The media ownership order the FCC is drafting likely will stick with the provisions outlined in last year’s notice of proposed rulemaking for that quadrennial review, Commissioner Mignon Clyburn predicted Wednesday. With the caveat that she has not seen the draft, and none is circulating for a vote, she speculated at a conference that it won’t likely propose more deregulation than the NPRM. “It will probably retain many of the existing media ownership rules” including a ban on one company owning more than one broadcast network and existing limits on how many radio stations can be commonly owned in a market, Clyburn said. There may be “a minor modification or two” to existing rules, she said.

LAS VEGAS -- T-Mobile is taking a long, hard look at how it could make sharing work in the 1755-1850 MHz band, T-Mobile Senior Vice President Tom Sugrue said on a Competitive Carrier Association convention panel Monday. Carriers as a whole have pressed the government to make the band available on a licensed basis. T-Mobile received special temporary authority from the FCC to test sharing with federal users and Sugrue said the carrier believes sharing could work, at least in the short term.

Granting Nagra USA’s request for a waiver from FCC set-top box rules (CD Sept 4 p5) could lead to a “Balkanization of home network interfaces that would further frustrate competition and also undercut common reliance on CableCARDs,” CEA said in comments on the requests. “CEA has opposed and will continue to oppose any waiver request that would undermine CableCARD common reliance unless and until an IP-based successor interface that is nationally standard and is nationally portable is referenced in FCC regulations,” it said (http://xrl.us/bnqtix). Nagra sought waivers from requirements that cable boxes include a CableCARD slot and an HDMI or DVI output.

Judges seemed skeptical that the FCC’s mandatory data roaming order imposed common carrier obligations on Verizon Wireless and other carriers, in oral argument Thursday at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Wiley Rein attorney Helgi Walker, arguing for Verizon, said the order opened up a “vast new frontier” of Title III authority. The FCC argued it had plain authority to enact the rules under the licensing provision in Section 303(b) of the Communications Act. A divided commission approved the measure last year, requiring carriers to offer data roaming on “commercially reasonable” terms and conditions, as proposed in the National Broadband Plan (CD April 8/11 p1). Verizon quickly appealed.

Colorado telecom companies are struggling to form a consensus on the state’s plan to overhaul its telecom rules and high-cost fund, as demonstrated by reply comments with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission made public after our deadline Wednesday. The PUC initiated the new rulemaking in August, heard initial comments Aug. 29, is holding meetings throughout September and will formally address concerns in hearings Oct. 1-4. Colorado’s biggest companies show broad agreement on deregulating VoIP and reducing the state’s high-cost fund but parties are still divided on whether the state commission should help fund broadband. Rural advocates have previously worried about how the reform may hurt rural broadband buildouts (CD Sept 10 p5).

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., commended Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., for seeking to reform the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), ahead of Thursday’s Judiciary Committee meeting. The committee agenda for the 10 a.m. executive business meeting includes consideration of HR-2471, a House-passed bill which aims to clarify U.S. law to permit “video tape service providers” to obtain a consumer’s informed written consent on an ongoing basis via the Internet. A committee spokeswoman said that Chairman Leahy plans to include language to update ECPA in the bill (WID Sept 12 p6). Wyden told reporters Wednesday he hopes the Senate can update the 26-year-old law to address changes in technology. “Certainly it would be my intention when any privacy legislation comes to the floor that we try to add the legislation I'm offering with [Rep. Jason] Chaffetz,” he said. In June Wyden and Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, introduced the Geolocational Privacy and Surveillance Act (S-1212, HR-2168) in order to resolve legal ambiguities over how citizens’ geolocation data are treated by companies and law enforcement agencies. But Leahy must first overcome the opposition to the bill from committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Wyden said. “Last I heard is that there were some privacy issues that Senator Grassley had raised,” said Wyden. Grassley held over the committee’s consideration of HR-2471 in last week’s executive business meeting because he said it could adversely impact ongoing Justice Department operations and unduly burden law enforcement agencies. Grassley said state and local law enforcement officials are particularly concerned that the bill could impact cases where time is of the essence, like kidnapping and child abduction cases. Grassley told us Wednesday he’s unsure if Leahy’s staff members have addressed his problems with the legislation, during an interview at the Capitol. “As I stated last week in the executive meeting I'm confident that we can work things out but I don’t know whether they have been worked out yet.” Leahy had no comment.

Shifting some spectrum Dish wants to use to start a wireless broadband network would cause so much interference from TV station and government use that S-band receivers couldn’t be protected, the company said in a study it commissioned and filed at the FCC. As Wireless Bureau staff work toward an order expected to let Dish use the 40 MHz of mobile satellite services (MSS) spectrum for terrestrial service, moving the uplink part of it up 5 MHz is getting attention at the agency and by industry, satellite officials told us. No order has circulated for a commissioner vote, though one’s still expected to (CD Sept 12 p6) soon, agency and industry officials said Tuesday.

The FCC will forbear from applying Section 652(b) of the Telecom Act to cable acquisitions of CLECs, it said in an order Monday (http://xrl.us/bnp6sw). As expected, the order was unanimously approved (CD Sept 6 p4). “By granting limited forbearance from section 652(b), we harmonize the rules that apply to transactions between competitive LECs and cable operators regardless of which entity acquires the other,” the order said. The section prohibited cable operators from acquiring more than a 10 percent interest in CLECs in the same region. NCTA had sought the forbearance, which local franchise authority (LFA) representatives opposed because it would limit their role in cable/CLEC deals.

FCC members upheld a staff decision to not release under the Freedom of Information Act materials relating to the Enforcement Bureau’s investigation of televised video news releases (VNR), under a FOIA exemption relating to government investigations. The commission upheld the bureau’s withholding from the Center for Media and Democracy in response to a 2007 CMD FOIA request for letters of inquiry to licensees as part of the agency’s investigation into VNRs on 77 stations, answers to the LOIs and other records. The bureau cited the law’s exemption 7(a) because the documents related to an enforcement investigation, said an order released in Wednesday’s Daily Digest (http://xrl.us/bnpg85) responding to the center’s 2010 application for review of the withholding. “Exemption 7(A) provides Commission investigations into VNRs the same protection it provides investigations involving national security concerns,” said the order approved by the five commissioners. “Courts also give deference to government showings of articulable harm in law enforcement situations not involving national security concerns.” There’s “one narrow class of records” not raising “concerns” under the exemption: Three completed VNR investigations that led to enforcement orders, said the decision directing the bureau to release the actual videos the licensees submitted to the agency. The licensees are News Corp.’s Fox Television Stations, subject of a 2011 forfeiture order (CD July 11/11 p6) after CMD filed a complaint, Access.1 New Jersey, recipient of a 2011 notice of apparent liability (CD March 25/11 p6), and Comcast, which got an NAL in 2007. The center can seek judicial review of the decision, the order said. CMD has complaints in years past over numerous VNRs, which the center said were carried during TV news shows without disclosures they were material provided by outside parties. The center, which hasn’t decided whether to sue the commission, is disappointed in the order and that it took five years to get the decision after the FOIA request was made, Executive Director Lisa Graves told us. The documents the center seeks “would shed greater light on the use of ‘fake news,’ pre-cooked” VNRs “made by corporations to be passed off as news,” she said. “The FCC does not appear to be up to the task of helping the public regulate the use of our airwaves in fast-moving media markets when it cannot even rule in a reasonable time period on the public’s requests for files. Taking five years to deny requests for information about how its weak rules are enforced does not give any basis for confidence that the agency is taking its responsibilities to be responsive to the public very serious[ly] at all.” This “slowness and obstinacy of burrowed-in bureaucrats” doesn’t “bode well” for anyone complaining that TV stations’ public files are missing information, Graves said. Top-four rated stations in the 50 largest markets began last month uploading to the FCC’s website new political file information, so it’s not just available at main studios in paper form.

Online video distributors don’t completely replace multichannel video programming distributor service, MVPDs and a top OVD told the FCC. Both industries outlined product improvements, in comments on a notice of inquiry for an upcoming commission report to Congress on MVPD competition covering the 52 weeks through June 30. Public Knowledge wants the agency to allow OVDs to operate as MVPDs, which some pay-TV companies oppose. The last, 14th MVPD competition report -- covering four years because annual documents weren’t released as the Telecom Act required -- for the first time reviewed OVDs, and the NOI asked questions about it (http://xrl.us/bnpcgy) for the 15th report (WID July 23 p5).