FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has sidestepped likely partisan Capitol Hill battles surrounding E-rate for now due to the nature of his overhaul, apparently focusing on Wi-Fi and not immediately touching the fund’s contribution rate and size, lobbyists and observers told us. They predict political rancor will come in later phases of the E-rate revamp when those parts will be inevitably addressed. The prime Hill critics now are Democratic architects of the original 1996 Telecom Act E-rate provisions, who question the proposal in more granular ways and urge the agency to listen as E-rate beneficiaries express fears, sending a critical letter Tuesday. The FCC will vote on Wheeler’s item Friday, and it’s been controversial among FCC Republicans. (See separate report in this issue.)

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai said in a statement that negotiations between his office and Chairman Tom Wheeler over E-rate broke down Tuesday, when Wheeler’s staff “rejected almost every suggestion that I made.” Wheeler’s E-rate modernization proposal could still be approved when the commission is scheduled to take it up Friday, Pai’s Chief of Staff Matthew Berry told us. But he expressed disappointment it would likely be along a party-line vote with the support of the commission’s two Democrats.

Proposed changes to how FCC regulatory fees are assessed impose a “disproportionate” burden on wireless, CTIA said in comments filed at the FCC. The FCC’s overall budget for FY 2014 is $449.8 million and Congress directed the agency to recover about $339.8 million through regulatory fees, and $98.7 million through revenue retained from spectrum auctions. Comments in docket 12-201 were due Monday on a June 12 NPRM (http://bit.ly/U1K1m0).

Technology solutions will never address the inherent security problems created by the government’s surveillance programs, said panelists at a New America Foundation (NAF) event Monday. Tech solutions are “fundamentally around the edges,” said Bruce Schneier, a longtime security technologist and fellow at the NAF’s Open Technology Institute and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “The single most important thing you can do is agitate for political change.” Recent reports (CD July 7 p11) on the number of non-targets swept up in the government’s Internet surveillance “reinforces the importance” of legislative action, said Google Privacy Policy Counsel David Lieber.

Talks on updating broadcasting protections stalled Saturday when the World Intellectual Property Organization Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights meeting ended without any recommendations. Despite the failure to agree on conclusions -- they'll now be drafted by SCCR Chairman Martin Moscoso -- there seems to be a pretty strong inclination by delegates toward a general agreement that pure webcasting is out of the treaty, WIPO sources said.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is bringing in economists and lawyers from outside the agency to oversee the review of Comcast’s proposed buy of Time Warner Cable and AT&T’s of DirecTV, the agency said Monday. Both teams will be under the overall direction of FCC General Counsel Jonathan Sallet.

The list of those for ICANN’s Coordination Group to develop a community proposal for the transition of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) from the U.S. to a global multistakeholder body is representative of the myriad communities within the ICANN organization, but could be hampered in finding agreement on questions on the Domain Name System (DNS), said ICANN stakeholders in interviews Monday. ICANN released (http://bit.ly/1j2mQDS) Thursday the names of 18 of the 27 group members, which included Milton Mueller, Syracuse University information studies professor, as one of the three Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) representatives. ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade and ICANN board Chairman Steve Crocker had downplayed the group’s role in determining the future of IANA oversight and stewardship (CD June 24 p7).

The FCC should cap the total interference that TV stations will experience as a result of the TV incentive auction repacking, said NAB, affiliates of Block Communications and consulting engineering firm Cohen Dippell in comments on a public notice (CD June 4 p17) on how much interference broadcasters are likely to see as a result of the repack. Though the incentive auction order proposed that stations’ new interference reception would be limited to 0.5 percent per station repacked, commenters all proposed solutions that would limit the total new interference any station could receive, rather than the total per repacked station.

The Senate Intelligence Committee said it expects to mark up the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) Tuesday, moving ahead with the bill after it delayed consideration in late June. Privacy advocates and industry lobbyists told us Monday they expect CISA will clear Senate Intelligence but that other factors will determine how far it advances beyond that point. The markup, closed to the public, is to begin at 2:30 p.m. in 219 Hart.

While on the surface work on the TV incentive auction has slowed at the FCC, agency officials tell us members of its Incentive Auction Task Force are working long hours to get various public notices and rulemakings ready for release starting late this summer. More than 50 FCC staffers from the auction team, the Wireless and Media bureaus, the Office of Engineering and Technology and other parts of the agency are doing significant amounts of work to prepare for the auction, agency officials said.