Career FCC staff, trying to finish media ownership rules, are set to release statistics on ownership of all U.S. radio and TV stations to include those results in the forthcoming draft order, agency officials said. They said the Media Bureau may release, as soon as Thursday, aggregate information on what Form 323 biennial ownership reports say about who holds various classes of broadcast licensees. That data from 2009 and 2011 -- to be presented in aggregate form for the first time and after delays releasing it -- would then update the record, agency officials said. Bureau staff appear to be nearing an end to drafting the quadrennial media ownership order that was due to have been finished in 2010, agency officials told us this week.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski largely claimed victory Wednesday on commission efforts to curb so-called “wireless bill shock” without imposing new rules, saying the top U.S. carriers are now offering alerts. But commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel said the FCC needs to keep regulation alive as a possibility.

The Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau issued three waivers of new FCC accessibility rules, an order released by the bureau Monday said (http://xrl.us/bnui3c). The NCTA, CEA and Entertainment Software Association (ESA) each sought waivers of certain elements of the new advanced communications services (ACS) accessibility requirements that were set to become effective Oct. 8, 2013. The CGB order granted each waiver but set an earlier expiration date than the parties had sought.

The top FCC staffer dealing with satellite issues was frustrated with GPS companies’ complaints about interference LightSquared’s wholesale wireless broadband service would cause to their devices, an internal email released by the House Commerce Committee Tuesday said. The 70-plus pages cover 2009 to 2011, including emails among FCC staff. An email among Wireless Bureau Chief Ruth Milkman, International Bureau Chief Mindel De La Torre and other staff shows that the FCC was interested in drafting an order on LightSquared’s application Dec. 20, 2010, a day before the FCC voted on net neutrality rules.

An FCC briefing on industry progress in meeting the goals of a Oct. 17, 2011, agreement on curbing bill shock will say more work remains to be done on the part of industry, commission officials said Tuesday. They said the FCC will also find that the four major carriers have met an initial goal of offering alerts on two of four possible notifications: For data, voice, messaging and international roaming overage, by Wednesday’s deadline. Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau staff are to brief commissioners. The report was a last-minute addition Tuesday to the FCC’s Oct. 17 meeting agenda (http://xrl.us/bnujah).

So-called patent trolls and the patent wars are high-profile indicators of problems in the way the U.S. handles its own technology patent process and resulting litigation, industry experts said Tuesday. While the experts said at an Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus event that such problems exist, they did not agree about how severe those problems are.

The former affiliate of a now-liquidated carrier brought lawsuits to a third state this week. Transcom Enhanced Services sued the Wisconsin Public Service Commission, AT&T Wisconsin, TDS Telecom and another 54 defendants. Transcom filed the complaints Monday in U.S. District Court in Madison. It’s brought similar complaints to courts in Tennessee, filed in July, and in Georgia, this month (CD Oct 15 p9).

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai pushed for creation of an Internet Protocol transition task force to help modernize the commission’s “anachronistic laws” and accelerate the technological changes in the communications industry. “We need to adopt a holistic approach to confronting this challenge instead of addressing issues on a piecemeal basis as they happen to pop up,” Pai said Tuesday at an event on Internet transformation hosted by the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Communications Liberty and Innovation Project (CLIP). “The work of the task force will be as daunting as it is necessary, for we simply cannot not import the broken, burdensome economic regulations of the PSTN [public switched telephone network] into an all-IP world."

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn (D) revealed the first two winners of his Illinois Gigabit Communities Challenge Tuesday -- Gigabit Squared and OnLight Aurora. They will help advance fiber deployment in nine South Chicago neighborhoods and in Aurora’s public and private K-12 schools, commercial corridors, higher education and healthcare institutions. The governor promised $6 million in “prize funding” to winning projects earlier this year as part of his Illinois Jobs Now! program, according to the challenge’s website (http://xrl.us/bnuiqd). In its Tuesday announcements, Illinois is calling this money “a seed investment” for its greater broadband goals.

The process for informing and crafting trade negotiations needs to be improved, said panelists at an American University Washington College of Law event on intellectual property, trade and development Tuesday. During a morning panel, David Langdon, senior economist in the Office of the Chief Economist in the Commerce Department’s Economics and Statistics Administration, pointed to a report from April (http://1.usa.gov/HxZbYf) that discussed the impact of IP laws on the U.S. economy. The report, which Langdon said was commissioned by the White House, attributes 34.8 percent of the country’s GDP and 40 million jobs in 2010 to “IP-intensive industries.” But, Langdon said, responding to comments from panelists and audience members, the study “does not explicitly call for policy” based on the concept that increased IP protection results in increased employment.