The FCC Media Bureau denied requests from the American Cable Association, Public Knowledge and Dish Network for more time to comment and more information on Sinclair's buying Tribune Media (see 1707250045), said an order released Friday in docket 17-179. The bureau agreed with Sinclair and Tribune arguments that the requests for more information and third-party data should properly be filed as part of a petition to deny, during the time frame for such petitions. The motion for additional information is “misplaced,” the bureau said. “Movants do not need access to the wide-ranging and highly confidential information movants request the Commission to demand in order to file a petition to deny.” The movants and Sinclair/Tribune conceded it's up to commission staff to issue information requests in the merger proceeding, so the motion for more information is dismissed, the order said. Because of the dismissal, the bureau didn’t consider whether a previous case on confidential documents in a deal, CBS v. FCC, applies to this matter. ACA, PK and Dish also didn’t establish a basis for an extension of time, the order said. Though they had asked for the extension to have more time to go over the additional information requested, the denial of that request makes the time extension moot, the bureau said. Several other entities had filed in support of the request, including Common Cause and NTCA. A spokesman for ACA said the movants were "disappointed but not surprised." Commissioner Mignon Clyburn indicated with a tweet she hadn't been informed 48 hours ahead of the decision to deny the request. "I've asked about the @FCC majority’s policy of providing 48 hours notice but it doesn’t seem to apply here," Clyburn said of the order. "The 48-hours policy does not apply to requests for extension of time, which are routinely handled at the Bureau level," an FCC spokeswoman emailed. "That said, the offices were given notice." Representatives from Dish, ACA, Common Cause, the Computer & Communications Industry Association and other supporters of the motion plan a news-media call Monday on their opposition filings to Sinclair/Tribune, said a news release: "As a group, these representatives will call for the Sinclair-Tribune merger to be rejected."

Shares of some telcos fell after Windstream eliminated a dividend. Windstream said it instead will buy back up to $90 million of stock. "This is the right path,” said CEO Tony Thomas Thursday. Later that day, the company's stock fell, as did those of CenturyLink and Frontier Communications. CenturyLink and Frontier declined to comment. Rural LECs were likely to take "it on the chin today in light of the ... dividend cut," Wells Fargo analyst Jennifer Fritzsche emailed investors before the open of regular U.S. markets; she declined further comment. Windstream can use the savings "to de-lever, expedite its capital investment in building out fiber, and buy back shares," she wrote in another note. Windstream is "very confident about the track we are on," a spokesman emailed us. "The stock volatility is not unexpected given the change in our capital allocation strategy. Our equity is undervalued in the market, and we believe eliminating the dividend and implementing a meaningful share repurchase program is the best way to create long-term value for our shareholders." Windstream ended Thursday down 36 percent at $2.38, CenturyLink closed down 5.5 percent to $22.44 and Frontier slid 15 percent to $14.54.

Correction: Southern Linc doesn't have any deals with AT&T related to FirstNet (see 1708010068).

The FCC created a new Broadband Deployment Advisory Group body, the Streamlining Federal Siting Working Group. Chairman Ajit Pai announced the new working group after the FCC meeting Thursday, and the agency later released a notice with members (see the personals section of this issue of the publication). Jonathan Adelstein, president of the Wireless Infrastructure Association, will be chair, and Valerie Fast Horse, information technology director at the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, vice chair. They “will tackle how we will address barriers to deployment on property that is controlled by the federal government,” Pai told reporters. “I think their work will fit in nicely with the work the other working groups are doing. I don't think it's going to hold back the overall mission to help us identify barriers to broadband deployment.” Pai also defended the BDAC's overall makeup, saying the membership is broad. Several federal agencies are represented on the working group, including the Agriculture Department, Interior Department and Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Bureau of Land Management. "Nearly a third of America’s landmass and thousands of buildings are owned or controlled by the Federal government," Adelstein said in a news release. "We need processes that ensure Federal resources are efficiently tapped to bridge the digital divide."

Groups opposed to the proposed overhaul net neutrality rules asked the FCC for an eight-week extension of the deadline for reply comments, now due Aug. 16 (see 1706280037). The petition notes that more than 15 million comments were filed. “This volume alone warrants an extension of time for the replies,” the groups said. “The current schedule does not afford interested persons enough time to read and properly consider the record, let alone to prepare their own replies.” The groups note the FCC provided a longer comment period in past net neutrality proceedings. Public Knowledge, Access Now, the American Civil Liberties Union, Computer & Communications Industry Association, Consumers Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Engine Advocacy and National Consumer Law Center are among those that signed the filing in docket 17-108. Some 20 Democratic senators plus Vermont independent Bernie Sanders sought more time, too, noting past net neutrality proceedings gave twice the amount of time for replies: 60 days. "The FCC should follow its own precedent and extend the reply comment period to ensure the fullest spectrum of comments fills the docket in this historic rulemaking," wrote Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Ron Wyden of Oregon, Al Franken of Minnesota, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kamala Harris of California, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and others. The agency declined to comment.

The General Service Administration accepted AT&T, CenturyLink, Verizon and seven others into its 15-year, $50 billion Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) program. GSA listed participants on its website. Verizon and CenturyLink celebrated in Wednesday news releases (see here and here). The EIS program, part of GSA’s Network Services 2020 strategy, helps federal agencies buy IT and telecom infrastructure services.

The LPTV Spectrum Rights Coalition said it's “declaring a truce” in the debate over a proposal to reserve vacant channels in the TV bands for unlicensed use (see 1707110015). The declaration came in an email newsletter Tuesday. Though NAB and Microsoft have been actively pressing the FCC on the matter, a broadcast industry official told us the two sides remain far apart, and the coalition announcement doesn’t indicate any of the other parties active in the vacant channel proceeding have reached an agreement with the coalition. The group is working on a plan under which licensees would be offered “economic opportunities to utilize their spectrum rights to participate in the solving of national problems,” the email said. LPTV spectrum could be used for rural broadband, and to assist in the rollout of ATSC 3.0, the email said. Microsoft didn’t comment. NAB "remains strongly opposed to the Microsoft proposal," a spokesman said in response to the coalition announcement. "Microsoft’s proposal could damage TV reception for tens of millions of people living in both rural and urban America.”

After assuring the FCC that changing Part 32 telco accounting rules to let carriers rely exclusively on generally accepted accounting procedures wouldn't lead to higher pole attachment rates, telcos are now saying they made no such guarantees, NCTA said in a docket 14-130 reply posted Tuesday. The filing responded to USTelecom and AT&T oppositions to its petition that the agency revise pole-attachment aspects of its order streamlining price-cap ILEC accounting (see 1707240051). NCTA said no one refuted its contentions of how pole rents can be inflated using GAAP. It said the required implementation rate differential isn't enough of a safeguard against rate increases under a GAAP-based regime. The association said the FCC should continue to provide access to pole cost data through public postings and pre-complaint discovery and require carriers responding to that discovery provide disaggregated pole cost data and not require confidential treatment.

The FTC will share consumer complaints about robocaller phone numbers every business day to carriers and others that have implemented call-blocking technologies, the commission said in a Tuesday news release. The numbers will be used in "blacklists" or databases of phone numbers flagged for complaints, said the agency. New data, including the date and time a call was received, what the call was about and if it was a robocall, also will be provided, the release said. More than 1.9 million complaints were filed in the first five months of the year, the agency said. "Kvetch and release" was the title of the agency's blog post about the initiative.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dismissed in part and denied in part Free Access & Broadcast Telemedia’s challenge of FCC incentive auction rules (see 1705160070). FAB’s case was framed as a challenge of the commencing operations and channel sharing orders, but the FCC argued and the court ruled in an opinion released Tuesday that the policies FAB targeted actually stemmed from the 2014 incentive auction order. “The window for challenging the Auction Order shut 60 days after that order was entered, and it will stay shut unless cracked open again by the Commission itself,” said the majority opinion by Judge Thomas Griffith. Judges Sri Srinivasan and Karen Henderson were also on the panel. “This petition for review flies beak-first into that hard limit insofar as it aims to re-litigate the Auction Order’s procedures,” the opinion said. The auction order’s effects on low-power TV already were upheld by the court in the Mako case, Griffin said. Rejecting all the parts of FAB’s challenge that stemmed from the 2014 order, the court considered arguments against the other two orders but also found them wanting. FAB argued the FCC acted in an arbitrary fashion by not studying the effect of the auction on LPTV, but Griffin disagreed. Channel sharing “would help some LPTV stations by enabling them to survive the repacking process and save money by sharing costs,” Griffin said. “The Commission was surely right that letting some LPTV stations share channels after the auction would be better than offering them no assistance at all.” The FCC in 2014 “made decisions that threatened to drive petitioners off the air -- decisions that petitioners understandably tried to challenge,” Griffin said. “But the law does not leave them free to keep trying.” FAB didn’t comment.