Paid peering and interconnection agreements, not necessarily something the FCC should be regulating, are ripe for agency examination, Commissioner Mike O'Rielly said in an interview Tuesday. “I want to be careful here.” The FCC doesn’t need to look at “every single agreement,” he said. “But I am interested in learning more about how those agreements are structured, and learning how is that changing the marketplace?”

The FCC approach to net neutrality is the right one, said Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei, hoping there’s no reclassification of broadband as a common-carrier telecom service. What some high-technology interests back in Title II or other more regulatory approaches isn’t the best way to proceed, he told executives and lobbyists for mostly old media Tuesday. “Very delicately the FCC has tried to balance between these interests.” The plethora of challenges faced by traditional media companies including cable operators mainly involve tech innovation, embraced more readily and successfully by upstarts that have bloomed into tech titans like Google, said Maffei in Q&A: Regulation hasn’t been a major hurdle.

House Republicans and Democrats sharply scrutinized the first half year of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s tenure at the agency. Wheeler appeared before the House Communications Subcommittee for the second time as chairman Tuesday, less than a week after a highly controversial FCC meeting where the agency approved its net neutrality NPRM as well as an item on broadcast TV incentive auction design. Lawmakers of both parties widely focused on net neutrality.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, wants to shake up the net neutrality debate in Congress with a draft bill that industry lobbyists and observers told us this week is unlikely to move if introduced. But they perked up at the peculiar bent of the draft legislation, circulated last week among some industry officials, that would modify Communications Act Section 706, the authority under which the FCC is attempting to craft new net neutrality rules.

Something major will have to happen to spark a new Communications Act, said panelists at a TechFreedom event Monday. In the current atmosphere of split government, major legislation is very difficult to pull off, said professor Christopher Yoo of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “A new Congress” would definitely help, he said. Something that changes the environment will also be needed, panelists said, like a new technology or a court case. “You may need some major precipitating event” that would change the relative value that different people would place on getting a deal versus not doing so, Yoo said. Hank Hultquist, AT&T vice president-regulatory affairs, agreed: Something needs to happen so that having legislation is important enough to enough people that it cannot be blocked any longer, he said.

AT&T’s proposed deal to buy DirecTV may be a signal the telco is prioritizing its domestic business over expanding its international presence, industry analysts told us Monday. AT&T is selling off its remaining stake in Latin American wireless carrier América Móvil for $6 billion to ease some of the regulatory hurdles for the DirecTV deal. The DirecTV deal (see separate reports in this issue), announced Sunday (CD Bulletin May 19), essentially puts to rest speculation about AT&T’s true level of interest in Vodafone, analysts said.

Lawmakers will inevitably dig into implications of AT&T’s proposed acquisition of DirecTV, announced Sunday night (see separate reports in this issue), Capitol Hill aides and industry observers told us. That deal requires approval from the FCC and from the FTC or Justice Department, and Congress oversees the approval process. House and Senate Judiciary committee members announced hearings (CD Bulletin May 19). Congress has tackled such antitrust questions in recent months, as the Senate Judiciary Committee and House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee held lengthy hearings on Comcast’s proposed purchase of Time Warner Cable.

Principles for facial recognition technology use submitted to NTIA ahead of a Tuesday multistakeholder meeting revealed wide-ranging opinions and a divide between privacy and civil liberties advocates and industry groups. Participants we talked to said it was a good exercise to start articulating what has only been hypothetical to this point in the four meetings of the NTIA-backed group tasked with creating a code of conduct for facial recognition technology.

HOT SPRINGS, Va. -- The FCC spectrum aggregation order draft appeared to move in a positive direction before it was approved by the agency on a 3-2 vote Thursday, House Commerce Committee Majority Chief Counsel David Redl said Saturday at the FCBA annual retreat. John Branscome, Democratic senior counsel to the Senate Commerce Committee, said the FCC appeared to take some positive steps forward in both major auction orders approved at the monthly public meeting (CD May 16 p5).

AT&T’s initial concessions in its $48.5 billion deal to buy DirecTV are routine to get FCC approval, but more details are needed to determine whether that’s enough to win over the commission, observers said in interviews Monday. AT&T will agree to a three-year net neutrality commitment, expand high-speed broadband service in mostly rural areas and will offer DirecTV’s standalone video packages “at a consistent nationwide price” for three years, said CEO Randall Stephenson Monday during a conference call. AT&T announced its intent to buy the direct broadcast satellite company Sunday (CD Special Bulletin May 19 p1), as expected, and it’s projected to get antitrust approval (CD May 2 p2).