Senate Communications Subcommittee Chairman Mark Pryor, D-Ark., worries about the FCC Wireline Bureau’s plans to hike its rate floor in July. “The rate floor, which is currently set at $14 will rise to over $20 on July 1, 2014,” Pryor said in a Wednesday letter (http://1.usa.gov/P1Fo93) to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. “Telecommunications providers offering service at rates below this rate floor could risk losing vital universal service support if they do not take action to immediately raise the telephone rates of their customers.” Wheeler acknowledged the concern during a separate Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing Thursday, which Pryor did not participate in. The FCC instituted a series of rate floor hikes as part of its November 2011 USF order to prevent what the agency would consider improper USF subsidies. The agency plans to phase in the increase and delay implementation beyond July, Wheeler said. The rate floor is part of the agency’s attempts to phase out excessive subsidies for basic phone service.

The FCC should ensure strong incentives for carriers to participate in the AWS-3 auction, the heads of the House Spectrum Working Group told FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in a letter Tuesday. “We urge the Commission to put forth a band plan that allows for robust competition, maximizing revenue through vigorous auction participation,” said Reps. Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., and Doris Matsui, D-Calif. (http://1.usa.gov/NUeTBD). “We recognize the FCC must balance many competing public interest goals in designing spectrum band plans, geographic license areas, and block sizes. We understand that is not an easy task."

The FCC should create a publicly searchable database of consumer complaints accessible from the agency homepage, Sens. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Tom Udall, D-N.M., told FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in a letter Tuesday. The 400,000 consumer complaints and inquiries the agency receives are made public “on a very limited basis,” they said. Such a database would “enhance transparency, help the FCC empower consumers, and spur greater innovation in the telecommunications marketplace,” they said. The database would also help the agency in “identifying emerging issues,” the lawmakers added. Consumers Union backs the move and will file comments with the FCC on such a database next week, it said of the letter. “An easily accessed, searchable database would help consumers see similar complaints and how they were resolved,” said policy counsel Delara Derakhshani in a statement. “By making consumer complaints public and searchable, it is easier to identify key trends or issues that need to be addressed."

Government phone surveillance questions must be resolved “in a bipartisan manner,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Wednesday during a weekly briefing. The programs have saved American lives despite some legitimate privacy concerns, Boehner said. He pointed favorably to legislation introduced this week by leaders of the House Intelligence Committee that would end bulk collection of phone metadata. “The bill represents the start of a bipartisan conversation” in balancing national security and privacy concerns, he said. The efforts will likely end with bulk phone metadata moving away from government hands, Boehner said.

Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., introduced a spectrum bill Tuesday. S-2155 would “amend the National Telecommunications and Information Administration Organization Act to create a Federal Spectrum Reallocation Commission, to provide for the use of a portion of the proceeds from the auction of reallocated Federal spectrum for deficit reduction, and for other purposes,” said the long title listed so far. The bill’s text hadn’t been posted, nor supplied upon request, by our deadline. No co-sponsors are listed, and the legislation has been referred to the Senate Commerce Committee. Kirk is not a member of that committee.

Writers Guild of America, West is “opposed to the reauthorization process being used to undermine competition in the set-top box market,” Director-Research and Public Policy Ellen Stutzman plans to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee at a hearing Wednesday at 10 a.m. in 226 Dirksen. “Consumers currently have too little choice when it comes to their MVPD [multichannel video programming distributor] set-top box and weakening Section 629 of the Communications Act by repealing the ‘integration ban’ is a move in the wrong direction.” The guild supports a clean reauthorization, she will say. “This Committee should take a hard look at whether the ’temporary’ Section 119 distant signal license should be allowed to expire as scheduled and as originally intended by its creators,” Schurz Communications Senior Vice President-Broadcasting Marci Burdick, a board member of NAB and speaking on its behalf, plans to say. “If, however, this Committee determines that an extension of the distant signal license is warranted, we ask that any reauthorization not serve as a vehicle for new laws that undermine the future of our free, locally-focused broadcasting system.” Also testifying are Dish Network Senior Counsel-Regulatory Affairs Alison Minea and Public Knowledge Senior Staff Attorney John Bergmayer.

The Senate Commerce Committee scheduled a hearing on the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act for April 1 at 2:30 p.m. in 253 Russell, it announced Tuesday. Witnesses weren’t announced.

Entrenched marketplace incumbents can pose an obstacle to innovation, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said Monday at Uber’s Washington office. Rubio was at a media event addressing a Florida law affecting Uber’s operations. Some outdated regulations sometimes are “a barrier to entry” for new innovative competitors, despite not causing bigger incumbents any trouble, he said. He posed various scenarios of this sort, such as “if the carriers had prevented WhatsApp from existing,” since the mobile app allowed a form of communications that may have competed with traditional text messaging that carriers facilitated. He marveled at Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp and how many hundreds of millions of dollars per WhatsApp employee the sale amounted to. Rubio also recalled his time in the Florida Legislature and a market dominated by cable franchises: “Your options were one company,” he said. “We had to pass a state bill to open that up.” Now, in a competitive landscape with Dish and DirecTV and AT&T’s U-Verse, “you get to shop for prices and bundling options,” he said. He also pointed to the struggles of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he’s a member, and how those lawmakers are always trying to pass laws applying to industries “moving faster than Congress ever could.”

Several industry associations asked congressional leaders to reinstate bonus depreciation provisions, which ended last year. Renewing bonus depreciation and potentially “the comparable Alternative Minimum Tax credit in lieu of bonus depreciation for 2014” would give “immediate incentive for businesses to make additional capital investments, thereby boosting the U.S. economy and job creation,” said the Monday letter, signed by CTIA, the Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance, NCTA, the Telecommunications Industry Association and USTelecom, among associations in other sectors. “We are united in the belief that immediate renewal of bonus depreciation for 2014 will make an important difference in sustaining and expanding necessary capital investment and its resultant job creation. Bonus depreciation makes such investment a much more certain and attractive business proposition, and it encourages investment and job growth in America right now.”

NTCA wants Congress to focus on outdated program access rules and make other video changes, it told the Senate Commerce Committee leadership in a letter from CEO Shirley Bloomfield last week. NTCA asked for changes to be implemented as part of Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act reauthorization. “Given the clear link between access to video content and broadband deployment, Congress should be concerned about the FCC’s inaction, which allows broadband deployment and adoption to be impeded by outdated program access rules,” said the response to an inquiry of Senate Commerce to a variety of stakeholders. “Congressional attention to this matter is particularly timely, as the prospect of cable giants Comcast and Time Warner Cable joining forces will only exacerbate the protracted fight being waged by small video distributors to secure programming under reasonable and affordable terms.” NTCA advocated for changes to retransmission consent negotiations as part of STELA. It said Congress should “strengthen the good faith negotiating standards and clarify what constitutes a per se violation” and kill the non-duplication and syndicated exclusivity rules. “There is ample evidence before the FCC showing that these rules provide broadcasters with a ‘one-sided level of protection’ and artificially-inflated bargaining leverage in retransmission consent negotiations, and are thus no longer justified,” it said. Broadcasters have strongly argued on many occasions for a clean reauthorization of STELA, which wouldn’t address broader video market issues. NTCA said Congress shouldn’t make cable operators retain retrans stations on the basic tier and that technology has “outpaced the need for existing rules” of the set-top box navigation and security function integration ban. NTCA pointed to one laudable aspect of the Consumer Choice in Online Video Act, introduced last fall by Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. “Section 668 of S. 1680, which would prevent programmers from arbitrarily blocking all consumers of certain providers from access to online content as discussed above, particularly merits serious consideration,” NTCA said.