Just caught up on the FCC’s last two months of activity. It’s been a busy winter: 274 enforcement actions for 2006 and counting.
This includes fines, or threats of fines, of $10,000 against the transmitter-hosts of both microstations in San Diego, though escalating the enforcement process up to that level of severity remains mostly outside the FCC’s standard protocol (in related news, the agency’s Inspector General is planning an audit of its regulatory fee-collection process, something not done since 1999).
However, field agents do appear to be making more visits to suspected pirate stations, and the turnaround-time between initial visit and warning letter seems to be shrinking: some field offices are now “escalating” cases within a week of first contact.
No matter how you slice it, though, 2006 goes down in the books as the busiest pirate-hunting season in the agency’s history by far. California, New York, Florida and New Jersey are the hottest states in the nation, though cumulatively there can be no doubt that microradio is alive and well and coast-to-coast.
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