Grain Management is the one designated entity (DE) that clearly wants to compete in the AWS-3 auction and the FCC should allow it to do so, said Maurita Coley, chief operating officer of the Minority Media and Telecom Council, Monday at MMTC’s Access to Capital conference. Meanwhile, Rainbow PUSH Coalition President Jesse Jackson released a statement in support of Grain.

A set of four cybersecurity bills the House was set to vote on Monday night appeared likely to pass with strong bipartisan support, industry lawyers and lobbyists told us in interviews before the vote. Debate on the bills had not begun at our deadline. The major bill of the four was the National Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection Act (HR-3696), which would codify the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) existing role in dealing with cybersecurity issues, but would not extend the department’s powers (CD Feb 6 p7). HR-3696 also deals with DHS’ role in information sharing, but lawyers and lobbyists we spoke with said the information sharing aspect of the bill has not stirred up controversy as did the House-passed Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (HR-624) or the Senate’s Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (S-2588).

Twelve principles (http://bit.ly/1l7SD1P) for the governance of “Internet unique identifiers” in response to NTIA’s plan to transition Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to ICANN and its global multistakeholder body received strong support from Internet governance stakeholders worried about maintaining ICANN’s accountability in the absence of NTIA, said stakeholders in interviews Monday. But Milton Mueller, Syracuse University information studies professor, criticized the document’s attempt to separate policy and technical functions within ICANN. The importance of the principles, released Monday by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, for the Internet governance debate prompted ITIF to publicize (http://bit.ly/1rwP60P) the document, but the organizations involved in drafting the document haven’t yet decided to go public, said an ITIF spokesman. ITIF wasn’t involved in the drafting process, he said.

Mobile carriers and mobile billers should ensure consumers have the right to block third-party charges, are aware of the charges and have an effective means to dispute them, the FTC said in a set of best practices to reduce mobile cramming issued Monday (http://1.usa.gov/1oBTSLs). In a conference call with reporters, FTC Consumer Protection Bureau Director Jessica Rich called the guidelines “practical steps” companies could take to curb mobile cramming, an issue that has caused consumers to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in unauthorized charges, she said. The report “discusses all of the different players and market participants in the carrier billing industry,” said Duane Pozza, an attorney in the FTC Division of Financial Practices. “It goes beyond mobile phone carriers."

Neustar capped the contentious back and forth with Telcordia, its rival that seeks the Local Number Portability Administrator (LNPA) contract Neustar now has, saying in a filing posted Monday that the FCC cannot legally grant the contract to Telcordia. The agency needs to issue a rulemaking notice before acting, Neustar said in the filing submitted Friday, at the end of the comment period on the North American Numbering Council’s recommendation to give Telcordia the contract. Neustar questioned the request for proposal process as “procedurally flawed,” in docket 09-109 (http://bit.ly/1kjyDyu).

New European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s push for a single digital market is a good thing, said telecom and Internet industry officials in recent interviews. Although the composition of the incoming commission won’t be known for several months, Juncker said he intends, within the first six months of his term, to take “ambitious legislative steps” toward such a market. But it’s too soon to tell whether the newly elected European Parliament will play ball and what impact, if any, the changes to all three EU institutions -- Italy took over the EU presidency July 1 -- will have on policy, said stakeholders.

The petitions that Chattanooga’s Electric Power Board (EPB) and the city of Wilson, North Carolina, filed Thursday seeking FCC pre-emption of state laws restricting municipal broadband deployments (CD July 25 p18) give FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler a definitive reason to examine pre-emption, industry participants and observers told us in interviews. Industry is likely to closely watch the FCC’s examination of the Chattanooga (http://bit.ly/1kZ4lM6) and Wilson petitions (http://bit.ly/1kZ54gc), and those petitions will likely have implications for the limits of the FCC’s authority under Communications Act Section 706, observers said. The FCC has been deciding how to pursue pre-emption after Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said in a separate opinion in Verizon v. FCC that Section 706 could allow the commission to examine state municipal broadband laws as a barrier to competition. Industry observers have been split on the pre-emption issue (CD Feb 24 p1).

A federal judge’s finding that FilmOn and CEO Alki David are in contempt of court may not bode well for competing service Aereo’s attempt to be treated as a cable system and obtain a compulsory copyright license (CD July 11 p10), several broadcast attorneys told us in interviews Friday. Judge Naomi Buchwald of U.S District Court in Manhattan fined FilmOn $90,000 for violating a federal injunction by streaming copyrighted broadcast content for nine days after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ABC v. Aereo decision.

The FCC’s FY 2015 budget hangs in the balance on Capitol Hill, with multiple big-ticket items on the agency’s agenda for that year. The House passed an appropriations bill this month that would give the agency more than $50 million less than it requested (CD July 17 p3), in stark contrast to the initial appropriations bill proposed in the Senate, which would fully fund the agency. Reconciliation of the different budget numbers is not expected any time soon, and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler should perhaps anticipate getting less than requested, one key lawmaker cautioned.

As the FCC moves forward on net neutrality rules, it needs to keep in mind the language of the Telecom Act of 1996 and not twist those words, which he believes the commission has in too many other areas, former Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth said Friday during a panel at the FCC Consumer Advisory Committee meeting. Furchtgott-Roth suggested a federal court will reject revised rules -- which was the fate of most of the 2010 net neutrality rules (CD Jan 15 p1).