Competitive local exchange carrier Global Naps owes Verizon nearly $58 million in access charges under a 2002 order by Massachusetts, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston ruled Thursday. It upheld a decision by a Massachusetts U.S. District Court. The sum is for services provided between 2003 and 2006. Verizon also had prevailed in the lower court on counterclaims for the debt against Global Naps President Frank Gangi and affiliates of the company. The appeals court also affirmed that decision.

HOT SPRINGS, Va. -- The FCC has a huge agenda from the National Broadband Plan to work through, but the commission has every intention of completing the work assigned, top officials said at the FCBA conference over the weekend.

Partnerships with non-profit and for-profit news sites and blogs will bring diversity to public media and create opportunities for pubcasters to carve a niche where market gaps exist, speakers said Friday at an FCC workshop on the future of public media. “It’s critical to expand and embrace the nonprofit online news startups,” J-Lab President Jan Schaffer said. “Collaborations can produce a lot of journalism.” With a focus on public service journalism, panelists noted gaps in investigative, local/statehouse and foreign reporting in both the private and publicly funded news industries and warned that traditional efforts to fill those gaps will be expensive.

Cable mergers and acquisitions activity, which began picking up in late 2009, will continue and perhaps increase in volume because of private-equity and commercial financing being easier to get, executives we surveyed said. They expect more consolidation of cable systems and channels. No blockbuster deals are expected soon, with Time Warner Cable sitting out recent deals and Comcast awaiting regulatory approval for its purchase of control of NBC Universal. (See separate story in this issue.) Conditions for financing deals have improved since our last survey (CD Oct 13 p2), executives said.

The FCC is expected to hire an outsider to oversee review of Comcast’s planned buy of NBC Universal to augment existing staff efforts of what many inside and outside the commission see as a unique deal because of the combination of broadband and cable with broadcast properties, agency and industry officials said. The move would be unusual in that most major transactions before the regulator are solely reviewed by long-time officials, though not unprecedented because of this commission’s hiring of outsiders for various roles. The regulator has looked at hiring existing employees and people outside the agency for the new role, FCC and industry officials said. It decided to hire an external candidate, an agency official said. We couldn’t learn the person’s name. This commission has used outsiders to work on the National Broadband Plan, most notably Blair Levin, who led that work.

Broadcasters are studying language in a bill heralded by Senate Democrats as a response to the recent Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court decision that could change the way politicians and their parties buy time on TV and radio stations. The Disclose Act, sponsored by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and others, would expand the rules giving candidates for elected office access to broadcast time at regulated rates. NAB is reviewing the bill and has some concerns, a spokesman said.

AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner and the major telecom and cable trade associations threw their weight behind a joint letter Thursday asking the FCC not to reclassify broadband as a Title II service. The letter accuses supporters of the idea of changing how broadband is classified of “alarmist rhetoric” in their arguments that the Comcast decision leaves the FCC “unable to implement the National Broadband Plan” or preserve net neutrality.

Reclassifying broadband as a Title II service is the best way for the FCC to avoid being reversed in court on net neutrality rules while quickly providing certainty to companies and their investors, Commissioner Michael Copps said Thursday. The April 6 Comcast ruling shows that commission orders in 2002 and 2005 deeming cable modem and DSL as information services were wrong, Copps said in an interview with a Communications Daily reporter for an episode of The Communicators to air this weekend on C-SPAN. Time is of the essence in FCC action on reclassification, and Copps is optimistic two or more colleagues will agree with him, he said.

Democratic lawmakers at a hearing Thursday questioned DirecTV’s opposition to the FCC’s proposal for universal video gateway devices. House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher, D-Va., wanted to know what it would take to assuage DirecTV’s concerns about the FCC’s plans. DirecTV is worried the FCC’s proposal would put it at a disadvantage against cable operators, because satellite TV services can’t rely on a two-way network to offer new services, testified Eric Shanks, the company’s executive vice president of entertainment. All its on-screen features must be built into the box, he said. DirecTV is also concerned that third-party devices could strip away the distributor’s services, he said.

The first two DTV allotments made by the FCC in five years may attract few broadcasters willing to bid for the licensees at auction and start operations from scratch, several industry lawyers predicted. Wednesday, the Media Bureau approved the second new allotment in as many months, for channel 5 in Seaford, Del. (CD April 29 p14). Because that slot and channel 4 in Atlantic City, N.J., are in the VHF band, where digital reception problems have occurred, and the stations are far away from large cities, interest may be limited, the lawyers said. One was upbeat about Seaford’s drawing interest because of the area’s demographics.