Under Chairman Tom Wheeler, the FCC has been approving what some observers see as a surprising number of big orders on delegated authority by the bureaus instead of by a vote of commissioners. The Media Bureau Dec. 20 approved Gannett’s $2.73 billion buy of Belo and Tribune’s $2.2 billion purchase of Local TV (CD Dec 23 p3). FCC officials said the Belo approval order was originally circulated as an order for a commissioner vote. The same day, the Wireless Bureau addressed Dish Network’s request for a waiver prior to January’s H-block auction (CD Dec 23 p1).

NCTA faces opposition to its request for the FCC to review the Wireline Bureau’s data collection order on the state of the special access marketplace. In comments filed Tuesday, USTelecom, the Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance and Sprint argued against full commission review. NCTA had asked the commission to modify the data request “to reduce the burden on cable operators and other competitive providers” in accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act (http://bit.ly/18RlukP). NCTA also argued the bureau ignored “critical concerns” about the security of the data it would collect. The bureau submitted the data collection request to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for PRA approval earlier this month.

After a perceived lack of goodwill between the FCC and broadcasters during Julius Genachowski’s tenure as chairman (CD March 5 p2), executives said there’s now guarded optimism that under Chairman Tom Wheeler the agency will have more open lines of communication with the industry. Wheeler’s comments on the importance of broadcasting and his decision a month into his tenure to delay the incentive auction of TV stations’ frequencies from 2014 to mid-2015 (CD Dec 9 p1) were among reasons for early hope cited by respondents to Communications Daily’s informal survey this month of station owners and associations. Under Genachowski, respondents said the agency had less goodwill than under previous chairmen like Kevin Martin from 2005-2009, so they hope opportunities resume for close communication between the agency and industry even when the two sides disagree.

"The Kingsbury Commitment is not a model to be emulated,” FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai told a TechFreedom audience Thursday. The event focused on what a new Kingsbury commitment should look like, but Pai rejected the premise. The 1913 commitment -- in which AT&T agreed to divest its Western Union stock, stop buying up independent competitors, and allow interconnection on its long-distance network -- is best seen as “a cautionary tale about the dangers of regulatory capture and the folly of attempting to manage competition,” Pai said (http://bit.ly/1jmSZFw).

In the Dec. 18 issue of the CBP Customs Bulletin (Vol. 47, No. 50), CBP published two notices that propose to revoke rulings and similar treatment for the tariff classification of USB flash drives and lanterns.

Companies or a third party, not the government, should store phone metadata of U.S. citizens the government wants to surveil, recommended a key executive branch-appointed panel in a report released Wednesday, one among 46 recommendations that proposed sweeping changes to U.S. surveillance law. Proposals ranged from creating a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) public advocate to limiting phone searches. The White House unveiled the advice of its five-member surveillance review group in an unplanned move to quash speculation on the report’s contents, said Press Secretary Jay Carney. The release comes as more than 50 organizations pressed Congress not to pass legislation that would preserve the government’s bulk metadata surveillance program.

Companies or a third party, not the government, should store phone metadata of U.S. citizens the government wants to surveil, recommended a key executive branch-appointed panel in a report released Wednesday, one among 46 recommendations that proposed sweeping changes to U.S. surveillance law. Proposals ranged from creating a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) public advocate to limiting phone searches. The White House unveiled the advice of its five-member surveillance review group in an unplanned move to quash speculation on the report’s contents, said Press Secretary Jay Carney. The release comes as more than 50 organizations pressed Congress not to pass legislation that would preserve the government’s bulk metadata surveillance program.

A fatal Metro-North Railroad crash in New York City this month renewed public awareness about implementation of the positive train control safety system, but PTC stakeholders told us they don’t believe the crash will ultimately change the dynamics of the technology’s implementation at the FCC and other agencies. The Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008, which required railroads to implement PTC communications systems, gives nearly all responsibility for implementing PTC to the Department of Transportation and the Federal Railroad Administration, said an FCC official. But the FCC has been facilitating the deployment of some PTC technologies because they involve spectrum, said an official there.

The FCC shouldn’t eliminate the UHF discount without also examining the possibility of increasing or eliminating the 39 percent broadcast ownership cap, and the commission may not have the authority to change the discount at all, said 21st Century Fox, Univision, Sinclair and other major broadcasters in comments filed Monday in docket 13-236. The broadcasters were responding to an FCC rulemaking notice seeking comment on eliminating the discount (CD Aug. 14 p1), possibly grandfathering existing and pending ownership combinations, and a proposed VHF discount. Though most broadcaster comments characterized the NPRM as a backdoor method of changing the ownership cap, Free Press, the Competitive Carrier Association and broadcaster Block defended the measure. “Eliminating that discount doesn’t change the cap; it merely changes the calculation under the cap because the equation was unequivocally wrong,” said Free Press.

The FCC Media Bureau is seeking comment on the way “video clips” delivered via the Internet are closed captioned, the bureau said in a public notice Friday (http://bit.ly/1k9qSYh). “We ask whether, as a legal and/or policy matter, the Commission should require captioning of IP delivered video clips.” Though full video delivered over Internet Protocol is already required to be closed captioned, the commission held off on imposing the requirement on video clips (CD April 19 p11). But consumer groups representing the hearing impaired issued a report arguing that streaming news clips are a primary source of information on sudden calamities such as the Boston marathon bombing, and the lack of captions excludes the hearing impaired (CD May 17 p7). Sens. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., and Edward Markey, D-Mass., authors of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, sent a letter to the FCC earlier this month asking the commission to require captions on IP video clips (http://1.usa.gov/1ejarJ3). The PN asks about the costs, benefits and technical challenges of captioning IP video clips. It also asks for information about the differences between captioning live or near-live clips -- such as news segments -- and prerecorded clips. The PN also raises the idea of requiring captions on only a subset of IP video clips. Comments are due Jan. 27, replies Feb. 26.