. The Democrats are out to get you by telling you to do your research.

Go ahead and revel in your idiocy. 60+ years worth of social progress is dangerously close to obliteration thanks to those who decided that having a female president is worse than a racist, xenophobic, egomaniac.
Congrats on contributing to what will be one of the ugliest stains in this nations history.

Re: I'm suspicious

[another_twilight]

By framing Trump's win as being the result of sexism you fail to acknowledge that many people chose not to vote for Clinton for various flaws, completely unrelated to her gender. Without some convincing proof otherwise, I'd assume that the number of people who voted for Trump _because_ Clinton was female is vanishingly small. The number for whom it was a consideration may be higher, but is still dwarfed by the number of people who rejected Clinton for her ties with banks and big business, 'pay for play' and accusations of corruption, scandals relating to mishandling of classified material, feeling that the Democrat's no longer represented the interests of those who once voted for them and/or any of dozens of other reasons that came up during the campaign.

The degree to which any of those has merit can be debated. What can not is that these had a marked impact on various groups of voters that may previously have voted for a Democrat candidate.

Re:I'm suspicious

[Darinbob]

And what's wrong with NPR? They're the most balanced and fair media outlet I've seen in the last decade. They present views and stories from across the spectrum. Liberals complain that it's too conservative, conservatives complain that it's too liberal, so it feels just right to me.

Stop picking sides like this is just a dumb ball game! Start using your brain to decide how you feel about the issues instead of letting others tell you how to think. Read the news from all segments instead of just the ones that agree with you. Once you start calling people "libtards" then you sound like a drunken fan in the bleachers.

Late night TV shows go and talk to the people on the streets and they're clueless. Ask them who they are voting for and it's "um, duh, Hillary because she's a woman?" or "um, duh, Trump because he's going to make things great?" They vote for their candidate because that's the team they always root for and not because they have the slightly clue what their candidate's policy platform is. They probably think that all of politics can be boiled down to left vs right, or liberal vs conservative, and that chemistry is earth, air, fire, and water.

If you think the US is a backwater then you're really out of touch. I think America is already great and can be made greater. I see no evidence in history that the US was greater in the past than it is today and that it needs to be made great "again". We are doing better today than in the any time in the past. We continue to make forward progress in small pieces. This does not mean that everyone is personally happy and fulfilled though, we continue to have problems that need fixing. But they won't be fixed by going back in time.

The government can't just shut down like this

[guises]

What the hell is this? Yes the future FCC may be different from the current one, but we still have a current FCC. The government can't just shut down for two months after an election.

This is the same logic they used to block the supreme court nomination, and is wrong for the same reason.

Re:The government can't just shut down like this

[ahabswhale]

The republicans always get what they want. Just like they got to deny Obama his Supreme Court appointee even though he still had a year left in his presidency. Get used to it because it's only gonna get worse.

Re:The government can't just shut down like this

[mysidia]

Just like they got to deny Obama his Supreme Court appointee even though he still had a year left in his presidency.

Congress gets to set the number of justices on the court.

The Senate have the power to deny the president's appointees for all 4 years if they wanted; it's one of the legislative checks on the
executive, that the president can only make selections that the Senate will consent to.

Obama could have gotten sneaky though and made an appointment when the Senate was in recess..... then the appointee to the court would be valid temporarily and immediately take office, until the end of the next session (Or permanent, if the Senate turned back and decided to vote to consent).

Re:The government can't just shut down like this

[ahabswhale]

You're right that the constitution doesn't dictate the number of justices but the Judiciary Act of 1969 does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Consequently, it's not optional to have eight except for temporary purposes (like retiring judge). Again, it doesn't matter because the republicans will do whatever the fuck they want anyway.

Re:The government can't just shut down like this

[coinreturn]

At least they've set a precedent now, so if any judges die/retire after Jan 2020... they're gonna have a tough time arguing that one.

No they won't. Have you ever paid attention to the Republican party? For example, they love deficits when they are in power and hate them when Dems are in power.

Re:Tomorrow's FCC Agenda

[alvinrod]

1) Trump has at least come out against the AT&T / Time Warner merger, though like anything else who knows what his actual opinion on the matter is or what he'll really do when it comes down to it.

2) Trump and Republicans in general probably aren't overly friendly to the entertainment industry. Then again they might try to do it because they believe its somehow to their benefit, but Trump was also against TPP (see point one) so assuming he says anything remotely related to how he actually feels, supporting them seems unlikely.

3) You mean to tell me that they don't already have this?

Well...

[HBI]

The FCC could pass regulations that will be invalidated upon Trump's inauguration, or they could avoid wasting everyone's time and do this. They took the cost-cutting choice.

Re:Well...

[mysidia]

Invaliding an FCC regulation would require legislative action by the congress, specifying what to chance, since the regulatory authority over these matters has been vested by congress with the FCC.

It's not like Trump would have the power to take office and unilaterally void all the FCC rules without any debate in the house.

He's already in a mess

[Anonymous Coward]

Half of Trump's transition team has been fired. Chris Christie was fired because he was Governor when Trump's son-in-law's Jared's, father was prosecuted on fraud charges and didn't pardon the fraudster.

Mike Rogers left after getting a briefing on the Trump Russian links from the CIA.

Trump then assigned son-in-law, Jared and his children, to his transition team, but US code 5 USC 3110, Trump may not "appoint, employ, advance, or advocate for" relatives in "the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control".

Nepotism is illegal. They're also not security cleared.

Trump may be a sad joke, but Putin is not.

Re:He's already in a mess

[harperska]

To be fair, he is not president until January 20 and the transition team is not a federal agency, so 5 USC 3110 doesn't apply in this case. If he were to try to appoint one of his trumplings to anything post-inauguration, though, then there would be a problem.

Re:He's already in a mess

[Outta_the_way_peck!]

Half of Trump's transition team has been fired. Chris Christie was fired because he was Governor when Trump's son-in-law's Jared's, father was prosecuted on fraud charges and didn't pardon the fraudster.

No, Christie was the US District Attorney who prosecuted Charles Kushner in 2004. He didn't become governor until 2010.