The Commission’s Notice of Inquiry (NOI) teeing up the new and (supposedly) improved version of Form 355 has made it into the Federal Register. You can read our post about the NOI here. As a result, we now know the deadlines for comments (and reply comments) on the FCC’s latest effort to force TV broadcasters – and, the smart money figures, all broadcasters eventually – to provide detailed quarterly reports about certain types of programming. Get out your calendars: comments are due by January 17, 2012 and reply comments by January 30, 2012. This proceeding is still in a relatively early phase. Before the Commission can impose any new rules here, it will still have to issue a separate notice of proposed rulemaking inviting more comments and reply comments, and then weed its way through all those. That process won’t crank up until the FCC has had a chance to sift through comments filed in response to the NOI.

But for anyone who believes that the approach suggested in the NOI is misguided, now is the time to start building that case in the FCC’s record.