New Jersey rural communities are unlikely to appeal a recent controversial state Board of Public Utilities (BPU) decision (CD April 25 p20) that critics say lets Verizon off the hook from a 21-year-old commitment to deploy broadband across the state. They are pursuing a new strategy that would bring the company before the BPU again, said attorneys and officials working on the issue. The BPU had ruled Verizon can offer wireless instead of the fiber that communities wanted. The communities now plan to press the BPU to order Verizon to improve phone reception by replacing copper lines with fiber, said Michael Darcy, assistant executive director of the New Jersey State League of Municipalities (NJSLM), on Thursday. That would bring the high-speed broadband the communities want, he said. The New Jersey Division of Rate Counsel is considering an appeal, said Director Stefanie Brand.

The likelihood of any AT&T takeover of DirecTV finding favor with antitrust authorities rests with its potential as a horizontal acquisition, experts said in interviews this week. Its potential to remove a pay-TV provider and to move AT&T’s U-verse service onto satellite dishes also are factors, some said. An AT&T/DirecTV deal probably has a better chance of being approved by the FTC or Justice Department than Sprint/T-Mobile or Comcast/Time Warner Cable, said some analysts and antitrust attorneys.

NBCUniversal will soon enable viewers using set-top streaming boxes to stream its TV content, Jennifer Pirot, senior vice president-digital distribution, told the Streaming Media East conference in New York Wednesday. “We will be there,” she said of set-top boxes.

The battle over net neutrality and whether to reclassify broadband as a Title II telecom service continued to echo on Capitol Hill Wednesday, ahead of a Thursday FCC meeting considering such questions. Responses differed substantially by party lines but were united by concern over what the FCC proposal contains, whether its consideration should delayed and the legal authority used in crafting new rules.

The chief of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division sent the FCC a letter Wednesday endorsing spectrum aggregation limits, set for a vote at Thursday’s open meeting. Meanwhile, net neutrality isn’t the only issue to attract protesters at the FCC. (See separate report in this issue.) A small group of protesters showed up at the FCC Wednesday to hold up signs urging commissioners not to forget the TV incentive auction as net neutrality takes much of the attention headed into the meeting. “Focus on Auction,” one sign read. “No Spectrum = No Net to Open,” a second said.

TV “time-shifting” and the ubiquitous duplication of other copyrighted materials could shift court rulings on fair use in favor of content providers, said corporate IP attorneys at a Silicon Flatirons event at the University of Colorado Tuesday. As technology progresses and allows for the expansion of fair use claims, content providers need to assert their copyrights, even if they are not operating within new technological media, said Stan Pierre-Louis, Viacom associate general counsel for IP. Content providers don’t have the prerogative to make fair use or copyright claims, said John Bergmayer, Public Knowledge (PK) senior staff attorney.

Many of the changes to the FCC net neutrality NPRM in recent weeks have been driven by the Democratic commissioners, agency and industry officials said, as Chairman Tom Wheeler tries to secure the three votes he needs on the most intensely scrutinized item he has tackled as chairman. As the vote nears, some officials point to Commissioner Mignon Clyburn as the one in the driver’s seat, as Wheeler redrafts the rules to devote more space to the possibility of using Title II to achieve his net neutrality goals. The idea of a “springing” Title II authority has also gained traction in recent days, and is part of the NPRM discussion, industry observers said. That would invoke Title II as backup authority in case a court finds Communications Act Section 706 has fallen short.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s draft Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) has support among industry executives we spoke with, while major privacy advocates who opposed the House-passed Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) said they also have significant concerns about CISA. That bill, which Senate Intelligence leaders had been working on since last year, tracks with many aspects of CISPA (HR-624) but has what proponents believe are improved privacy protections (CD April 30 p19).

Further FCC culling of a backlog of indecency complaints that exceeded a million at its peak (CD Jan 14/13 p1) hasn’t mollified critics on either side of the issue. The number of new consumer complaints about what’s on radio and TV plunged in recent years to a minuscule proportion of the highs after Janet Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction,” agency records show. That happened because consumers grew discouraged feeling the agency won’t act on instances of on-air nudity and cursing they flagged, and also because of a lack of high-profile indecency on primetime broadcast TV a la Jackson, said groups that ask viewers to file FCC complaints.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler appears to be largely freezing the commission’s Republicans out of the loop on all three big-ticket items slated for a vote Thursday -- net neutrality, spectrum aggregation and rules for the TV incentive auction -- agency and industry officials said Tuesday. Commissioners Ajit Pai and Mike O'Rielly have indicated that their strong opposition, particularly on the net neutrality rulemaking and spectrum aggregation rules, has given them little leverage to negotiate with the chairman’s office, officials said.