The opening arguments submitted by AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and the Puerto Rico Telephone Company in their appeal of last year’s Federal Communications Commission’s pole ownership preemption decision do little more than lend credence to the allegation that their challenges were launched in collusion with their friends at the FCC in a vain judge shopping attempt.
The 2018 FCC wireless order was a gigabuck early Christmas present to mobile carriers. It gave them the right to use city-owned property in the public right of way, such as street light poles, at below market rates, sharply restricted fees that local government could charge for permits to do so, and limited local discretion over street management and aesthetic standards. And it tightened shot clocks for processing permit applications for (not so) small wireless facilities.
About the only gift the FCC didn’t give mobile carriers was “deemed granted” privileges. Those would have allowed companies to start construction without permission, after shot clocks run out. California has a similar rule, enacted by the legislature, but with more generous time limits.
The FCC has declined to create deemed granted remedies for big, macro cell sites in the past, and the U.S. congress never told them to do it. In a special case created by congress, the FCC did impose a deemed granted remedy, but there’s never been any question that must do so in all cases. If there’s any question, it’s whether the FCC has the general authority to overrule state legislatures in that regard. Nonetheless, the four mobile companies filed an appeal claiming the FCC’s failure to do so was “arbitrary and capricious”.
In their first attempt to justify that claim, the mobile carriers offer page after page of boilerplate 5G hype, and then argued that the FCC’s decision to not give them everything they want had “no rational connection” to the glorious future promised by their eloquent marketing materials.
What the carrier’s intervention did earn them is four tickets in the judicial lottery that determined which appeals court would hear all the challenges, particularly those filed by cities and counties that objected to the substance of the FCC’s preemption order. It worked at first. Sprint’s ticket was pulled and a Denver-based court with a more friendly reputation caught the case. But a legal maneuver by the City of San Jose got it transferred to the ninth circuit federal appeals court in San Francisco, exactly the place AT&T, Verizon and Sprint – and the FCC – were trying to avoid.