Distil Networks "approached the FCC" in May 2017 "to offer Distil's services for free" to help the agency fix problems with its electronic comment filing system application programming interface caused by what the FCC claimed was a distributed denial-of-service attack, said Chief Product and Strategy Officer Rami Essaid in a statement. It was one of at least four software and cybersecurity firms that pitched their services in the days after the 2017 DDoS incident, according to a package of a thousand-plus pages of emails that American Oversight received in response to a Freedom of Information Act request (see 1806060032). The FCC "denied [Distil's] offer, claiming that they cannot filter out 'free speech,'" Essaid said. "However, this is not a matter of free speech -- bots are not real people." Former FCC Chief Information Officer David Bray disputed earlier this week a report that the agency pushed a false narrative after the 2017 incident that the system also had been victim of a cyberattack three years previously (see 1705100062 and 1806050046).

Tower company PTA-FLA isn’t a T-Mobile unit (see 1806060039).

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruling against the FTC on LabMD was called an important decision and bad for the agency. The commission can't require a company to completely overhaul its data security program but can ban specific acts or practices (see 1712070068), an 11th Circuit panel ruled Wednesday. The FTC sued the now-defunct diagnostic cancer lab in 2013 for unfair data security practices. The ruling said the FTC improperly mandated LabMD’s complete overhaul and charged the district court with managing the overhaul. “This is a scheme Congress could not have envisioned,” the panel said. “We therefore grant LabMD’s petition for review and vacate the commission’s order.” TechFreedom President Berin Szoka said Thursday the court’s decision shows the FTC “has been acting unlawfully for well over a decade” and calls into question the validity of past data security consent decrees. The commission didn’t comment. Wiley Rein called it “an important milestone and inflection point for” new agency leadership: “This case raised issues going to FTC power and practice, but ultimately turned on the remedy imposed by the agency which was found to be so vague as to be unenforceable.” The agency can ask for a full 11th Circuit review en banc or Supreme Court review. Judges Gerald Bard Tjoflat, Charles Wilson and Eduardo Robreno made up the panel and Tjoflat wrote the opinion.

Cable and broadcast interests continue to air with FCC officials their worries about terrestrial wireless use of C-band. In a docket 17-183 filing Thursday, NPR recapped a meeting officials had with Chairman Ajit Pai where it made similar arguments to those it made to Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Mike O'Rielly (see 1805290018) that sharing C-band with commercial wireless services will cause harmful interference to public radio earth station downlinks, and that sharing isn't possible with current technology. NCTA, in a separate filing, recapped a meeting with staffers including Wireless Bureau Chief Don Stockdale, International Bureau Chief Tom Sullivan and Office of Engineering and Technology Chief Julius Knapp. NCTA said neither fiber nor Ku-band spectrum is a good substitute for C-band and such a substitution wouldn't be feasible for its C-band operations such as cable TV distribution. NCTA expressed concerns about band repacking costs and technical issues such as earth station filtering. It told the FCC it would be premature to endorse any particular proposal before there's a comprehensive record about how incumbent C-band services will be protected and incumbent users will be made whole. Representatives participating in the meeting were from NCTA, CBS, Charter Communications, Comcast, Cox Enterprises, Discovery, Disney, 21st Century Fox, General Communication and Univision Communications. NCTA earlier said many questions still need addressing (see 1806010032).

Google Fiber disagreed with Communications Workers of America that one-touch, make-ready pole-attachment procedures in Louisville led to "dangerous mistakes" by contractors (see 1805250014). "CWA echoes the unsubstantiated claims made by Comcast, Charter, and NCTA ... by similarly failing to show that the errors depicted in the photographs attached to their ex parte notice were the result of OTMR or even caused by the use of third party contractors," filed Google, posted Tuesday in docket 17-84. "That, at some point, errors were made by someone in performing make-ready work does not implicate the safety and efficiency of a well-structured OTMR regime." CWA argues the risks "can only be resolved by allowing existing attachers to self-perform simple make-ready before a new attacher has the opportunity to undertake OTMR. But this argument does not follow," Google said. "Allowing self-performance would do nothing more than undermine the entire purpose of OTMR -- which is to increase safety and improve efficiency by reducing unnecessary trips to the pole that increase risks to people and property, create unneeded disruption to streets and sidewalks, and impose excessive and unpredictable costs on new competitive entrants." It said the organization's concerns are best addressed by requiring pole-owner OK of contractors, with input from existing attachers, as proposed by the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee. The union didn't comment Wednesday.

The FCC issued an NPRM on curbing intercarrier compensation "arbitrage" schemes that stimulate access charges. The notice released Tuesday was adopted unanimously Monday and withdrawn from the agenda for Thursday's commissioners' meeting (see 1806050057). It had no commissioner statements and appeared to be virtually the same as a draft. The FCC proposed to eliminate financial incentives for arbitrage by giving "access-stimulating LECs" two choices for connecting to long-distance carriers (interexchange carriers or IXCs), said the text in docket 18-155: "First, an access-stimulating LEC can choose to be financially responsible for calls delivered to its network so it, rather than IXCs, pays for the delivery of calls to its end office or the functional equivalent. Or, second, instead of accepting this financial responsibility, an access-stimulating LEC can choose to accept direct connections either from the IXC or an intermediate access provider of the IXC’s choice, allowing IXCs to bypass intermediate access providers selected by the access-stimulating LEC." A diagram on page 6 depicting the possible arrangements wasn't in the draft. The notice sought comment on a similar but broader CenturyLink proposal: "Rather than focusing on access-stimulating LECs, CenturyLink recommends shifting financial responsibility to any LEC that declines to accept a request for direct interconnection for the purpose of terminating access traffic." Alternatively, the FCC sought comment "on moving all traffic bound for an access-stimulating LEC to bill-and-keep" (zero payments). It asked whether to revise its "access stimulation" definition and on other alleged "arbitrage schemes and ways to eradicate" them. AT&T applauded the review of "wasteful and ongoing access stimulation schemes which hurt consumers by driving up market costs." The telco and others proposed "a framework by which access stimulators would bear the financial responsibility for their activities, which the FCC includes in this [NPRM]," said Executive Vice President Joan Marsh Wednesday.

The clock is ticking on AWS-3 licensee build-out requirements, and licensees generally agree about longer initial license terms and later build-out deadlines, though not about who should get them, in docket FCC 18-104 comments. They were due Tuesday to a Wireless Bureau inquiry on possible extensions of up to three years, 12-year license terms and associated build-out requirements (see 1804060060). Federal agencies likely are sticking to plans for relocating from the bands, since there were no updates since May 2017, T-Mobile said. A servicewide extension isn't warranted, and the FCC instead should make any extensions specific to geographic areas and spectrum where there's evidence agencies can't relocate, it said. CTIA said there should be three-year extensions for licensees that entered market-specific coordination requests in the early entry portal system but were subsequently denied because the federal system hadn't transitioned out. It said most AWS-3 licenses expire April 2027, but "a large portion" of federal operations aren't expected to relocate until 2025, and many AWS-3 licenses have interim build-out requirements due in April 2021. It said three more years would ensure licensees have time after the expected 2025 clearing to start network deployment. Blue Ridge Wireless also pointed to government relocation timeframes in calling for a three year delay. 2014 AWS Spectrum Bidco, with AWS-3 licenses in the 1695-1710 MHz band, said extension for all would give more time for government relocation in some bands and coexistence mechanism development in others. It said government users won't be relocating operations from the unpaired A1 and B1 blocks of 1695-1710 MHz, and there needs to be development of long-term coexistence plans, and talks with NOAA produced progress and raised questions requiring lengthy technical analysis. AWS-3 licensees Chester Telephone, FTC Management Group and Sandhill Communications encouraged three more years. They said agencies "appear to be working diligently" on relocation, but that process and requirements such as accepting interference from federal operations until those operations vacate the band has slowed commercial AWS deployment. Those plus rural challenges such as shortage of tower collation opportunities mean there's less time for meeting "already challenging buildout deadlines," they said.

FCC commissioners were trying to resolve differences on some agenda items for Thursday's monthly meeting, an official told us Wednesday. "We’re working with our colleagues to see what we can achieve with items on the agenda, though there’s always a potential for disagreements." Asked if there were likely to be any major brawls or dissents, an aide to Commissioner Mike O'Rielly emailed, “I don’t see anything major.” Four items were deleted from the agenda Tuesday after being adopted on circulation (see 1806050057), but the remaining eight seem likely to stick: on high-band spectrum for 5G, telecom service discontinuance processes, rural telco broadband USF contribution relief, 8YY access charges, text-enabled toll-free numbers, slamming and cramming, IP captioned telephone service and revisiting cable leased access.

House Commerce Committee ranking member Frank Pallone, D-N.J., said he's “disturbed” by a report Tuesday that said the FCC pushed a false narrative that the system had also been victim of a cyberattack three years previously, when dealing last spring with what it said was a distributed denial-of-service attack on its electronic commenting filing system (see 1705100062). The FCC didn't comment now. Pallone said Gizmodo shows “a concerted effort by FCC employees to mislead the public in the lead up to its vote to repeal” 2015 net neutrality rules. GAO in October began an independent review of FCC DDoS claims after a request by Pallone and Senate Communications Subcommittee ranking member Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii (see 1708170042 and 1710130052). Chairman Ajit Pai told Pallone, Schatz and other lawmakers a “non-traditional” DDoS attack hit the ECFS but the FCC declined to provide details on plans to protect the system (see 1706280044 and 1707310071). Pallone said Tuesday he's "call[ing] on [Pai] to ensure the FCC fully cooperates with” GAO's investigation. Gizmodo said the Office of Media Relations and FCC former Chief Information Officer David Bray in 2017 alleged the agency's commenting system ran into trouble in 2014 due to DDoS attack when there was no independent proof. Bray, who left the agency last year, didn't comment.

A pair of non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) satellite applications, an NPRM targeting access charge arbitrage in intercarrier compensation and an enforcement item that had been on Thursday's meeting agenda (see 1805160051) were approved in advance, the FCC said Tuesday. Advance approval of some items on Thursday's notably long agenda was seen possible (see 1806030001). The Audacy and O3b NGSO applications -- for Audacy's three satellites that would be a space-based data relay constellation for other NGSO satellites and on U.S. market access for O3b broadband satellites -- was expected to pass (see 1805170062). The wireline NPRM aimed at curbing intercarrier compensation arbitrage seeks comment on giving LECs stimulating access charges two options for connecting to long-distance carriers (see 1805170060). The enforcement item was a proposed $2.8 million fine for unlawful drone transmitters (see 1806050066).