The Senate was still slogging through a vote-a-rama Monday afternoon of mostly Democratic amendments -- including a proposal for an 800 MHz spectrum auction pipeline (see 2506060029) -- to the chamber’s revised reconciliation package, which will supersede the House-passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act (HR-1). Senate Republicans appeared closer to retaining a modified proposal for a voluntary freeze on enforcing state-level AI rules after Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz of Texas struck a deal with Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, a leading GOP critic of the plan, to shorten the pause’s timeline. Meanwhile, Senate Commerce ranking member Maria Cantwell of Washington and other Democrats continued insisting the AI proposal threatened states’ eligibility for funding from the $42.5 billion BEAD program.
The Consumer Technology Association, CTIA and other groups opposed an FCC proposal to update its “covered list” of unsecure companies to reflect a January finding by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security on connected vehicles (see 2505270059). Commenters said the FCC should let BIS complete its work before considering revising regulations. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has long raised concerns about Chinese involvement in U.S. networks and in March launched a Council for National Security at the agency (see 2503130012).
Sinclair Broadcasting has reached an agreement with the FCC to pay $500,000 to resolve what was originally a $2.6 million forfeiture against the company over children's programming violations and to renew the licenses of numerous stations, said a consent decree Friday. Together with a Media Bureau order dismissing a petition to deny against several Sinclair-controlled stations, the agreement resolved a yearslong holdup in the license renewals of nearly all Sinclair stations. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has pointed to the lack of Sinclair license renewals under the previous FCC as the precedent for his actions against CBS and other networks (see 2502270076).
In a 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday upheld a Texas law requiring age verification for access to porn sites (see 2506270015 and 2501130012). The majority in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton sided with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) in support of HB-1181, which the adult industry trade association Free Speech Coalition said violates the First Amendment (see 2409170012).
The elimination of federal funding for PBS stations would be a blow to the ATSC 3.0 transition, said commercial and noncommercial broadcasters and advocates for public TV stations and 3.0. The transition would survive the loss of PBS station participation, but removing it from the equation would affect the reach of 3.0 datacasting, emergency communications and the broadcast positioning system (BPS), commercial broadcasters told us.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the FCC’s USF contribution scheme in a 6-3 opinion Friday in Consumers’ Research v. FCC, but dissenting and concurring opinions from several conservative justices appeared to invite future challenges, attorneys told us.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said Thursday that he's “open-minded” about the result of the agency’s proceeding on modifying the national broadcast-ownership cap (see 2506180082), while Commissioner Anna Gomez denounced it as “a sweeping effort to tip the scales even further in favor of a handful of powerful corporations.” Gomez said she knows broadcasters are facing economic pressures and the FCC may need to provide relief, “but this is where we need a scalpel, not a chain saw.” Broadcast officials told us that keeping the ownership cap in place only for network-owned stations -- as the public notice suggests -- could make the rule change more vulnerable in court.
Near the end of a hearing Wednesday night, Senate Appropriations Committee members Deb Fischer, R-Neb., and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, echoed some Republicans’ concerns about President Donald Trump’s proposal for Congress to rescind $1.1 billion of CPB’s advance funding for FY 2026 and FY 2027 (see 2506030065). Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., earlier in the hearing joined several panel Democrats in voicing misgivings with White House OMB Director Russell Vought about clawing back the CPB money (see 2506250058).
As the FCC commissioners voted up a trio of regulatory items Thursday, Chairman Brendan Carr was predicting "a very, very busy" July and August, with a greater focus on accelerating infrastructure buildouts and freeing up spectrum. Approved at the agency's June meeting were orders streamlining cable TV rate regulation and axing the professional engineer certification requirement for the biannual broadband data collection filings, as well as an NPRM proposing to end the requirement that telecommunications relay services providers support the now-obsolete ASCII transmission format. Thursday's meeting was the first for Republican Commissioner Olivia Trusty, who was sworn in Monday (see 2506230057). With Carr now having a two-person Republican majority, agency watchers anticipate that it will ramp up more substantive work aligned with his agenda (see 2506200052).
With the cost of space travel decreasing, regulatory hang-ups are starting to eclipse launch costs as the biggest barrier to commercial space, SpaceX Vice President of Satellite Policy David Goldman said Wednesday. Regulatory challenges are "where the bottleneck is," he said at a space and spectrum conference at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder.