NTIA by next week thinks it will “fully obligate” the $1.34 billion Congress appropriated for DTV coupons, Acting NTIA Administrator Meredith Baker told House Telecom Subcommittee Chairman Ed Markey, D-Mass., in a letter Friday. Responding to Markey’s call for a status report on the coupon program, Baker said reaching the $1.34 billion “ceiling” won’t mean the program has run out of money, but the NTIA will need to halt processing new coupon orders until money from expired coupons has been recycled back into the pool.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Stanford Law Prof. Lawrence Lessig said he doesn’t trust Google any more than any other big company to promote good public policy at the expense of its financial interests. “I don’t trust Google to do the right thing,” he said Wednesday night at the World Affairs Council of Northern California. “I hope they do the right thing.” The presentation by the godfather of the copyleft was organized by the council, Lessig’s Change Congress organization and Netroots Nation. Google public relations didn’t respond Thursday to requests for comment.

The California Air Resource Board has issued a news release announcing that it has approved California's plan to reduce the state's greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Among other things, the plan proposes full deployment of the California Solar Initiative, high-speed rail, water-related energy efficiency measures and a range of regulations to reduce emissions from trucks and from ships docked at California's ports. (CARB news release, dated 12/11/08, available at http://www.arb.ca.gov/newsrel/nr121108.htm)

A federal court denied an appeal related to the timeliness of an FCC forbearance order. In a petition for review at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, competitive local exchange carrier Fones4All said the FCC improperly released a backdated forbearance order one day after the statutory clock ran out. Citing two decisions by the D.C. Circuit, the court said Fones4All couldn’t challenge the timeliness issue in court until it appealed at the FCC. The court also upheld the FCC’s order on the merits.

Raising its forecast by a million coupons from a projection in November, NTIA now expects to have accepted orders for 51.5 million DTV coupons when it stops taking applications March 31, but thinks the number easily could go higher, we've learned. Marking two months until the analog cutoff Feb. 17, the agency will announce this week that it has ordered a million more coupons from IBM.

Raising its forecast by a million coupons from a projection in November, NTIA now expects to have accepted orders for 51.5 million DTV coupons when it stops taking applications March 31, but thinks the number easily could go higher, we've learned. Marking two months until the analog cutoff Feb. 17, the agency will announce this week that it has ordered a million more coupons from IBM, we're told.

The incoming Commerce Committee chairmen asked FCC Chairman Kevin Martin to take up only DTV items at the commission’s Dec. 18 meeting. Commissioner Michael Copps quickly expressed agreement, but it was unclear how Martin will respond. The request, in a letter sent Friday, may have cost Martin support from Democrat commissioners on contentious matters not involving DTV, industry sources said. Late Thursday, the FCC released its Dec. 18 agenda listing all of the items that Martin circulated late last month.

The incoming Commerce Committee chairmen asked FCC Chairman Kevin Martin to take up only DTV items at the commission’s Dec. 18 meeting. Commissioner Michael Copps quickly expressed agreement, but it was unclear how Martin will respond.

Under a proposal by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, independent cable operators would be exempted from an expanded definition of what constitutes affiliated channels in complaints filed by independent programmers, said agency and industry officials. Tuesday afternoon, Martin’s office circulated a revision to a program carriage order he seeks a vote on by the Dec. 18 public meeting (CD Dec 4 p3), they said. An FCC spokeswoman confirmed that Martin made a proposal, but couldn’t provide details.

The Supreme Court should rule that AT&T and similar phone companies aren’t violating antitrust laws when they set prices high at wholesale and low at retail, the company said in oral argument Monday at the court. The case, Pacific Bell v. LinkLine Communications, centers on whether a “price squeeze” violates the Sherman Act if it’s done by a vertically integrated company that’s highly regulated at the wholesale level but has no antitrust duty to deal with competitors (CD Nov 11 p11).