FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler suggested the agency isn't holding off on regulatory actions while its net neutrality and broadband reclassification order is being litigated in court. Asked by a reporter Thursday about such possible delays, Wheeler said, "No, we think that we're on strong grounds in the court." Speaking at the agency's press conference, he said FCC General Counsel Jonathan Sallet and agency attorney Jacob Lewis "did exemplary jobs" at the Dec. 4 oral argument in the case. He said he listened to an audio recording of the argument and is "confident that the open Internet rules have a good future ahead of them." Wheeler also said he hopes the FCC can approve a Lifeline USF modernization order early next year. The agency has proposed to extend Lifeline low-income support to broadband and to revamp program administration. Asked if he was open to making permanent the net neutrality order's temporary small-business exemption from broadband provider enhanced disclosure rules, which the FCC just extended by one year, Wheeler said: "Let's base it on facts, rather than on suppositions; so let's see what we get in terms of the data." At their news conference, Commissioners Ajit Pai and Mike O'Rielly criticized the FCC's one-year extension order on both substantive and process grounds. Pai said there wasn't evidence in the record to justify imposing the enhanced rules on small broadband providers.

An FCC draft order to grant USTelecom's forbearance petition in various areas is expected to be adopted Thursday without major changes despite CLEC pushback, agency officials told us Wednesday. XO and others pressed the FCC not to give ILECs relief from duties to share newly deployed feeder conduits with competitors at regulated rates (see 1512110062). They said USTelecom hadn't justified the forbearance and the competitors still need regulated access to such "entrance conduits" to reach the buildings of business customers. But the commission appears unlikely to back off the draft's proposal to give ILECs relief from regulated sharing of entrance conduits for “greenfield" developments, the officials said. A CLEC representative suggested Wednesday the agency could be setting a bad precedent. "If they let it go through as is, you have to ask: are they creating a low bar for future forbearance petitions?" the CLEC representative said. "A lot of this stuff is market specific. Are they going to allow them to skate by without the evidence." The commission is to vote at its Thursday meeting on a draft order on the USTelecom petition (see 1512100063), and agency officials indicated the item would give incumbent telcos relief from several requirements, including to offer wholesale access (see 1511240070 and 1511250047).

Noninteractive webcasters will be required to pay 0.17 cent per performance on nonsubscription services and 0.22 cent per performance for subscription services beginning Jan. 1, the Copyright Royalty Board said at our deadline Wednesday. The CRB released the initial details of its 2016-2020 webcasting rate-setting ruling Wednesday but hadn’t released a full unredacted version of the ruling to parties in the rate-setting proceeding at our deadline. There had been few clear signs before the ruling about how the CRB would rule (see 1512110064). Noncommercial webcasters will be required to pay $500 annually for each station or channel for all transmissions totaling no more than 159,140 aggregate tuning hours (ATH) per month, the CRB said. All transmissions above 159,140 ATH per month will pay a 0.17 cent per-performance rate. Rates for commercial and noncommercial webcasters will be adjusted annually between 2017 and 2020 based on the Consumer Price Index, the CRB said.

While another route to broadband access in schools is laudable, it's outweighed by the public interest of people with hearing loss being able "to fully participate in society" due to their hearing aid connectivity via Bluetooth Low Energy deployed in the 2.4 GHz band, the Hearing Industries Association (HIA) said in an ex parte filing posted Tuesday in FCC docket 13-213. It recapped a meeting between HIA Executive Director Andrew Bopp and staff of Chairman Tom Wheeler at which Bopp said Bluetooth LE "is threatened by Globalstar's proposed use of the 2473-2483.5 portion of the 2.4 GHz band" for its broadband terrestrial low-power system. As well as degrading functionality of hearing instruments, TLPS could interfere with Bluetooth LE advertising channels, HIA said. In a statement Tuesday, Globalstar said Bluetooth representatives taking part in TLPS demonstrations early this year at the FCC's Technology Experience Center "proved that our operations on Channel 14 have no perceptible impact on Bluetooth-enabled hearing aids. While everyone who attended those demonstrations heard it for themselves, unfortunately, the Bluetooth representatives have decided not to share their data, including the audio files, to either the Commission or Globalstar." TLPS critics have been especially busy lobbying in recent days with numerous ex parte meetings (see 1512140046). In its own ex parte filing posted Tuesday, Globalstar said its general counsel held meetings with a Wheeler staffer and a representative of Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel to argue for TLPS approval. In its filing, Globalstar said it reiterated the benefits of TLPS as shown in demonstrations at the Technology Experience Center and the FCC's Maryland lab, and in pilot tests at a university in Chicago and at the Washington School for Girls in the District of Columbia. It also said it "has made it a priority to meet with interested parties in an effort to find common ground on key issues," saying it "enjoyed a productive dialog with the public interest community." But Globalstar said "discussions with corporate entities and special interest groups have been far less productive [because they're] composed of and controlled by corporations with the incentive to maintain the status quo and stifle innovative uses of the ISM [industrial, scientific and medical] band regardless of the demonstrated benefits to consumers."

The Drug Enforcement Administration stopped collecting bulk telephony records of Americans making calls overseas and destroyed "the only bulk database of those records," the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a blog post Monday. EFF staff attorney Mark Rumold said that EFF and its client, Human Rights Watch, confirmed the DEA practice was stopped and the records destruction occurred. He said DEA "secretly and illegally collected billions of records" from the 1990s to 2013. In April, EFF filed a lawsuit on behalf of HRW, which challenged the DEA program's constitutionality. HRW voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit after it received "assurances from the government, provided under penalty of perjury, that the bulk collection has ceased and that the only database containing the billions of Americans’ call records collected by the DEA has been purged from the government’s possession," Rumold said. He said the assurances were provided after a federal judge ordered the government to respond to HRW's questions -- "the first instance we know of in which a plaintiff challenging a mass surveillance program was allowed to take discovery." The government retains some illegally collected records, "and they've admitted as much," Rumold said. And the government still collects phone records in bulk through an NSA program and a similar DEA one, he added. DEA didn't comment.

The FCC should extend the short-form application deadline for the incentive auction to allow several Class A stations waiting for a verdict on their petitions of reconsideration to participate, said an emergency motion for stay filed by Abacus Television, WMTM and The Videohouse, known collectively as movants. The FCC should “extend the deadline for Movants to file applications to participate in the reverse auction pending the Commission’s disposition of the Reconsideration Petition (and any judicial review thereof),” the motion said. The recon petition was filed against the incentive auction order on reconsideration that barred the broadcasters from participating because they hadn't met a 2012 deadline for Class A stations to be auction eligible, the motion said. Alternatively, the FCC could allow the broadcasters to file to participate pending a decision on the recon petition, the motion said.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's office didn't respond to multiple requests for a meeting from Raycom, the broadcaster said in a letter to Wheeler posted Friday in docket 07-294. “I was disappointed that, although we made several requests to your office to schedule a meeting with you and your staff, we did not receive any response,” wrote CEO Paul McTear. Raycom met (see 1511090037) with the other commissioners in November, and discussed FCC ownership policies and planned changes to the syndicated exclusivity rules. “The existing retransmission consent regime is working exactly as Congress intended and is a critical source of the revenue stations need to invest in high-quality news and other local content,” the TV station owner's chief said. “Outdated rules continue to view virtually any consolidation among broadcast television stations as a threat,” McTear said. “That the Commission already is nearly four years overdue in completing its legally required quadrennial review of broadcast ownership rules surely has contributed to these rules having grown so far out of touch with the modern media market.” The FCC didn't comment.

Globalstar's latest terrestrial low-powered broadband service demos still fall short of justifying FCC approval for its proposed TLPS because the company hasn't made clear whether it addressed problems "that rendered previous demonstrations unreliable," said the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), Microsoft, NCTA and Wi-Fi Alliance in a joint ex parte filing posted Friday. Globalstar has done pilot demos of its TLPS service in Chicago and at Washington School for Girls in Washington, D.C., pointing to them as evidence it poses no interference threat to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth (see 1511190028). In their Friday filing, ESA et al. said previous filings by such parties as NCTA and the Bluetooth Special Interest Group raised numerous red flags about Globalstar's demonstrations, such as running transmitters at notably low power levels, using unrepresentative equipment, testing an 802.11 TLPS implementation when not having committed to using the 802.11 standard and failing to test for TLPS effects on latency or jitter. The ex parte letter recapped a meeting between Chairman Tom Wheeler aide Edward Smith and members of the ESA group. During the meeting, the letter said, ESA et al. also said a mitigation plan involving Globalstar addressing interference complaints after the fact "is unworkable." In a statement Friday, Globalstar Vice President-Regulatory Affairs Barbee Ponder said, "The benefits of TLPS are being shown daily at the Washington School for Girls, as the students there now have a wireless network utilizing substantially more spectrum than would otherwise be available. Representatives from numerous Commission offices have attended this deployment and observed these benefits that have been recognized recently by public interest groups. Those with nothing more than competitive interests at stake have no reason to ever do anything other than complain."

The FCC proposed a USF contribution factor for Q1 of 18.2 percent of interstate and international telecom revenue, the Office of Managing Director said in a public notice Friday in docket 96-45. That was as projected by industry analyst Billy Jack Gregg (see 1512040003). The proposed contribution factor will be deemed approved if the agency doesn't act on it within 14 days, the PN said. U.S. interstate and international (long-distance) revenue from end-users was projected to be $14.9 billion next quarter, continuing a long-term downward trend. Total USF support is projected to be $2.2 billion next quarter, with high-cost, rural support at $1.25 billion, followed by school and library E-rate discounts at $603 million, low-income (mainly Lifeline) support at $396 million and rural healthcare at $73 million. FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly voiced concern about the rising USF assessments on telecom carriers, and issued a warning about assessing broadband. "After hovering around the 16% mark throughout 2014 and 17% this year, the USF contribution factor tacked onto a portion of everyone’s telecom bills jumps past 18% to kick off 2016," he said in a statement Friday. "And with an unrestrained expansion of Lifeline plus an expansion of USF fees to broadband consumers at the top of many wish lists, who knows how much deeper Americans will have to dig into their pockets by next December? The entire situation is clearly unsustainable but the solution cannot be to capture broadband services in this morass."

Global wireless standards body 3GPP approved band 66, which includes Dish Network’s AWS-4 downlink spectrum, plus AWS-1 and paired AWS-3 spectrum, Dish said Thursday in a news release. “Band 66 is a win for the public who will be able to take advantage of the innovations and increased data throughput that a single AWS band class will deliver,” said Tom Cullen, Dish executive vice president-corporate development.