NTIA extended the deadline for comment on factors influencing industry adoption of IPv6 to Oct. 17, from Oct. 3 (see 1608180029). It was “in response to requests for additional time,” said an agency notice in the Federal Register. The Department of Commerce intends to use the comments to “inform” its work to promote IPv6, including a planned IPv6 best practices forum set to be held during the Internet Governance Forum's December meeting in Guadalajara, Mexico. Stakeholders see NTIA’s request for comment on IPv6 as particularly opportune given U.S. entities’ progress over the past year in adopting the protocol and amid the inflection point in the transition to new technologies like 5G and the IoT (see 1608310069).

The FCC net neutrality order ban on paid prioritization is overly restrictive, preventing arrangements that could benefit consumers, said a TechFreedom paper by Policy Counsel Tom Struble. "No exceptions are made for paid prioritization, and other forms of differential traffic management -- e.g., unpaid or user-directed prioritization -- are subject to strict scrutiny from the FCC," said a news release Friday on the paper. “The FCC’s blanket ban on paid prioritization created a major obstacle to innovation, and the agency failed to provide any real proof of harm as justification,” said Struble. “It’s not too late for the Commission to fix this. Adopting the transparency requirement proposed by the Broadband Internet and Technical Advisory Group would help ensure that consumers are receiving the service they pay for while providing the FCC with the information it needs to address concerns on a case-by-case basis. This approach would protect consumers without needlessly hamstringing ISPs that wish to experiment with new approaches to network management.” Struble was to discuss the paper Saturday at a conference where Commissioner Mike O'Rielly on Friday bemoaned the lack of FCC cost-benefit analyses (see 1609300069).

UBS downgraded AT&T from buy to neutral based on wireless competition concerns and “expectations for lower earnings growth than we had originally expected,” UBS said in a Wednesday note to investors. UBS said it's reducing its earnings per share estimates by 3 percent to $2.84 in 2016 to reflect “increased competitive intensity in wireless and incremental costs” tied to the DirecTV Now roll out (see 1609210048). UBS said earnings are likely to take a hit due to “1) diminishing benefits from the shift to installment plans, 2) limited upside to savings from lower volumes, and 3) ramping competitive intensity.” On DirecTV Now, an over-the-top service, UBS said: “We expect the cost of deployment of this new bundle and Sunday Ticket accounting to pressure Entertainment profitability in the near-term.”

Siris Capital completed a $2 billion acquisition of Polycom, the teleconferencing company said in a news release Tuesday. Polycom announced the deal in July after terminating a $1.96 billion deal with Mitel (see 1607080027). Siris Capital Executive Partner Mary McDowell will succeed Peter Leav as Polycom CEO, the company said.

The National Science Foundation is giving $10 million “in new awards to develop and scale next-generation Internet applications and technologies through the US Ignite program, supporting access to the gigabit-enabled networks and services that bring data and analytics to decision-makers in real time,” the White House said Monday in a fact sheet on its Smart Cities initiative. Four new cities joined US Ignite’s Smart Gigabit Communities network: Albuquerque, New Mexico; Adelaide, Australia; Salisbury, North Carolina; and Washington, D.C. “Four additional companies are joining the Administration’s NSF-led Advanced Wireless Research Initiative, collectively committing over $8 million in in-kind contributions to help support the design, deployment, and operation of four city-scale advanced wireless testing platforms,” the White House added: Anritsu, Crown Castle, Ericsson and FiberTower. Some $4 million of NSF money also would go toward “new Cyber-Physical Systems awards focused on Smart & Connected Communities, which would “help establish the technological foundation for smart cities and the Internet of Things, which enables connection of physical devices at enormous scale to the digital world through sensors and other IT infrastructure,” the administration said. The White House also said NTIA “is releasing a new toolkit to help communities leverage private-sector resources and expertise to advance smart cities” and that the National Institute of Standards and Technology “and its collaborators are announcing a new international coalition dedicated to developing an Internet of Things-Enabled Smart City Framework, with an initial release planned for next summer.”

GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump's regulatory policy “seeks to reduce the current regulatory burden by a minimum of 10% or $200 billion annually,” two advisers said in a white paper the campaign released Monday before the first presidential debate. Peter Navarro, a business professor at the University of California-Irvine, and private equity investor Wilbur Ross wrote the paper and are listed as senior policy advisers to Trump. “Many new rules never are adequately quantified -- or quantified at all,” the paper said of current regulations, citing the “woefully understaffed” White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. They cite the planned moratorium on new regulations a Trump administration intends to impose and the list of regulations ready for scrapping that all federal agencies would be mandated to produce. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton “has promised to continue Obama’s regulatory agenda,” the Trump campaign white paper said. It didn’t mention telecom policy specifically. The Clinton campaign slammed Trump’s economic policy ideas Monday, saying in a news release “economists and business leaders across the political spectrum agree that his economic plan would plunge our country back into recession.”

A Democratic administration of Hillary Clinton would likely involve more media ownership regulation and spectrum auction bidding credits, said Akin Gump in a report on the 2016 presidential election released Thursday. It summarized the elements of her telecom and tech agenda, detailed last year and this summer, and discussed by a Clinton aide at the Democratic National Convention. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump “has said very little” on telecom, Akin Gump noted, relying on speculation about traditional GOP positions on such issues when addressing his administration predictions. The firm speculated Trump could seek to privatize government-held spectrum but also be less likely to allow reallocation of spectrum used for national security. Trump “may push the FCC to take action that would force equipment manufacturers to cooperate with national security efforts, either through individual enforcement actions or via rulemakings of general applicability,” it said.

The FCC Wireline Bureau granted the application of Nice Systems and inContact to transfer domestic licenses under Section 214 of the Communications Act, subject to executive branch conditions, said a public notice Thursday in docket 16-177. DOJ said "Team Telecom" agencies wouldn't object to Nice's planned buy of inContact if the FCC conditions license transfers on the applicants' compliance with commitments they made in a letter of agreement. The commitments "will help ensure that those agencies with responsibility for enforcing the law, protecting the national security, and preserving public safety can proceed appropriately to satisfy those responsibilities," said a petition Wednesday from the DOJ/FBI backed by the Homeland Security and Defense departments. The Nice/inContact letter, which was attached to the petition, said they will comply with all lawful electronic surveillance requirements, plus recordkeeping, nondisclosure, point-of-contact and other duties.

The FCC during the Obama administration rewrote competition law by using a "gatekeeper theory" to justify net neutrality regulation instead of using "market power" analysis, said Fred Campbell, Tech Knowledge director, in a blog post Wednesday. "The FCC’s gatekeeper theory posits that even an internet service provider (ISP) without market power has the incentive and ability to 'force edge providers to pay inefficiently high fees because that [ISP] is typically an edge provider's only option for reaching a particular end user,'" he wrote, quoting from a 2010 net neutrality order. He said the commission found the consumer cost of switching from one ISP to another is too high to permit competition to properly discipline the market: "In antitrust terms, net neutrality categorizes vertical relationships (e.g., exclusive contracts) between ISPs and edge providers as harmful per se. This per se ban on vertical relationships is inconsistent with longstanding FCC precedent, congressional findings embodied in communications legislation, antitrust law, and relevant court decisions."

AT&T Chief Financial Officer John Stephens questioned the logic behind the FCC’s move to take on business data services (BDS) rules, during a Bank of America/Merrill Lynch investor conference Wednesday. The FCC’s “own study” based on 2013 data shows “somewhere around 85 percent of the buildings, or the vast majority of the buildings in the United States, had more than two business data services providers where we operate,” Stephens said: “We think that number is about 85 percent and when you include cable and other alternative providers it's even higher. So the facts and specifically the facts developed by the FCC in 2013 don't support their premise” that rules are needed. Stephens said AT&T will be a leader on 5G.