Week ending June 5, 2026

The June 2 comment deadline on the onshoring NPRM did what deadlines do: it emptied the industry’s drawers all at once. Thirty-four comments landed in the CG 26-52 cluster, and the trade associations arrived in close formation — CTIA, USTelecom, INCOMPAS, the U.S. Chamber, a twelve-member financial-sector bloc led by the ABA — nearly all of them telling the Commission the same thing in slightly different registers: you don’t have the authority, and even if you did, you haven’t shown the problem. The more interesting reading is in the two filings that broke ranks, and in the one theme the record couldn’t stop circling back to — who, exactly, is on the other end of the call.

“Withdraw the Notice”: the authority wall around onshoring

FCC 26-16, released in March as the tenth NPRM in this line, proposes to limit providers’ use of foreign call centers and tighten the standards on the ones that remain. The comment wall that went up against it on June 2 is built almost entirely out of the major-questions doctrine and Loper Bright.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, joined by the Michigan, Georgia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania chambers and the Business Council of New York, was the bluntest: onshoring is a matter “of vast economic and political significance that is far outside the Commission’s mandate,” and “[t]he Commission should withdraw the Notice.” CTIA wanted the proposals “abandon[ed],” arguing the NPRM “offers no evidence that offshore calling centers are causing declining customer satisfaction or security issues” and instead “cites to material that is out-of-date, anecdotal, or taken out of context.” USTelecom, through Kellogg Hansen, cast the proposal as a betrayal of the Chairman’s own program — the Commission “should maintain its focus on reducing and eliminating obsolete and burdensome regulations from its rulebooks and driving U.S. job creation through the Chairman’s Build America Agenda.”

The financial trades came at it from the statute. The ABA-led group of twelve — AFSA, America’s Credit Unions, BPI, CBA and the rest — told the Commission that “[n]othing in the TCPA or its legislative history provides support for extending the TCPA regulations to cover call centers,” and urged it “not to advance these aspects of the Proposal.” But they carved out the anti-impersonation and anti-fraud pieces and urged the Commission “to finalize the two proposals as soon as feasible” — the one place in the whole record where opposition gave way to genuine enthusiasm. INCOMPAS and the Cloud Communications Alliance went after the enforcement mechanics, calling the proposed per-call fee “[u]nworkable and [c]ounterproductive” and noting that “’[u]nlawful’ [c]alls [c]annot [b]e [r]eliably [i]dentified in [r]eal [t]ime.”

A couple of filers found daylight inside the opposition. ACA International, while urging the Commission “to refrain from regulating the use of foreign call centers by non-communications companies,” conceded the national-security floor — it does “not oppose barring the location of foreign call centers in” China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and the Maduro regime “assuming appropriate regulatory authority” — and floated the off-ramp Chairman Carr has reportedly been hinting at: “voluntary participation on onshoring efforts.” Vistra, the energy retailer, asked the Commission to stop treating all non-U.S. operations as one undifferentiated lump and to “distinguish nearshore call centers from foreign/offshore call centers,” with exemptions for “critical infrastructure sectors such as energy” — the sort of filing that quietly concedes a rule is coming and tries to shape its edges.

The two that didn’t read from the script

Against a near-unanimous industry chorus, the Communications Workers of America filed the week’s lone full-throated endorsement. CWA was “glad to see consideration of call center” rules, and it has the receipts: “[t]hrough collective bargaining, CWA has negotiated limits on the outsourcing of customer calls,” and “through policy advocacy, CWA has passed bills in both red and blue states to penalize companies that offshore customer service work.” Its account of offshore conditions — workers in “low-wage countries who lack protections for their rights and are often employed in lawless ‘free trade zones’” — is the mirror image of the industry’s affordability case, and a reminder that this proceeding is as much labor policy as communications policy.

The filing most worth an identity reader’s time came from Numeracle, and it didn’t argue about authority at all. It used the onshoring record to make a point about what STIR/SHAKEN does and doesn’t prove: the framework “authenticates the relationship between a carrier and a telephone number. It does not authenticate the identity of the human or organizational actor on the other end of the call.” The consequence, in Numeracle’s words: “A call may carry A-level attestation and display the name of a trusted American enterprise while the actual interaction is being conducted by a third-party call center operating in a foreign jurisdiction, under a foreign legal regime.” That is the attestation-versus-identity gap stated about as cleanly as it gets, and Numeracle tied it directly to the Commission’s pending “caller identification, Know Your Customer (‘KYC’), and Know Your Upstream Provider (‘KYUP’) proceedings” — the franchise the onshoring NPRM keeps brushing against without quite naming.

ITI added the channel-coverage wrinkle, warning the Commission off extending the rules to “non-interconnected VoIP and other Internet-only” services and to email and chat because “[t]hese types of communications are increasingly AI-driven.” Its members, it said, are “actively investing in technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI)-powered contact center platforms hosted in the United States” — a useful tell that the onshoring debate and the synthetic-agent debate are converging faster than the docket structure admits.

Twilio takes KYC and branded calling to the eighth floor

The same identity theme walked into the building in person. Twilio’s senior team — CEO Khozema Shipchandler, Curtis Swager, Paul Kenefick, Erin Emmott, and Jennifer Best Vickers — met June 3 with Chairman Carr’s office and, separately, with Commissioner Gomez, then filed parallel ex partes on June 5 in the robocall/call-authentication cluster (17-59, 17-97, 02-278). The message was on-brand: Twilio pressed the Commission’s “efforts to strengthen STIR/SHAKEN, specifically related to the FCC’s Know Your Customer and Know Your Upstream Provider proceedings,” highlighted its own “KYC and KYT practices,” and — in the Gomez meeting — “discussed its call branding solution” and the Call Branding proceeding. A Tier-1 CPaaS provider lobbying both the Chairman and a Commissioner to keep KYC/KYUP and branded calling moving is the clearest signal of the week that the verified-identity agenda has momentum independent of the onshoring fight.

18-89 had a real week

Rip-and-replace and the Covered List both moved. On June 3 the Wireline Competition Bureau opened a fresh comment cycle (DA-26-547), seeking comment on clarification requests from Summit Ridge Group and Widelity over “certain reimbursement issues in the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program,” plus letters from Pine Belt Cellular and Viaero Wireless on the same questions — comments due June 17, replies June 24. Two days earlier the Bureau reminded program recipients of their June 29 status-update obligation (DA-26-544). On the equipment side, the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau conditionally approved and exempted certain routers from the Covered List (DA-26-542) — a determination made in coordination with the Department of War — and followed it on June 4 with a companion approval covering certain UAS and routers (DA-26-548). The Covered List itself — Huawei, ZTE, and the rest — is unchanged; these are the carve-outs at the margins that keep the equipment-authorization machinery turning.

Honorable mentions

The June Open Meeting agenda, released June 4, carries an Alert Modernization Report and Order and Further Notice (DOC-422171A1) that lands partly in 22-329: the Order “aims to preserve the public’s trust in EAS by requiring targeted cybersecurity improvements that will help protect against hijacking by cybercriminals and our nation’s adversaries.” One Ministries already filed an early comment. On the numbering side, the WC 26-49 NPRM (FCC 26-17) drew comments from TelSwitch — “the robocall problem is not, at its core, a technical problem” — 448 Consulting, and, late Friday, DNC.com, which flagged a definitional snag worth watching: a business-process outsourcer that “obtains a number for one client and another number for a separate client could, depending on how the term is defined, be treated as a reseller,” dragging its technology provider into direct NANPA obligations.

Looking ahead

The near-term milestones are mostly in 18-89: clarification comments on the rip-and-replace reimbursement questions are due June 17 (replies June 24), and the program’s status-update filing obligation hits June 29 — expect filings to cluster around both. The onshoring docket now turns to replies, where the financial trades’ “finalize the anti-fraud pieces, drop the rest” split is the line to watch, along with whether anyone beyond CWA defends the core onshoring mandate on the merits. The Alert Modernization R&O and FNPRM is teed up for the June Open Meeting, which would open a fresh 22-329 cyber comment cycle. And the KYC/KYUP thread that ran through Numeracle’s comment and Twilio’s ex partes is the one to keep a hand on: the onshoring fight may be where the authority gets litigated, but the verified-identity proceedings are where the machinery actually gets built.