Wireless mic maker Sennheiser formally asked the FCC to reconsider parts of its incentive auction report and order on wireless mics. As of June 2010, companies had to take all 700 MHz mics out of service and replace them with devices that use 600 MHz spectrum, the company said in a filing in docket 12-268, not yet posted by the FCC. “Now, if the 600 MHz spectrum auction and TV band repacking proceed as planned, microphone users will lose most of their remaining spectrum,” Sennheiser said. A proposal to allow continued operations in the 600 MHz guard bands won’t make up for the loss, Sennheiser said. “The guard bands are likely to receive out-of-band emissions from neighboring operations and to have power limits inconsistent with some uses of wireless microphones,” the company said. “Moreover, a performer’s ear monitors require frequencies separated from those for the microphone, resulting in a need for two distinct bands in UHF.” Sennheiser asked the FCC to “revisit its policies so as to make adequate UHF spectrum available.” Several options are available, including reserving “naturally occurring” vacant channels and Channel 37 for wireless microphones, “or setting aside additional spectrum from that to be auctioned,” the company said. The FCC should also require auction winners to pay the cost to move mics to other frequencies, Sennheiser said: “The Commission has recognized elsewhere the inequity of leaving incumbents to bear their own costs of relocating to a different band for the sole benefit of auction winners.” The German company said wireless mics are vital to the U.S. economy. “Wireless microphones are ubiquitous in all aspects of the entertainment business, in news reporting, in sports, and in U.S. commercial, civic, and religious life,” Sennheiser said. “They are essential to the production of virtually all non-studio broadcast events, and to nearly all studio-produced programs as well.”

Former New York gubernatorial candidate Zephyr Teachout and running mate Timothy Wu, who created the term “net neutrality,” headlined a Free Press-sponsored rally in New York City’s City Hall Park Monday to urge the FCC to adopt strong net neutrality rules. Teachout, who received 34 percent of the vote against Democratic incumbent Gov. Andrew Cuomo, said from now on “you shouldn’t be able to be a politician in New York state, let alone in this country” without taking a “strong, clear stand” against the proposed Comcast/Time Warner Cable (TWC) merger and in favor of net neutrality. Cuomo recently ordered the state’s Department of Public Service to investigate TWC’s Aug. 27 nationwide broadband outage as part of the state Public Service Commission’s review of Comcast/TWC, already seen to be a more aggressive review of the deal than has occurred in most other states (CD Aug 28 p16). Wu, currently a Columbia University law professor and a former Free Press chairman, praised New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and other state politicians for “taking the right view” on net neutrality. Wu received 40 percent of the vote against Cuomo’s running mate, former Rep. Kathy Hochul, D-N.Y.

Correction: Pennsylvania State University law professor Rob Frieden did not say common carriers can discriminate among similarly situated users (CD Sept 12 p6).

FCC technical staff suspended the conversion of the comments to PDF in the electronic filing system to free more system resources to deal with an increase in filings, an agency spokesman told us Friday. As a result, no new filings on net neutrality were posted Thursday and Friday, the spokesman said. Free Press is organizing a protest outside the first of the FCC’s planned net neutrality roundtables Tuesday, urging the agency to hold public hearings outside Washington, the organization’s website said (http://bit.ly/1sCVE0H). The protest is scheduled for 11:45 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the FCC.

The FCC’s new regulatory fee schedule was published in the Federal Register Thursday and part of it took effect then, said an agency notice in the publication (http://1.usa.gov/1lXG8vC). The usual 30-day period after publication would “not allow sufficient time for the Commission to collect the FY 2014 fees before FY 2014 ends on September 30, 2014,” said the FCC. The new schedule (CD Sept 3 p11) shifts the percentage of the costs of the International Bureau that must be supported by satellite operators, ended the AM expanded band exemption, increases the annual de minimis threshold from under $10 to $500, eliminates several regulatory fee categories and adopts a regulatory fee for toll-free numbers managed by a responsible organization, said the commission. All the provisions except the de minimis increase, the eliminated regulatory fee categories and the toll-free category took effect Thursday, said the commission. It said those three provisions will be effective in FY 2015.

The FCC should be able to craft net neutrality rules using only a sliver of Title II and apply them to wireless, House Communications Subcommittee ranking member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., argued this week. “Title II has 47 statutes in it,” Eshoo said during an episode of C-SPAN’s The Communicators set to be shown Saturday. “You don’t have to take 47 statutes to throw it at this to cure it.” She said she would look to Section 202 of Title II, which speaks to discrimination and blocking. “I think it’s not all of Title II, but I think you can find the gold in that particular section,” Eshoo said, favoring a “light touch.” She cautioned against “the rhetoric” prevailing about the heavy-handed aspects of Title II but also said it’s “uninformed” to assume full Title II reclassification is required. She also issued a news release Thursday announcing results of her reddit contest to rebrand net neutrality, pointing to three popular results -- Freedom Against Internet Restrictions, Freedom to Connect (F2C) and The Old McDonald Act: Equal Internet for Everyone Involved Online (EIEIO). The contest generated 28,000 votes for 3,671 different entries and also “approximately 5,000 votes from Reddit users in favor of what they believe is the best policy approach to achieve net neutrality,” the news release said (http://1.usa.gov/1tCYiBC). “All 5,000 votes favored a reclassification of broadband providers as common carriers, specifically under Title II of the Communications Act.” During The Communicators episode, Eshoo also reiterated her desire that the Communications Subcommittee hold a hearing on some of the proposed acquisitions being considered this year and said there’s still time for such a hearing. She has requested as much from Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., she said. Eshoo called the NAB lawsuit on the TV broadcast spectrum incentive auction a “bump in the road” and said she doesn’t expect it to delay the auction, which seems “on track” for 2015 at the FCC: “I think it’s unfortunate the broadcasters have done that.”

Saying its electronic filing system is catching up to a “surge in comments,” the FCC on Thursday make available a Common Separated Values file for bulk upload of comments, the agency said on its blog (http://fcc.us/1tDotYM). All comments will be received and recorded through the same process as comments received through emails, said the agency. No Internet access provider “should block or degrade Internet traffic, nor should they sell ‘fast lanes’ that prioritize particular Internet services over others,” Google urged people to tell the FCC through its Take Action site (http://bit.ly/1lXEM3T). “These rules should apply regardless of whether you're accessing the Internet using a cable connection, a wireless service, or any other technology."

Dish Network argued that its upcoming over-the-top (OTT) streaming service would be hurt if Comcast is permitted to buy Time Warner Cable. Comcast alone could block Dish’s OTT video in Philadelphia and Chicago, but Dish could still survive “if its service was offered unimpeded in the TWC-dominated markets of New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas,” it said in an ex parte filing posted Wednesday in docket 14-57 (http://bit.ly/1qizrFI). If Comcast/TWC controls half or more of relevant high-speed broadband lines nationally, “Dish’s ability to offer a mainstream OTT service to the audience most likely to adopt that product at the outset could be greatly, perhaps fatally, curtailed,” it said. The combined companies also will be able to extract lower prices from programmers, which will force programmers to extract even higher rates from smaller pay-TV providers “to compensate the programmers for lost revenue,” it said. Dish also argued that Comcast/TWC will have the incentive and ability to restrict programmers’ ability to grant digital rights to competing pay-TV and OTT video providers. Dish continues to get its facts wrong, a Comcast spokeswoman said. After the proposed transaction, Comcast “will only make up about 35 percent of broadband subscribers nationwide -- and that doesn’t even include wireless broadband which will provide even more competition in the future,” she said. Comcast’s transaction with NBCUniversal has provisions for OTT providers “to access the NBCUniversal content,” she said. Neither Comcast nor NBCUniversal has the ability to control other programmer decisions with regard to OTT services, she said.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler should avoid finger pointing and stop “inventing rumors” about the incentive auction, said NAB Executive Vice President-Strategic Planning Rick Kaplan in a blog post response (http://bit.ly/1BsP3st) to Wheeler’s speeches to wireless conferences Tuesday (CD Sept 10 p1). Blaming NAB’s petition for review of the auction order for a possible delay is “not only wrong, but will create the very uncertainties and distractions” the FCC is concerned about, Kaplan said. If the NAB wins its court challenge and that leads to a delay for the incentive auction, it’s not the association that should take the blame, but the FCC, Kaplan said. NAB “has laid out why we believe the FCC has acted outside the law,” Kaplan said. “If the FCC insists on seeing the litigation through and loses, then it has no one else to blame but itself.” Wheeler blamed broadcasters in his speech as an alternative to blaming the FCC’s “misguided policy decisions,” Kaplan said. “It is definitely easier than blaming the fact that would-be spectrum sellers still have no idea what kind of return they can reasonably expect in the auction.” Recent FCC rules for broadcaster sharing arrangements and net neutrality proposals have “undermined trust with the very industries needed to participate in the auction,” Kaplan said. NAB still believes the auction can succeed, he said, saying “it would sure help” if broadcasters “had a partner at the helm of the FCC.” The commission had no comment.

Both sides are only half correct in the net neutrality debate, said Consumer Federation of America Research Director Mark Cooper Wednesday on a panel co-sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. Those opposing regulation trumpet the role of private investment in spurring the development of the Internet, but underestimate how public policy “tilled the ground” for the innovation, Cooper said. He cited the spending of public funds on research and development, and pricing policies like bill and keep designed to promote use. Those seeking strong regulation are wrong to deny “the important role the private sector played,” he said. Looking ahead, he said, the ability of ISPs to “extract rents,” particularly in areas where they have market power, could stifle innovation by edge providers. At the same time, regulations work best in “static” environments, and despite assurances that Title II regulations can be tailored through forbearance, “regulations are difficult to undo,” Cooper said. The panel on Cooper’s research into the combination of public investment and public policy was one of several through Friday at the FCC, in which academics present research on broadband regulation. The agency’s rural broadband experiments were inspired by Google’s process, in which it asks communities to apply for the company’s 1 gigabit broadband, said Jonathan Chambers, chief of the Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis, during a separate portion of the daylong event. The experiments, in which broadband providers, communities and others submitted applications on what they would build using agency funds, is intended to provide information to help guide the agency’s ability to use funds effectively to promote deployment, he said. Applicants, for instance, were asked to describe how they would provide speeds of 25/5 Mbps for less than the agency’s cost model for providing those speeds, he said. The process spurred Minnesota to create a broadband fund to provide funding for some of the ideas, he said.