The draft FCC rulemaking notice on retransmission consent asks questions about the practices of both pay-TV providers and broadcasters, the sides sparring over whether rules need to be updated, said commission and industry officials. The questions deal with subjects such as pay-TV providers’ notices to subscribers about possible carriage blackouts, and broadcast practices in negotiating retrans deals, FCC officials said. Some broadcast officials said they would prefer the item not ask about their industry’s retrans practices, or even to have a notice at all, and several pay-TV executives said they would prefer that the draft (CD Feb 14 p6) not say the commission doesn’t have authority to order interim carriage or arbitration in cases in which good faith is lacking.

The FCC should impose net neutrality conditions on the CenturyLink-Qwest deal, Free Press said in meetings with commission staff. In an ex parte notice published Friday, the group that supports such rules said it also asked the commission to require the merged company to forgo Universal Service Fund support for broadband projects. “We noted that the merging parties are making, and will be held to buildout requirements as a condition of the merger and that the combined entity should not expect to use USF monies to meet these commitments,” Free Press Policy Counsel Aparna Sridhar wrote in the notice.

The FCC’s net neutrality order became a small part of the larger federal budget game after the House Thursday night passed an amendment to the Continuing Resolution sponsored by Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore. Breaking mostly along party lines, the House voted 244-181 to approve the amendment. It would ban FCC implementation of net neutrality rules until the Continuing Resolution expires Sept. 30. A final vote on the CR was expected late Friday. The House also passed an amendment to cut the agency’s chief diversity officer. That position has been held by Mark Lloyd, who drew heat from the political right for what some thought was support of the fairness doctrine, which he said he never backed.

Moving AM and FM stations from rural to urban areas would become harder under a draft FCC order that also deals with tribal radio issues, agency and industry lawyers said. Among the many items tentatively set for a vote at the March 3 meeting (CD Feb 14 p6), the Media Bureau order circulated by Chairman Julius Genachowski sets up a rebuttable presumption against what are called move-ins, an agency official said. AM and FM stations seeking to change their community of license to reach a service contour that was half or more urbanized would need to make a case why they should be able to make such a move, FCC officials said.

The FCC is probing the representations of News Corp.’s Fox Television Stations in discussions it had with the agency over the pending and contested license renewal of WWOR-TV Secaucus, N.J. Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake on Thursday sent the a lawyer for the broadcast network a letter of inquiry saying it’s investigating whether Fox broke several rules by allegedly misrepresenting the extent of its news and operations. WWOR is the only full-power commercial station in New Jersey and is required to carry news serving the specific audience of the northern part of the state, rather than just its community of license, as is the case with all other U.S. TV stations.

A broad state role is critical to modernize and streamline Universal Service and Intercarrier Compensation policies, state members of the Federal-State USF Joint Board told an FCC workshop Thursday. Speakers debated proposed changes in fund size.

President Barack Obama’s broadband stimulus program was “vindicated” by new NTIA findings that up to two-thirds of America’s schools can’t get broadband at speeds they need, NTIA Administrator Lawrence Strickling. Thursday, the agency unveiled its new broadband map. The map indicated that up to 10 percent of Americans can’t get broadband. The map is based on more than 125 million searchable records in the new mapping database, with information from some 1,600 broadband companies. “All of these records can be analyzed in countless ways,” Strickling said. “But the data continues to show that a digital divide continues to exist."

Good oversight doesn’t include “wholesale attacks against agencies … for political purposes,” House Communications Subcommittee Ranking Member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., told reporters Thursday. She rejected amendments to the Continuing Resolution -- debated Thursday -- that would affect FCC operations. Eshoo said at a media briefing that her priorities for this Congress include spectrum reform, overhaul of the Universal Service Fund and building a public safety wireless broadband network.

SAN FRANCISCO -- “The odds are we'll wait for a catastrophic event” for the U.S. government to impose cybersecurity requirements, said Mike McConnell, a former director of national intelligence. “I hope that doesn’t happen,” but it’s the usual pattern for action, he said at the RSA Conference late Wednesday. Legislation could give legal protections for measures to protect networks, in addition to imposing liability for lapses, said McConnell, an executive vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton.

Six consumer electronics companies and Google united to press the FCC to issue a delayed rulemaking on AllVid so all cable operators, DBS providers and telco-TV companies’ systems can connect to a wide array of CE equipment using inexpensive gateway devices. The AllVid Tech Company Alliance was formed Wednesday. It wrote FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski to lay out a case many of the members have been making to the regulator separately in recent months. They contend that multichannel video programming distributors aren’t doing enough to let their subscribers use devices other than those provided by those MVPDs to access over-the-top and pay-TV programming.