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 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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

The FCC’s Rural Broadband Experiment was a success, with 575 bids from 181 different entities covering homes and small businesses in more than 75,000 census blocks in rural areas in every state in the country, said Jonathan Chambers, chief of the FCC Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis, Wednesday in a blog post. The amount of funding requested was nine times higher than what was available, he noted. “It appears that the auction succeeded in drawing bidders who believe they can provide service very economically,” he said. “For example, when we compared the bids to the amount of support calculated by the FCC's cost model, the total requested in the auction in the aggregate is less than half the model-based support for those census blocks.” The amount offered was relatively small, Chambers said, at $10 million a year for 10 years, "or just over two-tenths of one percent of the FCC's $4.5 billion annual fund for rural universal service support." Some predicted bidding would focus on just the lowest-cost eligible census blocks, Chambers wrote. But bidders “sought support in all types of geographic areas with varying cost characteristics, with the majority of bids in the most expensive to serve areas that will be eligible for Connect America Phase II support,” he said. Next, the FCC is starting the process of reviewing low bids, he said. Provisionally selected bidders must demonstrate technical and financial qualifications and obtain a letter of credit and designation as an eligible telecommunications carrier, before they can start receiving funding, he said. “At the same, time, we are starting to design a rural broadband auction on a larger scale. While hard questions remain, we are glad to have results from this experiment to help guide our answers, and we are appreciative of the interest shown by every bidder in the auction.”

Sinclair’s court challenge against the FCC’s incentive auction order is really about continuing the broadcaster’s “longstanding advocacy neither to reallocate nor to auction broadcast spectrum,” said the Expanding Opportunities for Broadcasters Coalition in an intervenor brief filed in support of the FCC in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Since EOBC includes NAB members, the coalition is intervening only in Sinclair’s case, the brief said. The brief also took issue with Sinclair’s argument against the 39-month construction deadline for repacked broadcasters after the auction. “The post-auction transition period reasonably balances the competing public interest objectives of preserving television service and expediting the introduction of new wireless service on reclaimed spectrum, the brief said. EOBC also supported the FCC stance that two independently controlled stations nationwide participating in the auction would fulfill its competition requirement. Sinclair has said the order should require that the two stations be in the same market. “Sinclair’s real complaint is with the policy choice for an Incentive Auction and not with the FCC’s implementation of the choice Congress made,” the EOBC said. The Competitive Carriers Association, CEA and CTIA also filed an intervenor brief supporting the commission Tuesday. Sinclair and NAB are “overreading” the congressional reference to OET-69 in the Spectrum Act, CCA, CEA and CTIA said. “Petitioners contend that Congress ordered the Commission to conduct an unprecedented and exceedingly complex spectrum auction using (1) archaic software that would make a timely auction impossible and (2) outdated, inaccurate factual inputs,” the brief said. “Congress did no such thing.”

It's time for the FCC to wrap up the selection of a local number portability administrator, said Telcordia executives and lawyers for the company in a series of meetings at the FCC, with Commissioner Mignon Clyburn and aides to other commissioners. “Telcordia has been pushing to bring competition to number portability administration for the past ten years,” the company said in a filing in docket 09-109. In that period, there have been three “major contract extensions” and modifications of the LNPA contract with Neustar and the cost of the contract had “skyrocketed,” from $200 million in 2005 to about $500 million in 2015, Telcordia said. “Any further delays will significantly harm consumers.” Neustar fired back. “Once again, Ericsson is impatiently stamping its feet just as the FCC is seriously digging in to the many important issues raised by this botched process," a spokesperson said. "Ericsson must know that a full and thorough evaluation will find that the company falls short when it comes to meeting the needs of all carriers and consumers.” Ericsson is the parent of Telcordia.

There's an “overwhelming record” in favor of “bright line” net neutrality rules reclassifying broadband as a Title II service, particularly based on filings from startup Web companies, Marvin Ammori, fellow at the New America Foundation, told FCC General Counsel Jon Sallet in a recent meeting, said an ex parte filing posted by the FCC Monday in docket 14-28. The FCC should forbear from most parts of Title II but retain Sections 201, 202 and 208, he said. But Free State Foundation President Randolph May said in a blog post in The Hill that reclassification would encourage other nations to impose more restrictions on the Internet. “Despite any protestations to the contrary that may be uttered by U.S. officials, the FCC's action regulating Internet providers will speak louder than any justifications the agency may offer,” he wrote. “Other countries, like China, Iran, Cuba and Russia, with unmistakable designs on exerting more control over Internet communications, will seize upon the FCC's new claim of regulatory authority as a justification for their own actions.” Public Knowledge also called for Title II reclassification in a filing at the commission. “In the wake of President [Barack] Obama’s full-throated endorsement of robust Open Internet rules based in Title II authority, Public Knowledge hopes the Commission is moving quickly to protect the future of the Open Internet,” the group said.