Matt Daneman

The Supreme Court is to meet Oct. 30 to decide whether to take up a pair of related DirecTV/Dish Network legal fights on sales taxes on their services versus how cable subscribers are taxed. But whether the justices opt to add the linked cases to their 2015-2016 docket is difficult to say, legal scholars told us.

The Department of Transportation's plan to test for interference between LightSquared's proposed wireless broadband network and GPS devices has a variety of backers and one big critic, said a series of DOT filings posted Tuesday. The comment period on the DOT plan closed Friday.

Nearly every small and/or new multichannel video programming distributor has difficulty obtaining reasonably priced video programming, with a large minority of them seeing retransmission consent fees more than doubling in recent years, according to a 2015 video competition survey put out Tuesday by NTCA and Incompas, the recently renamed Comptel (see 1510190061). The survey is from Networks for Competition and Choice -- made up of Incompas, ITTA, NTCA and Public Knowledge -- which are jointly pushing for video rules changes. The groups worked together to oppose now-abandoned Comcast/Time Warner Cable, and now are focusing on the video marketplace, members told us. "It sort of grew out of everyone noticing we're all saying the same thing and experiencing the same difficulties," said Jill Canfield, NTCA vice president-legal and industry.

The switch to the new FCC Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) (see 1510090048) should be in early December, with a "hard" cutover rather than a soft one because of the difficulty in keeping the old and new systems synched, said Stephen Vong, systems modernization adviser to FCC Chief Information Officer David Bray. A beta version of ECFS was demonstrated Monday to FCBA members. The beta has been changed markedly in recent months after feedback from users, said Jason Rademacher of Cooley, co-chairman of the FCBA Access to Government Committee.

The Department of Transportation's plans to test for interference between LightSquared's proposed wireless broadband network and GPS devices is so inherently flawed that there is no "rationale for proceeding," Roberson and Associates President Dennis Roberson said Friday. That day at 11:59 p.m. was DOT's deadline for accepting public comments on its draft test plan for GPS adjacent band compatibility. And at a news conference Friday, Roberson -- in the midst of conducting its own, LightSquared-sponsored testing for possible interference between LightSquared broadband uplink and downlink signals and neighboring spectrum GPS signals -- had numerous critiques of the DOT plan. DOT didn't comment.

While the Enforcement Bureau shot down Game Show Network's retiering complaint against Cablevision, it remains to be seen how Chief Administrative Law Judge Richard Sippel takes that into account in his own ruling. Sippel typically doesn't automatically follow bureau recommendations, but it's hard to say how much weight he might give the GSN/Cablevision comments, a lawyer with ALJ experience told us.

From extending its voluntary concessions for several more years to "synthetic bundles" of Charter Communications broadband with other providers' cable services, opponents of Charter's purchase of Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable had plenty of suggestions on how to make the deal more palatable. The comment deadline on the FCC review was Tuesday, with replies due Nov. 2.

Any worries about price regulation under the Title II net neutrality order are "somewhat overblown," FTC General Counsel Jonathan Nuechterlein said Friday at The Future of Video Competition and Regulation conference. ISPs are barely any more regulated under Title II than they were prior, when there were other theoretical regulatory routes for price controls, he said. "The question of Title II or not Title II is not that relevant," he said at the event put on by the Duke University School of Law Center for Innovation Policy. FCC General Counsel Jonathan Sallet agreed Title II "doesn't regulate and won't regulate retail rates," much the same way it wasn't used to regulate voice pricing.

Satellite operators increasingly are struggling with a data price war, as prices have dropped precipitously in some parts of the world over the past 12-18 months, Christopher Baugh, president of satellite market research firm Northern Sky Research, said Thursday during the annual Hosted Payload and Smallsat Summit. "It's bargain basement pricing," Baugh said. "The yield on a per-megahertz basis is particularly low. [And] these lower prices are here to stay."

The FCC net neutrality order was seemingly the stimulus for an agreement ending the long-running Cogent/Time Warner Cable interconnection feud, and could motivate other companies to sign similar agreements, Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer said Thursday, after the companies announced signing an interconnection agreement for their public IP networks. "Talks had been going on for a very long time, but they were going nowhere until there was a legal framework that had penalties for violating the open Internet order," Schaeffer told us. He said in past interviews that TWC was among those ISPs the Internet backbone company was considering filing a net neutrality complaint over (see 1505010033).