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.

USTelecom petitioned the FCC to give ILECs a break on various legacy rules so they can concentrate on the buildout of fiber and modern communications networks. The Monday petition has a list of rules for which it seeks commission forbearance.

A petition being submitted to the FCC to update rules acting as barriers to competition and broadband investment will be discussed by USTelecom and CenturyLink officials at a media call Monday, said a news release from the groups Friday. Scheduled to be involved are Steve Davis, USTelecom board chairman and CenturyLink executive vice president-public policy and government affairs, and USTelecom CEO Walter McCormick.

AT&T’s net neutrality proposal to bar prioritization dictated by broadband providers, but allow them if requested by customers, would address concerns about paid prioritization while passing muster in the courts, said Vice President-Federal Regulatory Hank Hultquist, on a USTelecom open Internet panel Friday. The panel included two hybrid proposals recently cited by Wireline Chief Julie Veach as being considered by the FCC in the midst of the Section 706/Title II debate. AT&T officials met with the FCC chief technology officer and Office of Strategic Planning officials on Sept. 29, said an ex parte notice in docket 14-28, about how AT&T business customers can direct prioritization of certain types of traffic.

Industry slapped down the latest net neutrality proposal from House Commerce Committee ranking member Henry Waxman, D-Calif. He urged the FCC to consider a hybrid net neutrality proposal that combines Communications Act Section 706 and Title II authority, as expected (CD Oct 3 p1). Waxman sent FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler a 15-page letter Friday, signed by him alone. He had outlined a different proposal with some similarities in a May letter, then advising Title II as a regulatory backstop to rules crafted under Section 706.

An FCC order on circulation would ease some of the record collection, retention and reporting rules approved in a 2013 rural call completion order (CD Oct 29 p2), said commission and industry officials in interviews Wednesday. The draft order likely will be approved, said an agency official. It would grant The Independent Telephone and Telecommunications Alliance (ITTA) and USTelecom’s petition to reconsider the requirements for some intraLATA calls but reject Comptel’s petition to reconsider another aspect of the order, which tightens the definition of small carriers exempted from the requirements, said the officials.

Executives who are members of Communications Security, Reliability & Interoperability Council (CSRIC) Working Group 4 said they're optimistic about ongoing FCC efforts to improve the communications sector’s cyber-risk management. Public Safety Bureau Chief David Simpson said during an FCBA event Tuesday night that FCC work on cybersecurity via CSRIC and other efforts “won’t be a recipe for perfection,” but he hopes it will improve the resiliency of 911 and other communications networks. “I think we'll see that in the outage reports” and other data, he said. Working Group 4 updated CSRIC Wednesday on its work to adapt the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework for communications sector use. (See separate report in this issue.) Working Group 4 Co-Chairman Robert Mayer had told us before the CSRIC meeting that the group had made “substantial progress” on that work (CD Sept 24 p4).