Correction: Kathy Kiely is National Press Club Journalism Institute Freedom Fellow (see 1705250014).

Robin Colwell, chief of staff to FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly, will take over as House Commerce Committee chief counsel on telecom matters. That role has been filled by David Redl, who the Trump administration nominated to lead NTIA (see 1705160081). Redl “will remain on staff until confirmed,” a committee news release said Friday. Colwell is a former aide to Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., and former counsel to the Senate Commerce Committee’s Tourism, Competitiveness and Innovation Subcommittee. Also joining as a senior professional staffer is Timothy Kurth, who advised then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., on tech and telecom issues. House Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., and Communications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., issued a joint statement lauding the new hires' “breadth of knowledge on communications policy” poised to help Commerce’s work toward “boosting broadband deployment, Next Generation 911 reauthorization, spectrum allocation and availability, and FCC oversight.” O’Rielly also issued a statement praising Colwell: “While she maintains sound conservative principles, she is able and willing to reach a deal when appropriate.” The committee also lost Deputy Chief Counsel Grace Koh earlier this year, now special assistant to the president for tech, telecom and cybersecurity policy. Kelsey Guyselman, Gene Fullano, Lauren McCarty and Giulia Giannangeli will retain their current committee roles, the committee said Friday. “It never hurts to populate the agencies with your own people,” Walden told reporters earlier this month of the career changes for Redl and Koh, saying "the hard part" is replacing them.

The Nebraska Public Service Commission executive director resigned after he couldn’t agree with the agency on a resolution to conflict-of-interest questions, the state telecom regulator said. Government watchdogs decried possible conflict of interest after Nebraska’s attorney general found no violations by PSC Executive Director Jeff Pursley, who consults on the side for telecom companies (see 1705170037). “The Commission and Dir. Pursley agreed that he would sever his ties with his part-time employer,” a PSC spokeswoman emailed us. “However, they could not come to an agreement on when that would occur and Director Pursley chose to resign.” The resignation is effective June 12; Pursley’s duties will be absorbed by staff until a new executive director is hired, the commission said in a Thursday news release. “Jeff is a man of many of talents,” said Chairman Tim Schram, praising Pursley’s USF experience.

ITTA and USTelecom asked the FCC to ease business data service regulations for some rural telcos by allowing them to opt into recently adopted relief for price-cap carriers. "Rate-of-return carriers that receive universal service fund ('USF') support based on theoretical cost models (termed 'model-based rate-of-return carriers) must comply with legacy regulation only for their BDS offerings," said a petition for rulemaking Thursday. "Costs of such rate-of-return regulations for these carriers now outweigh the benefits of the regulation." The petition "requests that model-based rate-of-return carriers be permitted to opt into existing price cap regulation for their provision of BDS, subject to certain conditions. ... Continued compliance with rate-[of]-return-based rate regulation, including tariffing, tariff review plans, cost studies, and associated requirements, entails significant costs that are difficult for model-based rate-of-return carriers to recover in the competitive marketplace."

Fourteen people who said comments were submitted to the FCC fraudulently under their names in support of a rollback of Communications Act Title II regulation of broadband service are demanding the agency investigate. In a letter to Chairman Ajit Pai and Chief Information Officer David Bray released Thursday by Fight for the Future, the 14 said the agency should remove the fraudulent comments from the docket, publicly disclose any information it has about whoever is behind what it says are more than 450,000 fake comments and notify others whose names and addressed were used fraudulently. "While it may be convenient for you to ignore this, given that it was done in an attempt to support your position, it cannot be the case that the FCC moves forward on such a major public debate without properly investigating this known attack," the letter said. The FCC didn't comment.

FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly said the U.S. government's October Internet Assigned Numbers Authority oversight transition (see 1609300065 and 1610030042) failed to stop China, Russia and other countries from increasing government involvement in internet governance. O'Rielly said in April the U.S. needs to continue to play a leading role in fostering multistakeholder internet governance, saying the IANA handoff was a failed “appeasement strategy” amid policy moves and statements from the ITU, China and Russia (see 1704210062). O'Rielly again noted his concerns about China and the ITU in a new opinion piece in the New Hampshire Union Leader, saying the U.S.' “fancy strategy didn't appease anyone” already opposed to multistakeholderism. O'Rielly also cited April ITU study meetings in which Russia and several African countries sought to define OTT content providers, which he called a “veiled attempt to expand ITU jurisdiction to the internet, as well as to get its grips into popular consumer uses, such as Netflix, Skype, and WhatsApp.” The U.S. “should learn from the ICANN aftermath and redouble our efforts to quash continuous and systemic assaults on the internet by foreign governments, using all appropriate means,” O'Rielly said.

FCC staff partially granted a Windstream waiver petition seeking added compensation to make up for intrastate access charges it billed to Halo Wireless in 2010-11 but was unable to collect (see 1509020059). The Wireline Bureau said it was acting "consistent with precedent" to allow Windstream to recover through intercarrier compensation (ICC) certain funds that it wasn't able to collect from Halo "due to an access charge avoidance scheme and subsequent bankruptcy" filing. "Windstream demonstrates good cause to include in its recovery calculations revenue associated with traffic eligible for compensation that was terminated during [FY 2011] and that otherwise meets the criteria spelled out in our revenue recovery rules," said a bureau order Wednesday in docket 01-92. "Including such revenue in Windstream’s revenue calculations, subject to [certain] conditions ... conforms to the policies underlying the recovery mechanism" adopted in a 2011 USF/ICC overhaul order, said the bureau. The 2011 order set terminating access-charge rates on a downward path to zero. Windstream welcomed the waiver. It enables the company "to recover important universal service funding withheld because of an improper avoidance scheme by Halo Wireless," emailed Senior Vice President Eric Einhorn. "We are pleased that the Commission agreed that Halo’s ploy to disguise traffic should not deny Windstream of vital and valid universal service support.”

Google is working on “a secret project” in virtual reality by partnering “deeply” with a “leading OLED manufacturer” to create a VR-capable display “with 10X more pixels," said Clay Bavor, vice president-VR, at a Society for Information Display conference in Los Angeles. He later declined to answer our question to identify the company. A representative then physically restrained us from a follow-up query. Better VR displays may have the “horrifying” result of requiring 100 Gbps, Bavor told the conference Tuesday. “Not only can you not render that much data, you can’t even transfer it,” he said. “You can’t even move it around the device.” Google didn't reply to our requests for comment Tuesday or Wednesday.

A civil rights attorney for Cleveland broadband consumers threatened a class-action lawsuit against AT&T over alleged income-based discrimination in the city as described by a National Digital Inclusion Alliance report. In a Tuesday letter, Parks and Crump attorney Daryl Parks said the Cleveland consumers will file an FCC complaint and advise state governors to consider the alleged AT&T income discrimination as state executives weigh AT&T’s FirstNet plans this year. Parks notified AT&T about the “redlining” concerns last month (see 1704270045). In a May 5 letter, AT&T Assistant General Counsel James Meza disagreed that the company violated the civil rights section (Section 706) of the Telecom Act. “This study is flawed and its conclusions are specious,” said Meza. AT&T is spending large amounts of money in Ohio and has a “targeted effort to promote broadband adoption by low-income customers,” he said. In the new letter, Parks said the ISP defined “redlining in such a way that only an extreme racial bigot could ever be found to be redlining” and interpreted Section 706 “in a manner that would render the statute completely impotent.” The company's “amount of aggregate investment is irrelevant to discrimination in the placement of investments,” Parks said. An AT&T spokesman and FirstNet didn’t comment further.

The FCC’s current landlord may want a 20 percent premium over the current rent to extend the agency’s lease, the commission said in its 2018 budget request. The FCC needs the extension because its lease will expire in October, but its new building won’t be ready until FY 2019, and current landlord Parcel 49C’s protest of the General Service Administration’s award of the bid for the new headquarters to Trammell Crow is pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals, the budget papers said. GSA is negotiating the extension, the document said. The 20 percent rent increase would be an extra $9 million per year, the budget said. “The first six months after the lease award is critical as the Commission will be required to meet design and construction timetables established by the GSA and the new lessor,” the budget said. “The FCC is also required to provide the details related to specialized areas and requirements related to electrical, heating, air conditioning, floor loading, specialized construction and the equipment to support them.” The commission also wants to use auction funds to create “public facing” and internal spectrum visualization tools, the budget said. The visualization tools would aid in helping the public and the agency understand “who has the rights to different spectrum bands at different locations,” the budget request said. The FCC also will be working to transition its systems “100 percent” to the cloud, the budget document said. “The FCC will proactively engage security engineers and architects to ensure the modernization of systems in the cloud are secure and adhere to Federal mandates and regulations to include two factor authentication.”