The FCC released results of its Form 323 data gathering on broadcast ownership, and the data shows a slight increase in full-power station ownership by women and a decrease for racial minorities between 2013 and 2015. The groups remain under-represented compared to their portion of the U.S. population. Public interest groups have been asking the FCC to release the 323 ownership data for several years, and pushed the issue during the previous administration's media ownership rulemaking proceeding. "This data is years overdue," said Cheryl Leanza, who represents the United Church of Christ. “Racial minorities owned 36 full power commercial television stations (2.6 percent) in 2015 and 41 full power television stations (3.0 percent) in 2013,” said the Media Bureau’s third report on ownership of commercial broadcast stations. The report shows women owned 102 full-power stations in 2015, up from 87 in 2013. Hispanic full-power ownership also rose from 2013 to 2015, from 42 to 62, the report said. Women owned 14.9 percent of total low-power TV stations in 2013, and fell to 11 percent in 2015, while Hispanic LPTV ownership went from 10 percent in 2013 to 13.4 percent in 2015. “Racial minorities owned 27 LPTV stations (2.4 percent) in 2015 and 41 stations (3.3 percent) in 2013,” the report said. According to the Form 323 data, American Indian/Alaska Natives owned 40 broadcast stations in 2015, Asians owned 152 broadcast stations, African-Americans owned 180 broadcast stations, Pacific Islanders owned 20, and people belonging to two or more races owned 10 broadcast stations. “Whites collectively or individually held a majority of the voting interests in 9,515 broadcast stations,” the report said.

FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn was to have spoken Wednesday in Los Angeles at the Connected Communities forum on access and affordability. An excerpt released by Clyburn’s office indicated a speech urging the public to pressure the FCC to make rules that foster “robust, affordable communications services” and “a media landscape” that reflects “rich diversity.” Commissioners “are your public servants at the FCC, and it is high time that our actions reflect our job description,” Clyburn said, according to the released remarks.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai worries the attacks he has undergone on net neutrality could have a negative effect on his family, he said in a podcast hosted Wednesday by Matt Lewis, a columnist for The Daily Beast. Pai said protesters have been in his neighborhood talking to his neighbors. “It’s just sort of annoying,” he said. “It’s the same professional protesters who have been to the FCC many times before. … It scared my kids a little bit, which took some reassuring from me.” Needing a security plan is one of the negative parts of being chairman, he said. “My eyes are still focused on the prize, which is delivering results for the American people,” he said. “Nothing is going to intimidate me.” The FCC must focus on actual harm rather than potential harms to the internet as it revises net neutrality rules, Pai said. “If there’s a hypothetical harm, let’s wait until it materializes or at least we have evidence that it will materialize,” he said. “Otherwise, the government is simply making it up as it goes along, which is pretty dangerous for investment and innovation.” Pai said he has long believed that the preferable solution is for Congress to step in and “tell us what the rules of the road should be in the digital world once and for all,” he said. The FCC has contorted itself for years “because we’ve tried to fit this square peg of the 21st century internet marketplace into the round holes of 1934 laws or 1996 laws,” Pai said referring to the Communications Act and Telecom Act. “Otherwise, we’re going to keep having these debates over and over again.” Pai, who was on Capitol Hill last week to meet with House Commerce Committee lawmakers on net neutrality (see 1705030052), said he mostly enjoyed Hill meetings aimed at finding agreement. A few weeks ago, Pai said he met with members of the House Rural Broadband Working Group. “It was an incredible meeting” and discussions ran twice as long as scheduled, he said. “I got some very favorable feedback from the Democrats,” Pai said. “They said, ‘You know what? This has never happened before. Thank you for giving us a chance to share our views and letting us know what you’re thinking.’” Pai added, “I continue to think common ground is there.”

The FCC Electronic Comment Filing System seemed to still be experiencing problems Wednesday, as it has been this week. Access to filings was intermittent and apparently limited to only some dockets when we did have access. The agency declined to comment. The commission has been receiving high volumes of comments on its open internet draft proposals, which Sunday night was the target of a commentary by HBO comedian John Oliver. His 2014 commentary was credited with helping spark a wave of public comments in a previous net neutrality rulemaking that apparently helped crash the agency's system (see 1406040046). Beginning Sunday at midnight, the commission was "subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks" that eventually tied up servers in the agency's commercial cloud host's system, preventing responses to people trying to submit comments, said Chief Information Officer David Bray Monday (see 1705080042). Fight for the Future, which backs net neutrality rules, Tuesday questioned whether the DDoS attacks took place right after Oliver's commentary, and Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, wrote the FCC Tuesday to ask questions about the situation and urge an alternative way to file comments (see 1705090063).

The FCC is closing a post office box used to collect fees from industry petitioners seeking relief from Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act obligations if they're "not reasonably achievable." A Tuesday order "will reduce Commission expenditures and modernize our procedures by amending Section 1.109" of its rules. "The only current use of Section 1.1109 and P.O. Box 979092 [in St. Louis] is to collect fees for [CALEA] Section 109(b) petitions. The FCC has not received a Section 109(b) petition since 2002," said the order by commissioners in docket 17-123. Based on U.S. Treasury guidance, the commission is migrating from using P.O. boxes to an all-electronic payment system for application and regulatory fees, said the order. Future payments for Section 109(b) petitions will be made under procedures set forth on a commission webpage, but for now, such payments will be made through the Fee Filer Online System, it said.

The repacking plan should be made more flexible so broadcasters can adjust their repacking timeline to their individual circumstances, NAB and Nexstar said in FCC replies to opposition filings against NAB’s petition for reconsideration of the post-incentive auction transition plan. “To ensure a successful and efficient repacking process that serves the interests of broadcasters and the public interest,” the FCC “must afford broadcasters greater flexibility,” Nexstar said in docket 12-268. NAB rejected arguments that its petition was procedurally flawed and late, with the 39-month repacking deadline determined in 2014. Such arguments are “misguided” NAB said, since the FCC’s transition plan is the focus of the recon petition. “There is nothing remotely improper about linking reconsideration of the scheduling plan to the pending petition for reconsideration of the 39-month deadline,” NAB said: The FCC should allow the Media Bureau to adjust the prepacking schedule to reflect broadcaster circumstances. The agency “must build into its repacking plan additional flexibility to allow stations to continue to operate on their pre-auction channels if those stations, despite diligent efforts, are unable to complete their transition by their assigned deadline,” NAB said. The FCC also should “clarify international coordination requirements,” the group said. “The Public Notice is ambiguous regarding the need for stations in border regions to coordinate their channel assignments with Canada or Mexico.” Broadcasters are “not only hard pressed to complete all the basic tasks necessary to meet the filing deadline, but also have insufficient time to study less costly alternatives for implementing their required channel changes,” said Nexstar.

The FCC should adopt only rule changes that are “necessary to permit broadcasters to move forward with deployment” in its proceeding on ATSC 3.0, said NAB, CTA, America's Public TV Stations and the AWARN Alliance in joint comments in docket 16-142 Tuesday. “Rather than imposing mandates, the Commission should allow the consumer electronics industry to respond to market conditions and introduce Next Gen-compatible equipment as consumers demand it,” said the entities that introduced the original ATSC 3.0 petition. “The Commission should allow the market, not regulatory dictates, to determine whether or not Next Gen is successful.” Broadcasters shouldn't "obtain MVPD carriage of ATSC 3.0 signals (in which viewers may have little interest) by threatening existing television service (in which viewers have a great deal of interest),” commented the American Television Alliance. ATVA warned the broadcast transition shouldn’t be a burden to others, an issue the American Cable Association focused on. Since smaller cable companies face more capacity constraints and are less able to absorb unexpected costs, the broadcast transition “presents particular challenges and requires particularized solutions,” ACA said. Comments from private citizens dominated much of the docket earlier Tuesday, before trade groups and companies were expected to have weighed in later on deadline day. "There should be minimum tuner standards” mandated as part of the migration to next-gen broadcasting, commented Ronald Brey, of Rockford, Illinois. Minimum ATSC 3.0 tuner standards would “prevent overload by non-TV services and linearity requirements to reduce intermodulation distortion,” said the frequent commenter in past FCC radio and TV proceedings. “The tighter geographic packing of TV stations should require a specified minimum of adjacent channel rejection.”

Fight for the Future, a group that supports the 2015 net neutrality rules, is questioning whether distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDos) against the FCC Electronic Comment Filing System took place after HBO comedian John Oliver urged the public to weigh in on net neutrality (see 1705080042). Oliver directed viewers to “gofccyourself.com,” which redirects to the comment filing site. A former senior FCC official told us the problem is the FCC never really fixed ECFS after the last time it crashed in 2014 under similar circumstances, and three years ago, the agency made similar claims of a cyberattack. “Fight for the Future is extremely skeptical of the FCC's claim that they experienced a DDoS attack at the exact same time that large numbers of people would have been commenting on their site in support of Title II net neutrality protections following John Oliver's viral segment on Sunday,” the group said in a statement Tuesday. “We have now read that the FCC is claiming this also happened in 2014 during the last John Oliver segment about the issue, and we are even more skeptical.” The FCC should release its logs “to an independent security researcher or major media outlet who can verify their claims and inform the public about what really happened here,” the group said. “The agency has a responsibility to maintain a functioning website to receive large numbers of comments and feedback from the public.” Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, are probing the FCC statement. They sent a letter to the commission Tuesday asking several questions and urging the FCC to set up an alternate way to comment if need be, such as a dedicated email address. Schatz first made that suggestion in a Monday tweet. “Any potentially hostile cyber activities that prevent Americans from being able to participate in a fair and transparent process must be treated as a serious issue,” they wrote. They want answers by June 8: “Has the FCC sought assistance from other federal agencies in investigating and responding to these attacks? … Did the DDoS attacks prevent the public from being able to submit comments through the FCC’s website? If so, do you have an estimate of how many individuals were unable to access the FCC website or submit comments during the attacks? … Does the FCC have all of the resources and expertise it needs in order to combat attacks like those that occurred on May 8?” The FCC received and is reviewing the letter, a commission spokesman said. Matt Wood, policy director at Free Press, said his group has similar questions. "We share the skepticism, and at minimum hope the FCC will demonstrate that it's not characterizing a flood of comments as an attack,” Wood told us. Scott Cleland, chairman of NetCompetition, slammed the Oliver segment in an opinion article in The Hill. Cleland said Oliver is likely to have little impact given the makeup of the current FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai. “Is net neutrality policy the joke here?” Cleland asked. “Or is the joke really that net neutrality activists think late night comedy is the most effective way for them to influence the FCC on public policy?” Public interest group Popular Resistance said it launched a new campaign, Protect Our Internet. The group urged net neutrality supporters to engage in a campaign of “Ajit-ation.”

The FCC Wireline Bureau and other staff greenlighted the $1.5 billion FairPoint sale to Consolidated Communications, in a Monday order. The bureau, with the International and Wireless bureaus, said the deal serves the public interest, convenience and necessity, and the benefits overweigh potential harms. “Applicants have no overlapping service areas and we find that the transaction will result in some cost savings, improved service quality, and enhanced broadband services.” Staff granted a waiver of the price cap “all-or-nothing” rule: “Applicants have presented good cause to waive the rule as we do not believe the public interest would be served by requiring the Applicants to undertake the financial and administrative costs of converting the acquired rate-of-return exchanges to price cap regulation at this time.” The deal previously won shareholder and antitrust clearance, but still needs some state regulatory OKs, including from the three New England states where FairPoint is dominant. Consumer advocates and workers’ unions in those states seek conditions (see 1704250024).

Verizon has been featured in numerous transaction rumors, but none of them may prove correct, CEO Lowell McAdam said Monday in a presentation to investors. “There is an awful lot more hype in the marketplace then there is in the business community right now,” McAdam said. “There is a daily rumor about what we will or won’t do. There have been various announcements even over the last 24 hours.” McAdam said he's open to offers and will take phone calls, but observers shouldn’t read too much into that. “I like to consider myself a polite and hospitable person,” he said. “We don’t feel the urgency that seems to be out there in the analyst community, the banking community and the media.” Verizon pushed the envelope on 5G and that made a difference for the entire wireless industry, McAdam said. Two years ago, 5G was seen as something that would hit in 2022, he said. “I think we’ve seen when we put our effort behind a technology and you see the promise of a technology the entire industry seems to shift,” he said. The key to the IoT is battery life and industry needs to build batteries that last 10 years, he said. “When you look at connecting remote devices the game has changed completely,” he said. “You literally will consider embedding these chips into the paint on a highway or a parking lot so that you cannot only see how traffic is flowing but predict traffic flows and parking management and things like that.” Wireless and wireline networks are already converging, he said. “The largest fiber network in the country will probably be a wireless network,” he said. “We see the architecture … changing dramatically as a result of 5G.”