The Federal Communications Commission plans to terminate some 330 dormant proceedings but is publishing the list first. Think of this as “last call.”
It released the list in mid-January, part of a recurring process that dates to a 2011 transparency initiative. The first round back then resulted in the termination of approximately 1,000 docketed proceedings; now we’re up to the sixth round of housecleaning, and deadlines for commenting on the latest list have been set. (Public comments are due March 6, reply comments on March 20, for CG Docket 17-22.) TheConsumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau is the arm of the FCC handling this. You can review the list here.
Flipping through the list is a bit like going through old FCC headlines. These may include dockets in which no further action is required or contemplated as well as those in which no pleadings or other documents have been filed for several years.
Some of these resulted in thousands of filings (“Applications for the Transfer of Control of licenses and Authorization from AT&T Corp. and Its Subsidiaries to SBC Communications Inc.” attracted 10,816 filings from 2005 to 2011), but others drew only a few (an “Amendment of FM Table of Allotments” for Llano, Texas, had only one filing). Proceedings up for deletion include one that dealt with the definition of radio markets and another about eligibility for FM translators, both of which attracted hundreds. While some of these go back to the early 1990s, others are more recent; but none on the list has attracted any activity in the past couple of years.
The bureau noted that records in terminated proceedings remain part of the commission’s official records. “The various pleadings, orders and other documents in these dockets continue to be accessible to the public, post-termination.”
For information, contact Lauren Wilson of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau at [email protected].
