The FTC is requesting public comment on a proposal to study the agency’s effectiveness when it ordered a divestiture or other remedies in merger cases from 2006 to 2012, an agency news release said Friday. “Successful divestitures and other forms of relief are central to the Commission’s merger enforcement efforts,” FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez said in the release. “Building on prior Commission efforts, the proposed study seeks to provide valuable information to ensure that our remedies continue achieving their primary goal -- maintaining competition in the affected markets,” she said. The proposed study would expand on a similar report by the agency from 1999, the release said. The FTC would review 92 related orders. (See the notice for public comment here.)

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel has no intention of leaving the commission, her soon-to-be-ex-Legal Adviser David Goldman told us Tuesday. Rumors were swirling at CES, especially after it was announced that Goldman was going to the Hill to work for Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., next ranking member of the House Commerce Committee. Also, the White House failed to send Rosenworcel’s name to the Senate for reconfirmation, while renominating Republican Mike O’Rielly. One carrier lobbyist said that development was “baffling” and took away some of Rosenworcel’s leverage. Rosenworcel has been on the FCC since May 2012 and her term expires in June, though she can stay on until the 2016 session of Congress adjourns. O’Rielly was confirmed to a new five-year term on the FCC in December (see 1412170031).

A new FCC Consumer Help Center announced by the agency Monday will make several changes to the previous online complaint system, including giving consumers the ability to track the status of their complaints, an agency official told us. The site operates on its own cloud-based platform instead of on the agency’s server, the official said. As before, the complaint system is separate from the Electronic Comment Filing System, though both appear on the agency's homepage. In addition to new functions, the official said, the $1.1 million cost of launching and then maintaining the new system over the next five years will be less than the estimated $2.3 million cost of maintaining the aging old system. Among the changes, online complaints will be forwarded to carriers daily instead of weekly, and cumulative tallies of complaints by type and state will be available on the site, the official said. The system guides consumers through filling out complaints, and provides information on common issues about service, and the commission’s jurisdiction over them, the official said. The system was praised by the Consumers Union, in a release. “This site will make it easier for people to file and track complaints about problems like annoying robocalls and fraudulent charges, and it will help the FCC spot emerging trends in the marketplace,” said Delara Derakhshani, the organization’s policy counsel. “This is a one-stop shop for consumers, and it’s a real improvement over the old system, where forms and information were spread out and hard to find.” The site was also praised by Danielle Kehl, a policy analyst at New America’s Open Technology Institute, in a release. “The new system will enable greater transparency about the type and volume of these complaints, and the system is a critical component of two broader goals: modernizing the FCC’s infrastructure and improving data collection practices,” Kehl said. "This is something that should help consumers better hold companies accountable," Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., said in a statement.

The 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta in 2015 is an opportunity to examine how “the FCC, and communications law and policy … should be reformed in ways that are consistent with rule of law norms [laid out in that historic document],” Free State Foundation President Randolph May wrote in a blog post Friday. “And there will be plenty of such reform and rule of law-oriented work on which to focus,” he wrote. May said Chairman Tom Wheeler “appears intent, especially after President [Barack] Obama’s intervention, on forcing adoption of new public utility-like net neutrality mandates applicable to Internet service providers -- once again relying on questionable legal authority.” It’s “likely,” May wrote, “the agency will abuse its merger review authority by imposing, or inducing merger applicants to ‘volunteer,’ conditions unrelated to any competitive concerns directly raised by the proposed transactions.” It’s also “likely the FCC will continue to try to micromanage competition in ways that favor certain parties over others without sufficient regard to reliance or proprietary interests or due process concerns,” May wrote. Wheeler also “increasingly has evidenced a tendency to diminish his colleagues’ ability to participate in FCC decision-making processes, for example, by directing the agency staff to act on ‘delegated authority’ on significant matters or acting alone,” May wrote. The agency didn't respond. May also cited a recently published book by Columbia University Law professor Philip Hamburger, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?. May said he doesn't go as far as Hamburger’s conclusion “that most, if not all, of the actions of our administrative agencies are unlawful,” but Hamburger’s arguments should “impact the way we think about the lawfulness of various FCC actions and the way the courts consider these actions on review.”

The White House touted its stances on net neutrality and cellphone unlocking in its release Monday reviewing the past year’s accomplishments. “The President took action to keep the Internet open and free,” one slide of the review said, referring to the administration’s backing in November of Communications Act Title II reclassification of broadband. Another pointed to President Barack Obama’s push for cellphone unlocking: “The President signed a bill into law that made it legal for people to unlock their cell phones. It was the first time a We the People petition prompted legislation.” Other items on the list included Obama's becoming the first president to write a line of code and participating in a question-and-answer session on the social media website Tumblr.

Corrections: Wilkinson Barker attorney David Solomon was chief of the FCC Enforcement Bureau (see 412230027) ... Consultancy Sovereign Strategy, of which former European Parliament member Arlene McCarthy is now deputy chair (see 1412190002), has joined the European Commission lobbying transparency register, Chief Executive Michael Quigley said. Sovereign is a member of the Association of Professional Political Consultants and the European Public Affairs Consultancies' Association "and as such respects their respective codes of conduct," he said. McCarthy also joined the transparency register in her own right, he said.

The FCC released an update of a document answering dozens of potential questions on the agency’s collection of data on special access service rates. Covered businesses with more than 1,500 employees are required to submit data by Jan. 29, smaller businesses, by Feb. 27. The FCC warned covered providers and purchasers of special access data that there's a potentially heavy price to pay for not making required submissions by the due date. “Failure to comply with these data reporting requirements may subject parties to monetary forfeitures of up to $160,000 for each violation or each day of a continuing violation, up to a maximum of $1,575,000 for any single act or failure to act that is a continuing violation,” the FCC said Tuesday. The agency said it plans to use the information it receives to do a “comprehensive market analysis that will look at the number [of] special access providers, facilities, service offerings, revenues, and expenditures nationwide in all price cap areas.”

Members of the Expanding Opportunities for Broadcasters Coalition shouldn’t be mischaracterized as spectrum “speculators” and the group hasn't highlighted speculator issues in its advocacy on the TV incentive auction, Executive Director Preston Padden said Monday in a blog post. The group doesn't disclose its member roster. Padden said he has had many discussions in which the other party suggests the issues that group raises are “not issues for real broadcasters,” he said. “It is unfair and inaccurate to describe our members as ‘speculators’ simply because they have expressed an interest in participating in the auction under the appropriate terms.” Coalition members include owners of big-four network-affiliated stations, affiliates of smaller networks and independent stations, he said. “Every Station in our Coalition has viable business options other than participating in the auction,” he wrote. “But these broadcasters recognize that, in many instances, the market value of their spectrum as repurposed for wireless use may be greater than the amount they would be willing to accept to relinquish that spectrum. If this makes them ‘speculators,’ then I guess so too are Lin, Meredith, Tribune, CBS and Fox -- all of which publicly have indicated that they are evaluating the potential benefits of auction participation.” The issues the coalition raises, including the importance of a fair and transparent process as well as that of pricing that will get many broadcasters to take part, aren't speculator issues, Padden said. They're “issues that should be important to any broadcaster interested in the auction, and, as a result, to anyone interested in the success of the auction.”

Adaptrum urged NAB to support its waiver application aimed at helping to bring broadband to rural Maine. There are no UHF TV channels on-air in the proposed deployment area of Maine, Adaptrum said in reply comments in docket 14-187. At the proposed 250 feet, “the chance of interfering with nearby TV receivers is practically ZERO,” it said. The filing is a response to NAB’s reply comments arguing that if the FCC grants Adaptrum’s request, Adaptrum should be required to operate with two vacant TV channels on either side of the channel on which these devices operate. “Excessive guardbands merely decrease service opportunities to citizens in an area where there is now little over-the-air TV or broadband,” Adaptrum said.

Some 680,000 comments filed at the FCC on net neutrality “were not transferred successfully” from the agency’s Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) to XML files made available by the agency, commission officials said Tuesday in a blog post. Gigi Sohn, special counsel-external affairs, and David Bray, chief information officer, said the agency received almost 4 million comments on net neutrality, and blamed problems on an 18-year-old comment system that “was not built to handle this unprecedented volume of comments nor initially designed to export comments via XML.” The problem was “due to a technical error involving Apache Solr, an open source tool the FCC used to produce the XML files,” they said. “We plan to fix this problem by issuing a new set of XML files after the New Year with the full set of comments received during the reply period." They said all of the comments were available on ECFS for public review.