The government continues to make progress toward the administration’s goal of identifying 500 MHz of spectrum for broadband by 2020, NTIA said in a report released Thursday. NTIA said between October 2010 and September 2013 it identified up to 405 MHz for broadband (http://1.usa.gov/1xe9U1I). NTIA cited: 15 MHz in the 1695-1710 MHz band, 100 in the 3550-3650 MHz band, 95 in the 1755-1850 MHz band, and 195 MHz in the 5350-5470 MHz and 5850-5925 MHz bands. The AWS-3 auction is government’s top priority at this point, NTIA said. “The focus for the next 12 months will be to engage industry and government stakeholders to ensure a smooth transition of the 1695-1710 MHz and 1755-1780 MHz bands as the FCC approaches the auction for these bands,” the agency said. NTIA also discussed the importance of expanded Wi-Fi in the 5 GHz band and a final rule on 3.5 GHz spectrum, targeted for sharing and small cell use. “America’s future competitiveness and global technology leadership depend on access to radio spectrum -- the lifeblood of smartphones, tablets, and other data-hungry wireless devices,” NTIA said in a news release (http://1.usa.gov/1kNHEci).

Verizon Vice President-Federal Regulatory Affairs David Young blasted Netflix Wednesday, saying the company had engaged in a PR stunt to blame ISPs for buffering transmissions to its customers. In a blog post, Young cited reports Netflix is displaying a message to some customers whose connection has been slow, saying “The Verizon network is crowded right now.” “This claim is not only inaccurate, it is deliberately misleading,” Young said (http://vz.to/1kD6TTk). “The source of the problem is almost certainly NOT congestion in Verizon’s network. Instead, the problem is most likely congestion on the connection that Netflix has chosen to use to reach Verizon’s network.” Netflix, not Verizon, is responsible for its connection to an ISP, Young wrote. “It is sad that Netflix is willing to deliberately mislead its customers so they can be used as pawns in business negotiations and regulatory proceedings.” Netflix spokesman Joris Evers told us in an email Netflix is not picking on Verizon. “We are testing ways to let consumers know how their Netflix experience is being affected by congestion on their broadband provider’s network,” he said. Tests in the U.S. started last month, he said. BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield said Netflix likely wants to send Verizon a bigger message. Despite signing direct peering and interconnection agreements with Comcast and Verizon in recent weeks “it is clear that Netflix is upset and believes peering should be free,” Greenfield said. “As a result, Netflix is looking to harness the power of its subscriber base to drive its message home to regulators and politicians.”

NTIA issued request for comment on how the White House consumer privacy bill of rights (http://1.usa.gov/1hwy3KA) should be updated, given the findings of the recent White House big data report (CD May 2 p3). The report concluded the administration should seek more stakeholder input before issuing any broad consumer privacy legislative proposal, and tasked NTIA with leading the process. Commerce Department Secretary Penny Pritzker said Wednesday’s request for comment “is part of our continuing dialogue among government, business, consumers, entrepreneurs and other stakeholders about maximizing the benefits and minimizing the risks of big data.” NTIA seeks comment on what sections of the bill of rights need to be “clarified or modified” to address big data. It seeks input on “whether a responsible use framework should be used to address the challenges posed by big data.” The focus on data use restrictions -- not on data collection restrictions -- was a notable aspect of the White House big data report, observers told us. Instructions for submitting comments are at http://1.usa.gov/1iWsB01.

The FCC clarified that FY 2014 application fees kick in July 3, instead of June 6, as had been previously announced, in a public notice Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1kD2NKW).

Correction: Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., isn’t running for his Senate seat this year, choosing to retire at the end of his term instead, nor is he a member of the Commerce Committee (CD June 4 p5).

Comedian John Oliver’s 13-minute attack on the FCC’s proposed net neutrality rules Sunday night was apparently enough to crash agency’s Electronic Comment Filing System Monday (CD June 3 p5). ECFS went down several times Monday. An FCC official said Tuesday the agency encountered technical difficulties Monday “due to heavy traffic,” but the site was up and running Tuesday. Oliver called on Internet “monsters” to let the FCC have it, during his HBO weekly program, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. FCC officially logged 1,506 comments Monday, many of them texts. “It’s sad that in the United States today, ISPs can buy the political influence necessary to usurp the will of the people,” one said. A second called the proposal “obviously just a way for rich cable CEO’s [sic] to blackmail people into paying more money.”

Correction: The TVfreedom.org blog post urging the pay-TV industry to end price increases to its subscribers is from May 22 (CD June 3 p7).

Free Press has begun campaigning against industry-backed Republican House legislation that would stop the FCC from reclassifying broadband as a Title II telecom service, as net neutrality advocates have requested. House Communications Subcommittee Vice Chairman Bob Latta, R-Ohio, last week introduced HR-4752 (CD May 30 p6), which has no co-sponsors and is referred to the Commerce Committee. “Latta’s bill is for the biggest companies that punch his campaign dance ticket, and not for the millions of people who have urged the FCC to protect the open Internet by making these same companies common carriers,” wrote Free Press Senior Director-Strategy Tim Karr in a blog post Thursday (http://bit.ly/1ku9zCo). Karr cited the $60,450 Latta has received in the 2014 election cycle from telecom and media industry players, including many “Net Neutrality haters,” as Karr called them. MapLight research “shows that the members of Congress who have been most active in opposing the idea of establishing net neutrality rules under Title II have received more than twice as much campaign money from the cable industry as the average for all House members,” President Daniel Newman told us in a statement last week when asked about Latta’s bill. Karr dismissed the legislation as “toxic” and urged people to send letters to Congress attacking it (http://bit.ly/1x1GfIY). Latta, in posting a link to industry endorsements for the legislation on his Facebook page (http://on.fb.me/1ueu74P), was widely attacked on these counts across several dozen comments. “Congrats on your new job at Comcast,” one commenter told Latta. “Thanks for nothing.” In response, Latta defended his position. “Those seeking to impose 1930’s telephone regulations on the Internet are desperately seeking a solution in search of a problem,” Latta told us in a statement. “The classification of broadband Internet access as an information service is a long-standing position I have held that has been shared by both the Federal Communications Commission and the Supreme Court. Regulating the Internet as a public utility is bad for the economy, bad for jobs, and most importantly, bad for consumers.”

Subscription TV and ISPs are the communications service providers that showed the most improvement in British customer satisfaction in Q1, said the U.K.-based National Customer Satisfaction Index (NCSI-UK) Tuesday. British satisfaction with subscription TV had a score of 71 in Q1, up 4.4 percent from Q4. British satisfaction with ISPs had a score of 69, up 3 percent from Q4. Satisfaction with both types of service is “much higher in Britain than the United States,” said Claes Fornell, chairman of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), in a news release. ACSI produces the NCSI-UK index. Mobile phone and landline providers also had improvements in customer satisfaction, while mobile network providers saw no improvement, NCSI-UK said (http://bit.ly/1kAPxqe).

AT&T’s Project VIP network investment plan continues to make progress in its second year, the company said in a news release (http://bit.ly/SqXGSU) Tuesday. The 4G LTE network now covers nearly 290 million people, and Project VIP is expected to take fiber to more than 400,000 new business locations by the end of the second quarter, the company said. In wireless, AT&T expects to report in the second quarter that postpaid subscriber net adds exceeded 800,000, that about 3.2 million AT&T Next smartphones were sold, which would make up about 50 percent of total sales, and that about half of the company’s postpaid smartphone customers are on no-device-subsidy Mobile Share Value pricing plans. Despite the “self-congratulatory pomp and circumstance,” MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett wrote investors, “AT&T’s business trends are much weaker than they appear.” Despite a much faster-than-expected transition to equipment installment plan (EIP) accounting, “AT&T’s earnings aren’t rising,” Moffett wrote. “AT&T is simply spending the one-time accounting benefit of EIP as a fig leaf to mask an aggressive and dangerous re-pricing of their subscriber base.”