Time Warner isn’t interested in spinning off HBO, Chairman Jeffrey Bewkes said Wednesday during the company’s Q1 earnings teleconference. BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield had laid out a case for why the company should let HBO stand on its own. He said spinning it off could reduce Time Warner’s leverage and give HBO and Warner Brothers Studios the freedom to experiment with new business models, such as bypassing pay-TV operators.

The FCC is moving forward on drafting an order on a Universal Service Fund and Intercarrier Compensation revamp and is working on accelerating the process, said Carol Mattey, deputy chief of the Wireline Bureau, during a D.C. Bar panel Wednesday. Industry panelists urged immediate action on VoIP and a more targeted USF.

A U.K.-based TV technology vendor said it’s working with Granite Broadcasting to test an over-the-air pay TV service in the U.S. this year. Motive TV will use Granite’s KOFY-TV San Francisco to test its TV Anytime Anywhere products in a U.S. market, CEO Leonard Fertig said in an interview. “We'll set up a series of experiments with different segments of the market, to see what can be done in the U.S., using the over-the-air digital frequency Granite already uses,” he said. The test will include VOD and DVR capabilities, pay-per-view, as well as the ability to view programming on multiple Web-enabled devices in the home, he said.

Enhancing privacy legislation and combating online piracy topped the list of legislative goals for lawmakers speaking at a Washington Caucus event sponsored by the Computer and Communications Industry Association. Senators and representatives from both sides of the aisle expressed their hopes and concerns on Wednesday for the expansion of Internet technologies in the coming years.

The thousands of short filings at the FCC blasting AT&T’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile will likely get only limited attention at the regulator, based on the long history of merger reviews by the agency. The agency has posted more than 4,200 such comments, overwhelmingly opposed to the deal as of our deadline. Other high-profile deals have attracted similar numbers of filings.

A California do-not-track bill squeaked through its first test after what supporters called the country’s first legislative hearing on the subject. The state Senate Judiciary Committee late Tuesday approved SB-761 by Sen. Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, in a 3-2 vote on party lines. “Partisanship applies” when consumer protection and industry interest conflict, Director Beth Givens of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse told us Wednesday.

Few media items of major import are likely to get FCC action in the foreseeable future, as the agency continues to focus on other areas, predicted all the agency and industry officials we asked. Votes on proposed AllVid and program carriage rules (CD May 3 p8) appear to be the near-term exceptions to what may prove to be the rule, they predicted. It may be a while before the commission releases a long-anticipated mathematical model showing how TV stations’ coverage areas would be affected by the repacking of TV channels the FCC seeks as part of its hoped-for incentive auction plan. Broadband, spectrum and changing the Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation system likely will keep dominating the commission’s attention, said agency and media industry officials.

The FCC “should abandon” its proposal for reverse auctions and instead create three new, separate funds to overhaul the universal service system, state members of the Joint Board on Universal Service told the commission in comments posted late Monday. The state members said the three new funds should be: (1) A “provider of last resort” fund to be “a comprehensive cost-based support mechanism to provide sufficient support to carriers that accept provider-of-last resort duties, adjusted for broadband services. (2) A “mobility fund” that would provide “grants to finance the building of wireless towers in areas the FCC designates as under-served or unserved by wireless broadband.” (3) A “wireline broadband fund” that would award grants “to finance broadband wireline facilities in areas the FCC designates as under-served or unserved by wireline broadband.” The comments were posted to docket 10-90.

The U.S. must learn from Japan in what worked and didn’t in communications following the 9.0-magnitude earthquake that hit the country in March, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Tuesday at the start of the agency’s earthquake preparedness forum. FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate said major earthquakes are unique among natural disasters in the amount of damage they can do to communications and other systems.

AT&T and Sprint Nextel started their battle over the AT&T/T-Mobile merger at the state level, with filings in states including West Virginia. Despite varying levels of jurisdictions, AT&T also filed in Hawaii, California, Arizona and Louisiana.