Soon, it won’t cost a dime to get a vanity callsign. This according to the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Report and Order, and Order, MD Docket 14-92 and others, released May 21. Notice that this is a notice of proposed rulemaking. The fee won’t actually be eliminated until Congress is notified of the change. That will take at least 90 days.
“The Commission spends more resources on processing the regulatory fees and issuing refunds than the amount of the regulatory fee payment,” the FCC said. “As our costs now exceed the regulatory fee, we are eliminating this regulatory fee category.”
Personally, I don’t care if there’s a fee or not. I certainly won’t be applying for one anytime soon, if ever. What I don’t understand, though, is if the fee is not covering their costs, why don’t they increase the fee or reduce their processing costs somehow?
Like the recent news about the FCC plan to shrink its enforcement bureau, this sounds like the FCC is just giving up.
I didn’t realize they collected funds from every applicant, process the checks, then write new ones for the unsuccessful applicants. Seems they could just take applications without funds, then require payment from the winner before releasing the call.
Considering the fees just went up recently to cover costs, it seems interesting that FCC is just now discovering the problem. Perhaps the earlier request should have been met with more skepticism and inquiries into the actual process. I think that lack of curiosity is the bigger issue here.
I agree – they’re basically saying “the dumb way we collected fees didn’t work because it was dumb, so we decided not to bother.” I went the vanity route when I moved to a new number, and consider the money well spent. I’m even gladder I won’t have to spend any more.