The Federal Communications Commission has rejected the appeals of 19 apparently small private religious schools who filed Form 470 applications for which a vendor served as the contact person.
The applications, filed by schools in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Arkansas, Arizona and New Mexico, all designated a person named Charles Scorpio as their contact person and then chose D&H IT Group, Inc. as their service provider for telecommunications services. The FCC said there was strong circumstantial evidence that Charles Scorpio was affiliated with that company and that the schools, in their identical letters of appeal, all filed on the same day, did not provide any evidence to the contrary.
Citing its earlier decision in an appeal involving Mastermind Internet Services Inc., the commission supported the Schools and Libraries Division's decision to reject the applications, saying that an applicant could not conduct a competitive bidding process when a vendor served as the contact point for other vendors. The decision is available at http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Orders/2001/da010736.doc.
