A five-year program dedicated to paying for internal E-rate connect requests from schools should enable coverage of 10.5 million students in funding year 2015, compared with 3.8 million students without the multiyear program, said an FCC staff report released Tuesday. The FCC approved its E-rate modernization at its July open meeting (CD July 14 p1). The order will provide $1 billion annually for the next five years for Wi-Fi connections within schools and libraries. The report was authored by staff of the Wireline Bureau and the Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis (http://bit.ly/1uoRcod). The FCC asked interested parties to comment on the data in the report as part of broader comments in docket 13-184 on a Further NPRM on the E-rate program (http://bit.ly/1kcJUAy).

Paid prioritization would hinder innovation in e-government, online voter registration, and online civic engagement, Common Cause representatives including Program Director Todd O'Boyle, Legal Fellow Allison Venuti, and Media and Democracy Fellow Michelle Forelle told an aide to FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel Monday, said an ex parte notice (http://bit.ly/1ss3x6K) posted in docket 14-28 Thursday. Non-prioritized Web services would suffer from decreased traffic and utilization, creating a choice for local governments and non-profits of either facing curtailed traffic or paying access charges, the group’s representatives said. Access charges paid by local governments would ultimately be borne by local taxpayers, Common Cause said, while nonprofits may be excluded from the online marketplace of ideas. Communications Act Title II reclassification would offer voters and consumers safeguards, while relying on Section 706 to pass open Internet rules “would leave too much room for negotiation, leading to unacceptable fast lanes,” Common Cause said.

Correction: NATOA’s most recent monthly webinar, on FirstNet, was Aug. 4 (CD Aug 4 p21)

In an apparent first for the FCC, all three legal aides to an FCC commissioner live tweeted numerous times during Friday’s open meeting. Matthew Berry, Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) and Nick Degani (@NickDeganiFCC), aides to Commissioner Ajit Pai (@AjitPaiFCC), all tweeted during the meeting, as did their boss, mostly about the text-to-911 item (see related story), which was the subject of a Pai dissent.

Several groups argued that President Barack Obama’s recent comments on net neutrality (CD Aug 7 p2) differ from the FCC’s rulemaking notice, and asked for Obama’s help. “Your vision of net neutrality is fundamentally incompatible with FCC’s plan, which would explicitly allow for paid prioritization,” the groups said in a letter to the White House Friday (http://mzl.la/1B12X5V). “The only way for the FCC to truly protect an open Internet is by using its clear [Communications Act] Title II authority. Over the next few months, we need your continued and vocal support for fair and meaningful net neutrality rules.” The letter’s signers include the American Civil Liberties Union, Common Cause, Consumers Union, Demand Progress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Press, MoveOn.org, Mozilla and Public Knowledge. The FCC had declined comment on the allegation of any difference between Obama and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, and the White House has not responded to requests for clarification on where Obama stands. Wheeler has defended his commitment to protecting the open Internet and has said the NPRM asks many questions rather than prescribes any one path.

The FCC Media Bureau seeks comment on a petition for rulemaking for expanding online public file obligations to cable- and satellite-TV operators. Comments are due Aug. 28, replies Sept. 8, the bureau said Thursday in a public notice (http://bit.ly/1r1T0yf). The petition was filed by the Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause and Sunlight Foundation, it said. The bureau also seeks comment on whether the FCC should begin a rulemaking proceeding to require radio stations to use the online public file, it said. Because all comments will be posted in the FCC Electronic Comment Filing System, “we hereby waive the requirement that parties be served copies of the comments and reply comments,” it said.

The FCC seeks comment on AT&T’s proposed buy of DirecTV. Initial comments and petitions in docket 14-90 are due Sept. 16, the FCC said Thursday in a public notice (http://bit.ly/1sAYySe). Responses to comments and oppositions to petitions are due Oct. 16, replies and further oppositions Nov. 5, it said.

Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood fired back at industry officials questioning the group’s statements that President Barack Obama’s views on net neutrality go well beyond policy advocated by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler (CD July 14 p2 or WID July 14 p4). One commenter suggested Free Press is living in a fantasy land. “Prepaid pundits are free to spout off whenever they want,” Wood said Thursday. “There is indeed a Title II crowd” that believes broadband should be reclassified, Wood said. “It’s made up of millions of Americans,” he said. “It includes thousands of civil society group and grassroots leaders. It counts hundreds of innovative edge companies, venture capitalists, and dozens of real broadband providers among its numbers. It also has a growing list of lawmakers at the local, state and federal level.” Obama mentioned the Internet for a second time in a week Wednesday, at a news conference. The administration is “disturbed by efforts to control the Internet,” Obama said (http://1.usa.gov/1qYUEFD). Over the past decade the growth of “new media, new technology allow people to get information that previously would have never been accessible, or only to a few specialists,” he said. “Now people can punch something up on the Internet and pull up information that’s relevant to their own lives and their own societies and communities.” Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said in an interview Thursday Obama’s statement on Tuesday made clear the president “understands the stakes” involved in the open Internet proceeding. “I think he did it with clarity and with a clear-headed approach to what the cost of a ‘fast-lane, slow-lane’ Internet would be,” Copps said. “I would hope that the commissioners would be looking at that and listening to that.”

Many FCC staffers worked from home Tuesday, at the request of FCC security, to avoid the general disruption from the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit at the nearby Mandarin Oriental Hotel, agency officials told us. But the FCC was largely back to normal Wednesday, officials said. Tuesday was the peak day of the summit, featuring remarks by President Barack Obama and meetings at the Mandarin.

Emmis Communications has encountered a diversity of resistance among wireless carriers in getting them to adopt the NextRadio FM reception app in smartphones (CD Aug 5 p7), Chief Technology Officer Paul Brenner told us Monday by email. “It seems that the varying carrier strategies have an equally varying effect on acceptance.” Among the benefits of the app that Emmis extols is that NextRadio saves smartphone owners on data usage and battery life, compared with streaming audio. But “one carrier is all about making money from data usage so an offload of streaming to FM tuners is a negative impact to ARPU,” he said, referring to the average revenue per user metric that carriers use to measure financial performance. “Another carrier focuses attention on their own marketing analysis of their own consumer expectations and the third is the un-carrier that refuses to require handset modifications.” Brenner said he’s not certain whether the growing NextRadio adoption among the carriers can be attributed to the FreeRadioOnMyPhone.org campaign in which consumers were urged to contact their carriers to support NextRadio. “The HTC multi-carrier penetration is not something we can necessarily equate to the freeradioonmyphone.org launch because those phones were probably in the pipeline long before we launched that site,” he said. “HTC was our launch phone in 2013 mostly because they have always provided embedded support for FM radio, which probably makes it harder for non-Sprint carriers to actually disable the functionality. That is an educated guess on my part.” At the same time, “what we do see is our daily registered user count is increasing, so it appears our work with NPR, American Public Media and K-Love/Air-1 is making some difference there,” he said. The Emmis team “does not stop reaching out to the other carriers and showing them that NextRadio can benefit them and more importantly the American consumer,” Brenner said. “Hopefully at some point they recognize the benefits that Sprint did more than a year ago and their customers are now enjoying. Strangely enough, international adoption of FM in smartphones is prominent and we are getting direct inquiries for NextRadio outside of the US.” None of the major carriers commented on NextRadio adoption.