The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC or Commission) Wireline Competition Bureau (WCB or Bureau) has dismissed seven petitions for reconsideration and/or clarification of the USF/ICC Transformation Order on the basis that those issues have either been resolved by ongoing intercarrier compensation and universal service reforms or grown stale by no entities having filed comments or ex partes regarding these petitions for several years. On January 14, 2020, the Bureau released a Public Notice permitting comment on its plan to dismiss eight petitions and received no comments on seven of them. The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PPUC) objected to dismissal of the Public Service Commission of the District of Columbia’s (DC PSC) petition and thus the Bureau has declined to dismiss the DC PSC’s petition at this time. The PPUC argued that some of the issues in the DC PSC’s petition are still unresolved and require a definitive ruling from the Commission such as the USF/ICC Transformation Order’s application to the FCC’s permissive directives in the context of unlawful rate discrimination.
