FCC commissioners will look at a notice of inquiry at their February meeting seeking comment on programming diversity issues "and the principal obstacles that independent programmers face" in being carried on video distribution platforms, the FCC said Thursday. Commissioner Mignon Clyburn had said the NOI was in the works earlier this month at the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council's broadband conference (see 1601210031). The meeting is scheduled for Feb. 18.

The Justice Department "finally released" the full text of the EU-U.S. umbrella agreement, the Electronic Privacy Information Center said Monday on its website. EPIC sued the department last year when it didn't act on the group's Freedom of Information Act request. The agreement, EPIC said, "outlines data transfers between EU and US law enforcement agencies, and is the basis for the Judicial Redress Act currently before Congress." EPIC had asked the Senate Judiciary Committee to delay consideration of the bill until a hearing is held on it as well as when the umbrella agreement is made public. The committee is holding a hearing Thursday on the bill (see 1601270025).

Numerous American TV Alliance members lobbied the FCC in recent days on proposed changes to the totality of circumstances test for good-faith retransmission consent negotiating. In an ex parte filing posted Wednesday in docket 15-216, ATVA recapped a pair of meetings with Media Bureau staff, including Chief Bill Lake, and separately with the chairman's office, including Senior Counselor Philip Verveer. ATVA members at the meetings included representatives of the American Cable Association, AT&T, Dish Network, Mediacom, Suddenlink, Time Warner Cable and USTelecom. During the meetings, ATVA said the representatives said the FCC has "unquestionable authority to act in this area" and went over ATVA's proposals (see 1601140026).

The FCC is moving back Thursday's open meeting and giving extra time for most filings. In a notice Wednesday, it cited the weather-related closing of FCC offices Friday afternoon through Tuesday (see 1601250058) and said all filings that were due Jan. 22 through Jan. 27 are now due Thursday. Network Outage Reporting System notifications (see 1601250058) and reports and filings subject to statutory deadlines, however, are excepted from the deadline changes, the FCC said. In a separate notice Wednesday, the agency said Thursday's January open meeting still is a go, as was expected (see 1601260063). It will start at 1 p.m. in the Commission Meeting Room instead of the standard 10:30 a.m. The FCC also pointed to the recent winter storm, in an unopposed motion filed Wednesday in U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit asking that the filing deadline for its brief due Thursday in the appeal of its 2015 effective competition order be moved to Feb. 2. "The prolonged closure of the government has seriously disrupted the efforts of FCC counsel to prepare the brief," the agency said in its motion, which also asks that the intervenor for respondents' brief deadline be moved to Feb. 16, the petitioners' reply brief deadline moved to March 8, and final briefs now be due March 29. NAB, NATOA and Minnesota's Northern Dakota County Cable Communications Commission sued the FCC in August, asking the D.C. Circuit to reject the June effective competition order (see 1508280033).

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler joined a U.S. delegation to Cuba last week that had talks with government officials and others about improving bilateral communications links and domestic Cuban systems. "The Cubans we met were proud people who recognize the benefits new telecommunications networks can bring to education, health care and economic growth," Wheeler said in a blog post Wednesday, saying the delegation was led by Ambassador Danny Sepulveda of the State Department and included technology community representatives. "Our message was simple: we want to help (already, for instance, two companies have roaming agreements with the state-owned telecom provider). We spoke about a new undersea cable connecting our countries, commercial relations for equipment and service providers, as well as an ongoing regulatory dialog." Wheeler said the Cubans talked about upgrading to DSL and 3G wireless and "we urged them to leapfrog such linear transitions and expand to state-of-the-art services." The U.S. delegation pledged to support Cuba's efforts, and members of the island's "small but growing entrepreneurial community [are] hungry for network connectivity," he said. "It is unclear, however, just how anxious the Cuban government is to open up expanded network capabilities." The FCC recently removed Cuba from an exclusion list for international Communications Act Section 214 authorizations, easing the way for U.S. telecom carriers to provide facilities-based voice and data services to Cuba (see 1601150076). "We are also working on removing certain non-discrimination requirements on the U.S.-Cuba route, which would give U.S. carriers more flexibility to negotiate rates with the state-owned telecommunications operator and to respond to market forces," said Wheeler, who said he enjoyed his visit. Separately, the Department of Commerce said its Bureau of Industry and Security "will generally approve license applications for exports and re-exports of telecommunications items that would improve communications to, from, and among the Cuban people," under U.S. trade amendments for Cuba announced Tuesday in a release.

Global Tel*Link and Securus Technologies sought a court stay of certain FCC inmate calling service (ICS) rules, pending further judicial review of a recent order, which the agency refused to stay (see 1601220040). The commission imposed “rate caps that the FCC admits are below providers’ lawfully incurred costs,” GTL said in a motion Wednesday to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (Global Tel*Link v. FCC, No. 15-1461 and consolidated cases). GTL asked that the rate caps be stayed before their effective dates -- March 17 for prisons and June 18 for jails. It said it was likely to prevail on the merits of the underlying case, an initial prong in stay reviews. The rate caps don’t allow ICS providers “to recover the cost of site commissioners they are required to pay [to correctional authorities] -- even though the FCC recognized that those payments are both a substantial cost incurred by ICS providers and permitted by federal law,” GTL said: The FCC "acknowledged that, if commissions are taken into account, the rate caps are below cost.” The company said the rate caps were below cost even without factoring in the site commissions, and it said the agency lacked authority to cap intrastate ICS calls. GTL said the balance of equities also favors a stay because, first, it would otherwise suffer irreparable harm from being forced to charge “unlawful, confiscatory rates" and "the revenues lost cannot be recovered.” The public would also be harmed if the rate caps lead to the loss or reduction of service, it said, while there will be “no cognizable harm” if a stay is imposed. “The court will now set a calendar for briefing the matter, perhaps a month, and then a decision will be issued,” said a GTL spokesperson. “Briefing on the merits of the appeal will occur sometime after, once the court sets a calendar, probably spring into early summer, then oral arguments will take place in the fall and a decision to follow." In its motion, Securus sought a stay of various FCC fee restrictions, its site commission definition and certain reporting requirements. "This new regime will dramatically reduce Securus's rates for several services and may prevent their continued provision," said Securus, which also made detailed arguments in favor of a stay. Others may join the stay effort, GTL said.

The FTC postponed a Tuesday news conference to announce an initiative (see 1601220026) to help identity theft victims and to release new statistics about the crime for 2015, because federal government offices in Washington were closed due to a winter storm. The commission didn't say when it would reschedule the announcement.

The FCC is on a “slippery slope” as it moves closer to a privacy rulemaking (see 1601110065), said Richard Bennett, network architect and conservative blogger, Tuesday in a blog post. Advisers are pushing the FCC to act, Bennett said. With last year’s net neutrality order, which reclassified broadband as a common carrier service, the FCC controls privacy for ISPs and the FTC for advertisers and websites, he said. “Consequently, the advertisers are now pressing the FCC to impose severe restrictions on ISP use of personal information while arguing before the FTC that industry self-regulation is the way to go.” While ISPs are the “first and last to carry bits between consumers and Internet services” their actual gatekeeper role is limited, Bennett said. “There are many gates and many gatekeepers on the Internet,” he wrote. “Many transactions begin with a Google search, many gaming sessions take place over Facebook, and many purchases are mediated by Amazon, eBay, or PayPal. Payment services have the most luscious information of all, what we purchase, where we purchased it, and how much we paid for it. That’s not exactly small potatoes, and it makes more sense to use PayPal with its top-notch security than some tiny web site of uncertain reputation to handle your credit card information.” With many websites using HTTPS, ISPs have little real information when subscribers do domain name searches, he said. “If I search for ‘cats’ on Google, the URL looks like something like this: https://www.google.com/search?q=cats&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS563US566&oq=cats&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j0l5.2170j0j9&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8,” he wrote. “This causes the browser to do a DNS query for www.google.com and to send the rest of the query in encrypted format to the IP address returned by DNS.” The only information the ISP gets is the destination IP address and its equivalent domain name, Bennett said.

The FCC is expected to proceed with its monthly meeting Thursday, assuming the government reopens in time after its closure due to Winter Storm Jonas, a knowledgeable source told us Tuesday. The Office of Personnel Management as of late Tuesday hadn't announced the status of government offices for Wednesday. The FCC is to vote on a broadband deployment report pursuant to Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act, an order to require cable and satellite TV operators and broadcast and satellite radio companies to post public inspection files on the agency's online database, and a rulemaking notice on strengthening the emergency alert system. The broadband report is expected to say advanced telecom capabilities aren't being deployed in a timely and reasonable fashion under Section 706 (see 1601070059). The agency's two Republican commissioners appear likely to dissent from the report, the knowledgeable source said. Meanwhile, the FCC appears unlikely to address rural rate-of-return USF reforms at its Feb. 18 meeting (the tentative agenda for that is due out Thursday) but seems more likely to act on that issue at its March 31 meeting, an industry source told us. Commissioner Mignon Clyburn also recently said the agency planned to address Lifeline USF reform this quarter (see 1601210031). Spokespeople for the commission and Commissioners Mike O’Rielly and Ajit Pai had no immediate comment.

The Communication Workers of America plans to testify against Altice's buying Cablevision at a series of New York State Public Service Commission hearings in the New York City area in coming days, the CWA said in a news release Monday. The hearings are to be Tuesday in the Hudson Valley community of Peekskill, Wednesday in the Bronx, and a pair of hearings Feb. 2 on Long Island. "Given its track record in other business dealings in France and Portugal, the future of Cablevision under Altice's proposed deal would mean customers will get worse service and employees will lose their jobs," said CWA District 1 Vice President Dennis Trainor in a statement. "The PSC should reject the deal as currently proposed to protect customer service and jobs." In a statement, Altice said it "look[s] forward to a fair and open regulatory process with the relevant authorities in connection with our proposed Cablevision transaction, and as in all of our other territories we expect to deliver significant benefits to consumers and their communities." CWA raised similar concerns as it lobbied the FCC for conditions on the proposed transaction (see 1601220015). In a note to investors Monday, Macquarie Capital analyst Amy Yong said Altice and Charter Communications were having different degrees of success in locking down the financing for pending acquisitions as they face different hurdles. The FCC's 180-day Charter shot clock was paused earlier this month to deal with "hot topics including interconnection, Regional Sports Networks, and of course broadband competition [though] concerns around broadband share from the Comcast-Time Warner deal don't seem to apply to Charter," Yong said. New York state regulators earlier this month signed off on Charter buying Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable (see 1601080048) and the California Public Utilities Commission plan a public hearing Tuesday (see 1601200060), but Altice is facing more pushback from New York City on its proposed Cablevision takeover because of how the $900 million in synergies Altice has cited could affect its 14,000 employees there and 3.1 million customers in the metropolitan region, Yong said.