Week ending May 15, 2026

A quiet week, but a loaded one — most of the docket activity was positioning ahead of the May 20 open meeting, where the Call Authentication Further NPRM (the know-your-upstream-provider item, FCC-CIRC2605-01) is teed up for a vote. The most useful filing of the week wasn’t a comment at all; it was a Sorenson ex parte that attached a redline of the draft FNPRM’s relay-service paragraphs, giving everyone outside the eighth floor a look at the actual text up for adoption. Meanwhile the companion proceeding — the TRACED Act “knowledge of customers” NPRM (WC 26-49) — hit the Federal Register on May 8, and the first substantive comments landed, both pushing back on the idea of a government-ID KYC baseline. Put the two together and the shape of a single framework comes into view: know your customer at the edge, know your upstream provider in the middle.

What the Sorenson redline reveals about the May 20 FNPRM

Sorenson Communications and CaptionCall, through John Nakahata of HWG, filed a May 13 ex parte (WC 17-97, CG 17-59, CG 03-123) reporting a call with CGB and WCB staff and — more usefully — attaching a redline of draft paragraphs 123–125. Nakahata “recommended targeted edits to paragraphs 123–124 concerning the application of STIR/SHAKEN requirements to telecommunications relay services (‘TRS’),” and asked the Commission to distinguish “‘initiating’ voice service providers from ‘originating’ voice service providers in the TRS context” and to clarify “whether TRS providers’ routing platforms or network elements would constitute ‘facilities’ under the FNPRM’s proposed definitions.”

The attached draft text is the real find. Paragraph 123 frames the attestation problem the relay providers have been raising since late April: downstream providers “have begun treating them as voice service providers with a STIR/SHAKEN implementation obligation, and are treating, or have threatened to treat, their calls as unsigned and lower their attestation levels if these providers do not implement STIR/SHAKEN.” Paragraph 124 floats the blunt fix and immediately worries about it: “Should we simply mandate that calls from TRS providers be given an A-level attestation to ensure that calls from individuals with disabilities are treated as trustworthy?… Would such a requirement create a loophole that bad actors could easily exploit?” And paragraph 125 carries a heading worth flagging for the national-security frame — “Addressing Foreign Calls With KYUP and STIR/SHAKEN Authentication” — seeking comment on “how our proposals would serve to deter illegal calls that enter the United States from abroad.” That last one wires the KYUP regime to the foreign-origination problem, the same seam the cross-border robocall debate keeps circling.

The KYC comment cycle opens — and the first voices object to a government-ID baseline

The “knowledge of customers” NPRM (WC 26-49, cross-listed CG 17-59 and CG 02-278) published in the Federal Register on May 8, setting comments for June 8 and replies July 7. The first two substantive comments both go at the same target: a government-issued-ID KYC baseline.

Offline Software Solutions, a small VoIP vendor (Edwin Zimmerman), commented on an unusual but pointed religious-accommodation ground: “Amish universally rejects government ID like driver’s licenses and passports… Should the FCC require government ID as a baseline KYC requirement, we do not believe that we will be able to meet that requirement for our Amish clients.” Its constructive ask is the same risk-based framing the analytics filers tend to favor: “We urge the FCC to adopt clear, risk-based, privacy-preserving KYC rules. In particular, one risk factor is an end user’s call volume/call duration ratio.” Fred Morris, filing as an individual, made the privacy version of the argument against KYC on burner and prepaid phones: the proposal “seems to be a fig leaf blessing telecomm providers to collect and sell personally identifying information about the entity which owns / controls the device; it is privacy destroying and anti-consumer,” adding that “device behavior provides much better customer segmentation than utilizing ownership as a proxy for such behavior.” These are small voices and it’s early, but the through-line — verify behavior, not identity documents — is the one to watch as the larger filers arrive.

CGB clears eleven stale petitions off the TCPA docket

Housekeeping, but the kind worth noting. The Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau issued DA 26-465, dismissing “11 petitions for reconsideration or applications for review” in CG 02-278 (and new docket CG 25-307), on the rationale that “the relief sought in these petitions and applications is moot or outdated by advances in technology, changes in consumer preferences, or changes in regulations.” The dismissed list runs from MarketLink and PACE to the Mortgage Bankers Association, the Competitive Carriers Association, and the National Consumer Law Center. The detail that matters for the consent fights ahead: the Bureau pointedly did not dismiss the two American Bankers Association petitions, “[i]n light of joint comments filed by various financial organizations” — financial-industry consent questions stay live while the rest of the decade-old backlog gets swept.

Covered List: the Wi-Fi Alliance goes looking for the exemption door

On the supply-chain track, the Wi-Fi Alliance (Alex Roytblat, with David Redl’s Salt Point Strategies) filed a May 12 ex parte reporting a meeting with Adam Chan — newly elevated to Senior National Security Counsel in the Chairman’s office — about the March action adding “all foreign-made consumer routers to the FCC’s Covered List” (DA 26-278). The ask is procedural and telling: the Alliance “sought additional clarification regarding the conditional approval process by which entities may request exemptions for routers on the Covered List.” The conditional-approval cadence that has been issuing named-model exemptions is now drawing organized industry attention to the process itself — who may apply, on what timeline. Expect more of this as the router addition starts to bite.

Honorable mentions

Two single-filer items rose above the consumer express-comment wash on 17-59: Bobby Etheredge Jr. petitioned in 02-278 for a “silence as revocation” rule for political P2P text messaging, arguing the current opt-out mechanics create a “security paradox”; and Pine Belt Cellular wrote in to WC 18-89 supporting reimbursement of post-deadline rip-and-replace costs, flagging roughly $250,000 of exposure. On the FTC side, Chairman Ferguson sent compliance-warning letters to some fourteen platforms ahead of the May 19 Take It Down Act deadline — the statute that reaches AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery, and the closest the week came to the synthetic-media beat.

Looking ahead

The week ahead is the one that matters. First, the May 20 open meeting: if the Call Authentication FNPRM is adopted as drafted, the Sorenson redline, the TRS attestation question at ¶124, and the foreign-calls/KYUP framing at ¶125 all convert from circulation-draft language into a live comment cycle on named text. Second, the June 8 KYC comment deadline in WC 26-49 — watch whether the trade associations and analytics vendors line up behind the “verify behavior, not documents” framing the early individual filers are previewing, and whether anyone steps up to defend a government-ID baseline. Third, the Covered List exemption process — with the Wi-Fi Alliance now pressing on conditional-approval mechanics, expect either a clarifying public notice or another round of named-model approvals. And keep an eye on the TRS coalition: with Sorenson now redlining text directly, the relay providers’ A-level-attestation ask is the most concrete unresolved item heading into the meeting.