U.S. mayors will debate late next week whether to weigh in on net neutrality through a resolution urging Congress, the White House, and the FCC to reclassify broadband and “guarantee a free and open Internet.” How much sway the mayors will have, or even if they will be able to find common ground among themselves, given the polarized nature of the issue in Congress (CD Feb 3 p5), depends on what side of the issue you stand, according to interviews with advocates and observers.

AT&T and Netflix traded blows Wednesday as top executives questioned who should bear the costs of interconnection between content providers and ISPs. Jim Cicconi, AT&T senior executive vice president-external and legislative affairs, said at an Aspen Institute net neutrality event that the reason Netflix was seeing poor quality lately was its choice of “the cheapest transit company out there.” Columbia Law professor Tim Wu, who coined the phrase “net neutrality,” cautioned that ISPs sit as “situational” monopolies that could let them extract “too much from the rest of the network."

With Aereo’s fate resting on a Supreme Court ruling looming soon on the copyright infringement lawsuit brought by ABC and other broadcasters (CD April 21 p3), the over-the-air streaming TV provider is continuing to offer subscriptions for its TV/DVR service. We signed up for a one-month trial, currently available in 11 markets, to get a feel for the potential cord-cutter service that many agree could change the broadcast TV model significantly if Aereo prevails in the case.

The FCC is “very aware of its responsibility” to complete its media ownership quadrennial review, Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake told House lawmakers Wednesday, pledging to make such recommendations by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s June 2016 deadline. Lake acknowledged the market evolution that the hearing’s panelists and witnesses described, but said the agency’s task is making “rules for the current state of evolution.”

A public notice proceeding on whether to establish an emergency alert system process for multilingual broadcast alerts aims to find a consensus, FCC officials said. The concept of establishing a broadcaster as a “designated hitter” to transmit EAS messages for non-English stations knocked off-air stemmed from a Minority Media and Telecommunications Council petition (CD March 13 p10). Circulating, meanwhile, is a Public Safety Bureau NPRM on issues that were identified after the first nationwide EAS test, the officials said.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will mark up its clean Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act bill (CD June 9 p1) later this month, said Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. Leahy and ranking member Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, introduced the short piece of legislation Tuesday, as expected (CD June 10 p11), receiving praise from NAB. Broadcasters have long advocated for a clean reauthorization of STELA, which expires at the year’s end.

If it wants to encourage continued growth of the Internet of Things the FCC has to make sure enough spectrum is available for the growing number of sensors and other devices that make up the IoT, said a key finding of the FCC Technological Advisory Council, which held its quarterly meeting Tuesday at FCC headquarters.

U.S. and EU officials have “come together” on 11 of the 13 recommendations the European Commission made in November to strengthen the U.S.-EU safe data transfer harbor agreement, but the final recommendation on a “national security exception” for data privacy remains unresolved, said officials from both camps at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event Tuesday. The safe harbor program allows U.S. businesses to transfer data freely between the two jurisdictions and handle EU citizens’ data.

NTIA’s planned spinoff of its oversight of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions, along with debates on cross-border data flows and data localization, are top issues the U.S. communications sector is examining for potential effects on their overseas business, industry officials said Monday night. Those issues all fundamentally center on how the world will view the Internet in the future, given it wasn’t a jurisdiction-bound technology meant to be “defined by geography per se,” said David Weller, Google head of global trade policy, at an FCBA event.

Some panelists bashed the prospect of Title II reclassification of broadband and backed some prioritization of online traffic, speaking Tuesday at a Capitol Hill event hosted by the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy on net neutrality rules and the role of peering agreements.