Accessibility, inmate calling services on FCC’s August agenda

The FCC’s August agenda includes items on accessibility and inmate calling services, but not any of the several more contentious items before the agency.

The agenda at next week’s open meeting includes two items related to accessibility and a third, an “Order on Reconsideration, responding to a petition filed by Michael S. Hamden, that would ensure that the rates for Inmate Calling Services (ICS) are just, reasonable, and fair and explicitly account for facilities’ ICS-related costs.”

{mosads}In recent years, the agency has made several reforms to the rates people pay to use inmate calling services, in an attempt to make them more affordable to incarcerated people. They have faced pushback from the relatively small world of providers of the services.

Missing from the August agenda are any of the high-profile items before the commission.

In the coming months, its five members are expected to consider an item imposing new privacy rules on broadband service providers. The regulations would more tightly restrict how internet providers could use their customer’s data.

Chairman Tom Wheeler has also proposed an item that would open up the market for television set-top boxes, which the video industry earns billions of dollars each year renting to consumers, and reforms to the marketplace for high-capacity internet connections used by businesses. Both have drawn significant lobbying attention this year.