The House would cut the broadband loans program at the Rural Utilities Service under fiscal 2012 budget legislation moving through the Appropriations Committee. The panel’s Agriculture Subcommittee late Tuesday approved an agriculture bill that counts the RUS program among its cuts. House Communications Subcommittee Ranking Member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., slammed the proposed cut. USTelecom and the NTCA supported giving $22 million to the loans program under an amendment submitted by Rep. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo. At our deadline, the subcommittee voted not to adopt the Lummis amendment.

An industry group led by USTelecom discussed the need for a model that would “accurately identify the costs of building and operating broadband networks in high-cost areas throughout the country.” The discussion came in a meeting with Wireline Bureau Chief Sharon Gillett and others at the FCC, said an ex parte filing. “Such a model could be used to identify areas that are high-cost to deliver broadband, some of which may be currently unserved, and to determine amounts of support to ensure that broadband services of a specific nature are available in those areas.” The industry representatives also discussed the advantages of a “greenfield network build” approach versus “the National Broadband Plan’s network augmentation build approach, which was used to size the cost of extending currently existing networks to unserved areas,” the filing said. Verizon, AT&T, CenturyLink, Frontier and Windstream representatives took part in the meeting, along with consultant CostQuest which does economic models for the telecom industry.

For the second month in a row, the FCC won’t take on any high-profile issues at its monthly meeting. The agenda for the June 9 open meeting lists four items, none likely to excite much attention (CD May 23 p6). The May meeting’s agenda was similarly light (CD May 13 p 9).

Capital investment in broadband in the U.S. increased 4.2 percent in 2010 from the previous year to $66 billion, USTelecom said Thursday, based on a joint study with the Yankee Group. Broadband providers invested more than $1 trillion on networks from 1996 through 2010, the study said. Wireline’s share continues to outpace expenditures by cable operators and wireless carriers, the group said. Wireline was responsible for 42 percent of broadband capital expenditures last year, compared to 30 percent for wireless and 19 percent for cable. Wireline capital expenditures, at $27 billion, are down from the heydays of investment in 2000 and 2001, when the U.S. fiber backbone was under construction, though investments have held steady at above $60 billion annually since 2005. “A lot of that was speculative capital that came into the market” 10 years ago, USTelecom Vice President Patrick Brogan told reporters. A dollar invested today also goes further than one spent then because of improvements in technology, he said. “This doesn’t represent a single penny of taxpayer money -- this is all private sector investment,” said USTelecom President Walter McCormick on the same media call. “The levels of investment are really at historic levels. This is a uniquely American success story.”

Carriers, E-commerce companies and trade associations have joined forces to form the Download Fairness Coalition to push for a national tax framework. The group seeks to end what it calls discriminatory and multiple state and local taxes, officials said during a conference call Thursday.

OMAHA, Neb. -- Industry and public interest advocates have yet to devise a comprehensive proposal addressing all the problems of the Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation regime, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said at a commission roundtable. “We want to see more from stakeholders in this program, and we want to see it quickly.” The chairman led a public forum on the pending overhaul late Wednesday at the University of Nebraska at Omaha to close a day-long set of discussions. He reiterated the four corners of his reform program: Moving to a broadband fund and phasing down intercarrier comp rates, (including intrastate revenues); “controlling costs and constraining the size of the fund;” “demanding accountability;” and “market-driven and incentive-based policies to maximize the impact of scarce program resources.”

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Staff in the office of FCC Commissioner Meredith Baker was lobbied on more than a dozen occasions by Comcast, the NCTA, cable company rivals, nonprofit groups and others as she considered a job offer at Comcast, agency records show. Since April 18, when Baker privately recused herself from voting on anything at the FCC (CD May 16 p7), the lawyers who advise her also were visited by executives of AT&T, the CTIA, News Corp., Verizon and other companies and public interest groups. Baker’s not the first FCC member to directly leave for a large company regulated by the agency, though it’s been decades since that’s believed to have last occurred, said several who have long watched the commission.

Leaders of the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association and the Iowa Telecommunications Association gave a cool reception on NCTA’s proposal to freeze the RUS broadband loan program. The RUS relaunched its troubled broadband loan program earlier this year and published interim rules. The comment period on the proposed rules closed last week. In its filing with RUS, the cable association said the broadband loan program was structured as if high-speed broadband suffered under geographic monopolies like old water and electric systems (CD May 16 p14). Offering broadband subsidies to telcos in areas where cable already offers it puts government in the “totally inappropriate role for a government agency,” by “picking winners and losers in the marketplace.”

MTV Networks Chairman-CEO Judy McGrath to step down; heads of MTV operating units to report directly to Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman …Cisco assignments of senior vice presidents as part of streamlining units: Pankaj Patel and Padmasree Warrior will lead engineering, and the Emerging Business Group will be run by Marthin De Beer … USTelecom promotes Karn Dhingra to director-communications … MUSL TV hires Robb Weller, ex-Weller/Grossman Productions, as executive vice president-programming and production … National Religious Broadcasters hires Aaron Mercer, ex-Generation Forum of the National Association of Evangelicals, as vice president of government relations … Univision promotes Carlos Deschapelles to senior vice president, sports sales … Julian Bellamy, ex-Channel 4 U.K., becomes Discovery Networks International creative director-head of production and development.