Two mobile carriers – Verizon and Sprint – and a group of industry lobbyists filed arguments in support of the Federal Communications Commission’s sweeping preemption of state and local ownership of public property with the federal appeals court based in San Francisco. That’s where the long list of challenges to the FCC’s 2018 wireless and wireline decisions are being heard.

The mobile industry’s arguments focus on whether the FCC has the authority to tell states and local governments how to manage and allow access to the public right of way.… More

Tactical retreat well describes much of the Federal Communication Commission’s defence of its heretofor sweeping rewrite of rules regarding local government pole rentals and permits for small(ish) cell sites. It goes to great lengths to explain that its bargain basement “safe harbor” price for permits and rental rates “is not a ceiling”.

It also backs down from what appeared to be a total preemption of publicly owned property located in the public right of way, limiting it to cases where “the property in question is controlled by the same government entity that controls the rights-of-way” and there’s a “‘temptation’ for governments to seek to ‘insulate conduct from federal preemption’ by ‘blending’ their regulatory and proprietary roles”.… More

The Federal Communications Commission’s March 2018 decision to scrap federal environmental and historical reviews for small cell sites was “arbitrary and capricious” according to the federal appeals court based in the District of Columbia, aka the D.C. circuit. In an opinion issued this morning, the D.C. circuit judges said “the commission failed to justify its confidence that small cell deployments pose little to no cognizable religious, cultural, or environmental risk”.

Today’s decision does not directly affect appeals of the FCC’s September 2018 wireless or August 2018 wireline rulings – those are being fought out in the ninth circuit federal appeals court in San Francisco.… More

Update, 9 August 2019.

In its brief, the FCC backed down from what appeared to be a blanket assertion that all publicly owned property within the public right of way is the same thing as the public right of way. This preemption of local property rights only applies “when the property in question is controlled by the same government entity that controls the rights-of-way”, the brief said.

By that reasoning, if a city owns a light pole along a road controlled by a state agency such as Caltrans, it can charge a mobile carrier as much as it wants to use it.… More