The Rural Utilities Service is anticipating that investment for round two of the Broadband Initiatives Program “is going to be more than double what we invested in the first round,” Administrator Jonathan Adelstein said at the Broadband Breakfast. The agency planned to have three rounds, but “folded the second and third rounds into the second one.” Adjusting the “remote” definition, increasing the grant component and other changes in the eligibility process encouraged more applications, he said. Most of the awards will be announced in July and August, he said.

A TV spectrum paper by FCC broadband staffers released Monday to little fanfare drew mixed reviews from broadcast lawyers who closely read it and engineers just beginning to parse it. Consumer electronics and wireless groups, seeking spectrum repurposed from broadcasting to wireless broadband, praised the paper, which is at http://xrl.us/bhor2p. The 60-page paper was posted Monday on the website of the National Broadband Plan but no news release accompanied it, so lawyers and engineers still were studying it Tuesday.

Anti-porn advocates urged more vigorous enforcement of federal obscenity laws, saying Congress and the Department of Justice should ensure that aggressive prosecution of laws already on the books is a priority, they said at a briefing hosted by the Coalition for the War Against Illegal Pornography on the Hill Tuesday.

The Rural Cellular Association (RCA), the Rural Telecommunications Group (RTG), T-Mobile, Sprint Nextel and many small and midsized carriers said the FCC should use its authority under Title III of the Communications Act to impose a data roaming obligation on carriers like the one for voice approved in 2007. But AT&T and Verizon Wireless countered that requiring roaming for data would violate the Communications Act. The commission sought comment on data roaming when it dropped the in-market exception for voice roaming (CD April 22 p4).

FTC officials took issue Tuesday with media descriptions of how the agency works. It had come under fire from some bloggers and industry executives for including in a discussion draft for a Tuesday workshop proposals to change copyright law and to tax some CE devices to help subsidize the ailing newspaper industry (CD June 10 p17). “The authors of those articles and blogs don’t know the agency, and they've misdescribed what the agency has done and what the workshop is about,” Commissioner Thomas Rosch said at a workshop about journalism’s future.

News Corp. is in talks with British Sky Broadcasting to acquire the 60.9 percent of BSkyB stock it doesn’t already own, the companies said Tuesday. News Corp. has already made two informal offers for the public shares, both of which were declined by BSkyB, they said. While the companies haven’t agreed on a price, they agreed to proceed with the regulatory process to “facilitate a proposed transaction,” said News Corp. BSkyB’s independent directors said it would back a higher offer. “It is the unanimous view from the independent directors that there is a significant gap between the proposal from News Corp. and the value of the company,” said BSkyB. The purchase likely will require regulatory approval from the European Union and other regulators, said News Corp.

Recent Supreme Court cases haven’t displaced antitrust law in telecom and other highly regulated industries, Verizon Senior Vice President John Thorne said at a hearing Tuesday of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy. But an FTC official and others urged Congress to use legislation to clarify the meaning of the high court’s 2003 Trinko and 2007 Credit Suisse decisions. Democratic and Republican subcommittee members said they were troubled by the rulings, but Republicans seemed hesitant to back legislative action. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., told us a legislative fix is unlikely.

The CEA differed with some consumer electronics makers and cable operators on whether the FCC should exempt more subscription-video providers from CableCARD rules so they can use cheap HD set-top boxes that combine navigation and security features. Filings Monday on fixes to CableCARDs before the commission moves to a gateway device standard showed NCTA and members including Comcast, Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable support use of digital terminal adapters (DTA), as the regulator proposed in a rulemaking (CD April 22 p6). The CEA and Consumer Electronics Retailers Coalition (CERC) said DTAs undermine CableCARDs.

The FCC needs to weigh the potential effect on minority broadcasters if it proceeds with a proposal to urge broadcasters to sell off part of their spectrum for mobile broadband, FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn said Monday at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition meeting in Chicago on spectrum and the National Broadband Plan. She said the effect of the auction on broadcast diversity is one of a “number of potential landmines” for the auction proposal. Clyburn has voiced similar concerns before (CD March 17 p7).

Though little is known about key LTE patent holders and their asset values, companies like Ericsson and Nokia are already projecting how much essential intellectual property rights they will have for LTE. Meanwhile, the fate of Canadian vendor Nortel’s estimated large LTE patent assets is still pending, making the 4G patent ownership landscape even more unclear, experts said.