A divided Congress can help broadcasters avoid harmful legislation or regulation by slowing down consideration of issues detrimental to the industry, NAB President Gordon Smith said Thursday. “When it comes to broadcast issues, it is helpful to us, to have an extra check and balance between the chambers” so issues are “fully considered,” he said. That’s because decisions can have “lasting and damaging consequences,” Smith said in response to our question on C-SPAN.

The Department of Homeland Security is fully committed to allocating the 700 MHz D-block to public safety and will work with Congress to make that happen, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano told the House Homeland Security Committee Thursday. Napolitano also reiterated DHS’s commitment on cybersecurity.

House Republican leaders held a closed-door meeting with industry lobbyists Wednesday to press them to get involved in helping the GOP repeal net neutrality rules, House aides and lobbyists said. The meeting was held after an effort by House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., to repeal the rules collapsed Wednesday morning.

Tribes without ancestral lands would receive an assist from the FCC in getting AM and FM stations, under a draft order set for a vote at Thursday’s meeting, agency officials said. A landless tribe could get a waiver of commission rules by showing that it should receive a priority now reserved for tribes with lands, FCC officials said. That part of the radio order is not controversial inside the commission or out, agency and industry officials said.

AT&T has 10 million subscribers on tiered data plans, wireless chief Ralph de la Vega said Wednesday at a Morgan Stanley conference. The loss of iPhone exclusivity to Verizon has produced no surprises, he said.

The FCC in recent days approved four items on circulation that will be publicly released soon, including a report to Congress about minorities and women whose delay had prompted criticism by many groups, commission officials said Wednesday. They said the commissioners have approved the report about how the FCC is reducing barriers that minorities and women face entering the media and telecom industries. It had been due at the end of 2009.

FCC Commissioner Meredith Baker called for an overhaul of FCC merger policy, including sharp limits on the agency’s ability to stop the 180-day “shot clock” for merger review. Baker warned Wednesday that uncertainty baked into the process could be discouraging some deals that otherwise would be proposed by industry.

Converting the Universal Service Fund to broadband could cause the fund to balloon unless policymakers first reexamine “the purpose, design, and management” of the subsidy program, the GAO said in a report. The report dated Tuesday deals with opportunities to reduce duplication in government, save tax dollars and increase revenue. GAO recommended that Congress give USF increased attention since it falls outside of the annual appropriations process. In a speech Wednesday, Aspen Institute’s Blair Levin said “waste, fraud and abuse” are buzz words that don’t grasp the USF’s real problems.

The FCC should phase out Lifeline and Link-Up and “build on a new foundation” rather than tweak the systems, National Broadband Plan architect Blair Levin said Wednesday. There’s too much “dead weight loss” in the programs, because it’s not enough to make broadband available -- it has also to be adopted, he said. “How will the public react if they find out we're subsidizing other people so they can watch funny cat videos on YouTube?” Levin said at a Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies conference.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The complexity of content licensing deals is among factors slowing the rollout of TV Everywhere services from the pay-TV operators, panelists said at the OTTCON Wednesday. “If you're an HBO customer in a house that you own in Connecticut, but you're a Qwest customer at your ski lodge in Vail, are you going to be entitled to have HBO to Go in Vail even though” the local pay-TV operator isn’t getting a portion of that subscription fee, asked David Price, vice president of cable vendor Harmonic. “We have a boundary issue, which is really causing some consternation around the business modeling,” he said at the conference on over-the-top video.