A petition for U.S. Supreme Court review of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denial of petitions to review the 2011 USF/intercarrier compensation (see 1405270045) order should be denied, the FCC said in a brief filed with the high court. U.S. Cellular, Cellular South and the Rural Independent Competitive Alliance said the FCC lacked authority to require broadband buildout in order to receive USF, but none of the petitioners has standing to challenge the requirement, the agency said. The petitioners’ argument rests on the classification of broadband as an information service, but “the FCC has now reversed that classification,” the brief said. The appeals court also correctly said the agency was authorized to impose the broadband requirement even when broadband was classified as an information service, the agency said.

The FCC should restart the transaction clock for AT&T/DirecTV and approve the deal as soon as possible, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson told FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler Thursday, according to an ex parte filing. The restart should happen “as soon as issues involving the programmers are resolved,” the filing said.

The FCC Wireline and the Consumer & Governmental Affairs bureaus scheduled a workshop April 28 to discuss what steps the FCC should take to protect privacy after the net neutrality order forbore broadband providers from rules barring the disclosure of consumer proprietary network information, the agency said in a public notice Monday. Acknowledging the order raised questions about privacy issues, Chairman Tom Wheeler announced at the Center for Democracy & Technology annual dinner last month that the agency would hold a workshop (see 1502240070). The 10 a.m. event will be at FCC headquarters. “Diverse stakeholders” will discuss a range of matters about the application of statutory privacy protections to broadband Internet access service, said the release, which didn't identify the participants. The workshop also will address to what extent the commission can apply a harmonized privacy framework across various services within its jurisdiction, the release said.

A new group, the High Tech Forum, plans to examine the technology behind high-tech policies, its organizers said in a news release last week. “The Internet is one of the most successful experiments in world history -- but most people have no idea how it works,” the group said. "The new High Tech Forum will change that.” The forum is led by Richard Bennett, longtime network engineer and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. The group is offering a classroom, which will provide “basic explanations” of Wi-Fi, wireless networks and “more complex issues like the limitations of unlicensed spectrum and functionality of high versus low frequencies,” the group said. It's offering an "Ask the Engineer" feature and forums for discussing issues.

Wiley Rein is laying off 18 partners, 18 secretaries and 12 administrative support staff, according to a news release from the firm. The move was part of a “strategic plan” and a response to “changes in client demand in certain areas,” the firm said. The strategic plan was the outgrowth of a “year-long business review" launched in 2014, the firm said. “We needed to take steps to ensure our professional and staff resources were aligned with our strategic and practice area goals,” the release said. The firm's Telecommunications Practice was not impacted and "is doing great," a firm spokeswoman told us.

“Given the inaccuracies that have been published” in the media, specifically by The Wall Street Journal, Google Senior Vice President-Communications and Policy Rachel Whetstone said in a blog post Friday, the company wanted to share its side of the story. In response to The WSJ’s report saying FTC commissioners voted unanimously to end the investigation into Google despite the Competition Bureau recommending legal action be taken, Google said The WSJ chose not to report what “the FTC made clear this week,” (see 1503260030) which is the Commission’s decision was in accord with the recommendations made by the Competition Bureau, Economics Bureau and Office of General Counsel. With respect to The WSJ reporting Google employees have met with senior officials about 230 times since President Barack Obama took office, compared to Comcast employees visiting 20 times, Google said the reporting was inaccurate. “Our employment records show that 33 of the White House visits were by people not employed here at the time,” Whetstone said. More than five visits involved a Google engineer “on leave helping to fix technical issues with the government’s Healthcare.gov website (something he’s been very public about),” Whetstone said. “Checking through White House records for other companies, our team counted around 270 visits for Microsoft over the same time frame and 150 for Comcast.” The meetings Google employees had with senior officials “were not to discuss the antitrust investigation” but issues such as patent reform, science, technology, engineering and math education, self-driving cars, mental health, advertising, Internet censorship, smart contact lenses, cloud computing, cybersecurity and energy efficiency, Whetstone said. Directing her comments to Robert Thomson, CEO of News Corp, the Journal's owner, she wrote: “We understand you have a new found love of the regulatory process, especially in Europe, but as the FTC’s Bureau of Competition staff concluded, Google has strong pro-competitive arguments on our side.” Like the FTC, the Texas and Ohio Attorneys General “closed their comprehensive competition investigations into Google in 2014,” Whetstone said. “Courts in Germany and Brazil found that there is no basis in the law for Google competitors to dictate Google’s search results." The WSJ had no immediate comment.

Court appeals of the FCC net neutrality order by Alamo Broadband and USTelecom (see 1503230066) are premature, the agency wrote the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation Friday. The order doesn't take effect until it's published in the Federal Register, which hasn't happened, said the letter from Deputy Associate General Counsel Richard Welch. The FCC assumes the court that's randomly selected to consolidate both appeals will rule on whether they're premature, the letter said, and the agency plans to file a motion to dismiss both petitions as premature once the court is selected. The FCC’s attempt to justify the reclassification of broadband by pointing to industry investments in mobile voice under Communications Act Title II is “revisionist history” and “simply not borne out by the facts,” CTIA said in a blog post Friday. Wireless carriers’ investment has focused on the “heretofore unregulated market for mobile broadband networks” rather than the regulated voice market, the association said. In the past decade, carriers invested $260 billion in their networks, and another $90 billion purchasing spectrum at auctions, "primarily to handle mobile broadband traffic,” said the group. “Of course, the wireless industry will continue to invest, but the uncertainty generated by the FCC’s action means there will be less investment. And that’s no illusion.” Free Press disputed the argument, in a news release Friday. The group noted, among other things, that the annual growth rate in wireless capital spending between 1993 and 2002, before wireless was classified as a deregulated Title I service in 2007, was more than seven times higher than the annual rate in the following decade. The rate from that decade was seven times higher than the rate from 2003 to 2013, Free Press said.

The FCC is seeking comment on the definition of “commencing operations” for new 600 MHz band wireless licensees after the incentive auction, said a public notice issued Thursday. Since some broadcast users of the band are allowed to continue operations until they receive notice that the wireless licensee is about to “commence operations” in that spectrum, a specific definition is needed, the PN said. It proposed defining commencement as when the wireless licensee begins “site commissioning tests,” which usually take place after the physical infrastructure of a cell site has been installed. For site commissioning testing, a licensee “will require access to its 600 MHz Band spectrum in the area in which it is commencing operations so all of its facilities can be tested under the real world conditions for which they were designed and in an environment that is free from potential interference from others,” the PN said. It seeks comment on whether some other stage of testing should be considered commencement, and the size of the area the wireless licensee must notify ahead of time. Comments are due May 1, replies May 18.

NTIA’s proposed exclusion zones for the 3.5 GHz band remain overly conservative, even after being dialed down considerably, Michael Calabrese, director of the New America Foundation’s Wireless Future Project, told us Thursday. NTIA recently filed at the FCC documents proposing much smaller “exclusion zones” along the coast than previously for the band, targeted by the FCC for sharing and small cells (see 1503250062). “Since the original exclusion zones assumed transmissions 1,000 times more powerful, shrinking them is simple common sense,” Calabrese said. But even these smaller zones make the 3.5 GHz band less commercially viable, he said. “The Navy told us their primary interference concern is a cumulative rise in the noise floor, within sight of the coastline, which can occur only from widespread and dense deployment of the very low-power, Wi-Fi like devices FCC is authorizing,” he said. “ Because this will take years, and because the geolocation database system governing minute-to-minute access to the band can limit the number of devices authorized to transmit within sight of Navy radar, it’s likely that passive sensing tied to the database will be deployed long before the noise floor endangers naval radar. In short, these exclusion zones are unnecessary and unduly restrictive.” Calabrese is a longtime member of the Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee.

Correction: An FCC spokeswoman corrected information provided for a previous correction (see 1503250017), specifying now that the $190,000 the agency annually spends to maintain its Seattle field office doesn't include personnel expenses.