The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit on Tuesday was selected to hear appeals over new telephone and broadband rules the FCC released last month in a nearly 600-page order.
The St. Louis-based federal court was selected today in a lottery, said Randolph Mitchell, a docket specialist with the Washington D.C.-based Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, which randomly assigns cases filed in multiple districts to an appeals court.
Telecom companies with various interests have challenged the FCC’s controversial rules in 11 of the 12 U.S. appeals courts, sources say, but one court must be assigned to hear all the appeals over the new regulations.
Verizon Communications Inc., the No. 1 local phone company, plans to file a motion to have the case transferred to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. “We continue to believe the D.C. Circuit, which addressed these same issues previously, is the appropriate forum to hear this case,” a Verizon spokesman said Tuesday in a statement. “We plan to file the appropriate transfer motion to the court that has received the initial assessment of the appeal.”
Last month, Verizon and the other Bell companies filed a petition for a so-called writ of mandamus in the D.C. Circuit. In the filing, the companies asked the court to tell the top U.S. telecom regulator it had not followed the court’s direction under a previous case. That case concerned what parts of the local phone network the Bells have to lease to competitors at regulated rates.
Last month, the FCC released rules directing state regulators to conduct studies to determine whether to preserve rules that allow AT&T Corp., MCI and other phone companies to lease local lines from the Bell companies at discounted rates. BellSouth Corp., SBC Communications Inc., Qwest Communications International Inc. and Verizon maintain the rules require them to lease their local phone networks to rivals at below cost.
