Career FCC staffers are giving renewed attention to a long-dormant program-carriage case that the Media Bureau decided in the channel’s favor and proposed that the full commission uphold, agency officials said. Bureau officials appear to be revisiting an order on Mid-Atlantic Sports Network v. Time Warner Cable that went on circulation the last business day Kevin Martin was FCC chairman, an agency official said. Representatives of MASN and Time Warner Cable likely will come to the commission to meet with staffers and perhaps FCC members in the coming weeks to discuss the case, agency officials said.

The U.S. lacks a coherent international cybersecurity strategy and needs more leadership from Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt to coordinate agencies, said a GAO report released Monday. The lack of leadership is hampering the establishment of U.S.-related standards for cybersecurity, said the report, which pointed to several problems. The federal government hasn’t documented its goals for international cyberspace governance, it said. President Barack Obama’s 2009 Cyberspace Policy Review was supposed to produce near-term international goals but doesn’t set specific activities or timing to accomplish them. Without a comprehensive strategy from the White House, “Congress and the American public will be ill-equipped to assess how, if at all, federal efforts to address the global aspects of cyberspace ultimately support U.S. national security, economic, and other interests,” the report said.

Accord is slightly closer on how wireline ISPs should handle all Internet content and manage real-time communications and streaming services that don’t work properly with latency, officials on both sides of the issue said Monday. A meeting Saturday involving FCC Chief of Staff Eddie Lazarus (CD July 30 p1) didn’t produce breakthroughs, they said. The meeting did show that supporters and opponents of net neutrality still have more common ground on the wireline issues of content nondiscrimination and managed services than on wireless, said commission and industry officials.

Motorola, TIA, CTIA and other industry players asked the FCC to maintain the de minimis rule in some form for larger manufacturers when it revises its hearing aid compatibility rules (HAC), in a vote scheduled for Thursday’s commission meeting. One of the results of the order is that Apple’s popular iPhone could become hearing aid-compatible.

Career FCC staffers are updating an overdue report to Congress on hurdles minorities, small businesses and women face in the media and telecom industries which Chairman Julius Genachowski will soon seek a vote on, agency officials said. The triennial report, due last Dec. 31, is mandated by Section 257 the Telecom Act to cover the past three years of work the commission has done to improve such constituents’ access to the industries and describe barriers that are faced, agency and industry officials said. Advocates for minorities said they'll closely scrutinize the document when it’s publicized to get a sense of what steps Genachowski is taking to reduce barriers to entry.

National Broadband Plan authors defended the document’s broadband speed recommendations in a laid-back and mostly friendly conversation Friday afternoon with the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association. Reporters and NTCA officials huddled on opposite ends of a large conference table, while in the middle and sitting across from each other, new NTCA CEO Shirley Bloomfield and former FCC broadband team members Blair Levin and Erik Garr debated what many rural carriers and some members of Congress have called the broadband plan’s double standard: 100 Mbps proposed for 100 million homes, but Universal Service Fund support in rural areas for only 4 Mbps.

The FCC International Bureau’s decision to decline EchoStar’s application for a new C-band satellite on the basis of a pattern of speculative applications (CD July 30 p9) was a surprisingly strict move by the bureau, said satellite industry executives. While the bureau’s decision limits the number of applications the company can file, it remains unclear how it will affect its bottom line, the company said. EchoStar will respond to the action within the next month, it said. It’s thought to be the first time the bureau had used the rule as the basis for declining an application, the executives said.

Motorola, which signed an agreement with San Francisco Bay Area public safety agencies to deploy an LTE network, sees interest from major cities throughout the country, Bob Schassler, vice president of North America Government Markets, said in an interview Thursday. Meanwhile, the company posted a Q2 net income of $162 million versus $26 million a year ago.

Negotiations for a possible compromise on broadband reclassification and net neutrality, hosted by FCC Chief of Staff Eddie Lazarus, intensified this week, with industry officials at the commission for two additional days of discussions and a call scheduled for late Thursday. What is being described as a “marathon” Saturday meeting is also on tap, set to start at 8 a.m. that day. Hill pressure on the commission to reach a compromise is also growing, with Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., telling FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski he’s not pleased with responses to his May 27 letter posing questions about the agency’s work on broadband reclassification.

The FCC is ready to handle payphone-compensation problems as needed, Wireline Bureau Chief Sharon Gillett told a commission symposium looking at ways to streamline and improve the dial-around compensation process for payphone calls. A dial-around call is made using an access code or toll-free number instead of coins. “Payphones are very important today, as ever, particularly in times of emergency or for consumers who don’t have access to any other form of wireline or wireless telephone service,” Gillett said. Section 276 of the Communications Act requires payphone service providers (PSPs) be compensated fairly for calls, she noted: “Our challenge today is to ensure that PSPs are compensated for all completed calls, including dial-around calls.”