Industry groups and companies reacted along already well-established lines to a Wall Street Journalreport that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is considering a net neutrality order, with some hybrid version of Communications Act Title II, for a vote as early as the Dec. 11 commissioner meeting.

Cash from telecom industry political action committees could help tilt the Senate Republicans’ way in next week’s midterm elections, if some forecasts of a GOP takeover of that body pan out. The industry’s heaviest hitters donated more money through their PACs to Republicans than Democrats across the board this cycle, with spending in Senate races specifically leaning in that direction. Media company PAC spending differed, however, many favoring Democratic Senate candidates.

Under a Title I regime, consumer and business usage of the Internet has tripled over the past five years according to Cisco analysis, USTelecom President Walter McCormick said in a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler (http://bit.ly/1tRynL9). “Given these growth projections and the success the nation has enjoyed under a Title I environment, we urge the Commission to avoid any proscriptive regulatory policy that would threaten future investment and innovation,” McCormick wrote. “Proponents of extreme measures, such as Title II reclassification of broadband, have not provided evidence to indicate that investment and traffic growth would be better under Title II, or that the entire sector -- edge, content, and broadband -- could be any more vibrant under Title II than it has been under the current longstanding Title I regime.”

The FCC should issue a notice seeking comment on “alternate approaches” to collecting special access market data instead of its current data collection effort, USTelecom said in an application for review Friday. USTelecom said the commission had ordered a two-year collection effort, but the Office of Management and Budget only approved a one-year effort. The one-year effort creates an “obvious conflict” with the commission’s “determination that a comprehensive review of the special access marketplace required the collection of data covering two years,” USTelecom said. The filing was not yet posted in docket 05-25.

There's “no sound reason” to allow LECs receiving Connect America Fund Phase II support to not serve specific locations in unserved areas and instead serve locations in partially served areas, NCTA Vice President-Associate General Counsel Jennifer McKee told FCC Wireline Bureau officials Oct. 17, according to an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/1DAN8mL) posted Tuesday in docket 10-90. If the agency allows the flexibility, the burden should be on the LECs to show the specific locations they want to serve in the partially served areas that aren't being served, the American Cable Association said at the same meeting. LECs should also not be excused from serving all areas in an unserved Census block for which they're receiving CAF support, said Ross Lieberman, ACA senior vice president–government affairs, and Kelley Drye’s Thomas Cohen, counsel to ACA. CenturyLink and USTelecom had said they would be willing to support providing faster broadband speeds under CAF if granted the flexibility (see 1409100036).

AT&T, Comcast and Google continued to lead the pack among big lobbying spenders in the third quarter of 2014. All three companies spent several millions of dollars on lobbying, with some of the biggest items at stake in years on the table -- net neutrality, media consolidation deals and a contested reauthorization of the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act foremost among them. Also looming on Capitol Hill is a possible rewrite of the Communications Act, which may take off in earnest next year.

What FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and his team will propose on net neutrality remains unclear, industry and agency officials said in interviews this week. The officials agree the most likely proposal remains some iteration of Title II reclassification of broadband, possibly based on proposals by Mozilla and Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu, an early proponent of net neutrality.

The information and communications technologies (ICT) sector is now substantially aware of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cybersecurity Framework and is working to align it with often-robust existing cyber risk management practices within the sector, industry stakeholders told NIST in filings released through Tuesday. That level of awareness also extended into state governments, state agencies said. NIST sought feedback from stakeholders within critical infrastructure sectors about the “Version 1.0” framework, which it released in February 1402130026. Comments were due Friday.

NetCompetition Chairman Scott Cleland said a net neutrality proposal from House Commerce Committee ranking member Henry Waxman, D-Calif., is illegal. Waxman outlined his proposal -- calling for hybrid net neutrality authority using Communications Act Section 706 and Title II -- in a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler Friday, provoking immediate outcry from NCTA and USTelecom (CD Oct 6 p2), both of which belong to NetCompetition. The Waxman proposal is “a call for FCC double-regulation of the Internet using both Title I and Title II,” not a compromise, Cleland said in a Sunday blog post (http://bit.ly/1xhwOE7). He said the “fatally-flawed tent-pole assumption” revolves around the idea “that the FCC can somehow deem previously mutually-exclusive services under precedent and the law to now be inclusive” simultaneously. “Congress did not grant the FCC statutory authority to unilaterally combine heretofore mutually-exclusive, congressionally-defined, regulatory classifications, let alone for the purpose of imposing more restrictive regulation than Congress imposed in either Title I or Title II authority, or for the purposes of regulating competitive providers in the 21st century more restrictively than Congress and the FCC regulated the telephone monopoly in the 20th century,” Cleland said. Free State Foundation President Randolph May also criticized the proposal. “The notion of adopting new net neutrality rules is problematic enough if the Commission relies only on Section 706,” he told us. “But were it to cook up some ‘hybrid’ approach a la Waxman, the result would be even worse in light of the dubious assumptions incorporated into Waxman’s recipe. The only good thing about the proposal from my perspective is that, if it were adopted, it would most likely be rejected by the courts. Maybe three strikes would convince the Commission that it’s time to await further direction from Congress."

House staffers kicked off the planned internal bipartisan briefings on overhauling the Communications Act, as expected (CD Oct 2 p6). Republicans on the House Commerce Committee announced plans to overhaul the act in December, but Republicans and Democrats had not communicated about the initiative until now.