COVID-19 caused CTA to cancel a raft of events through June, while moving another to a “virtual format,” said the association Wednesday.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai circulated a plan to deregulate what he calls telephone access charges, among items tentatively up for a vote at commissioners' March 31 meeting. It would detariff "the last handful of interstate end-user charges that remain subject to FCC regulation," he blogged Monday afternoon.

FCBA postponed its March events.

House Communications Subcommittee leaders agreed to let the Clearing Broad Airwaves for New Deployment (C-Band) Act (HR-4855) advance to the full House Commerce Committee Tuesday, but there hasn’t been an agreement yet on the bill’s underlying language, subcommittee Chairman Mike Doyle, D-Pa., told us Monday night. HR-4855 would allocate most proceeds of the coming FCC auction of spectrum on the 3.7-4.2 GHz C band to fund telecom projects. It’s among 11 spectrum, media diversity and public safety communications measures the subcommittee plans to mark up Tuesday.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai will propose his colleagues vote at their March 31 meeting to require phone service providers to cut down on spoofed robocalls through caller ID authentication using secure telephone identity revisited standards and signature-based handling of asserted information using tokens. That would deliver on Pai's previous comments on Stir/Shaken and a newer law.

America's Communications Association is postponing its annual Washington, D.C., summit, scheduled for March 17-19, citing coronavirus concerns.

The FCC suspended "non-critical" staff travel, among other coronavirus precautions, it announced Wednesday afternoon. Also on hiatus "until further notice" is the agency's "involvement in non-critical large gatherings that involve participants" from "across the country and/or around the world."

Commerce Department Deputy Chief of Staff and Policy Director Earl Comstock is leaving the department, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross confirmed Monday. “I value his wise counsel, his deep policy expertise, his innovative thinking and leadership, and I thank him for his service to the American people,” Ross said in a statement. Comstock's positions on spectrum policy have conflicted with goals of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

FCC members OK'd rules for a C-band auction, at their ongoing meeting Friday morning. The vote was along party lines, 3-2.

The FCC proposed fining the four national wireless carriers a total of more than $200 million over privacy concerns, the agency's chairman, Ajit Pai, announced to reporters this afternoon. He said that the proposed penalties had recently been adopted.