The deadline for public comments on the current and potential availability of communications services in the Arctic region was extended to Dec. 3, the NTIA said in a notice in the Federal Register on Tuesday. Comments had been due by Nov. 3.

FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly’s comments Monday that a Communications Act Title II approach could deter broadband investment are “evidence-free fears” that “have been refuted several times over,” said Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood in a statement to us. “Imagine how much less fearful he could be simply by examining the facts instead of ISP talking points!” O’Rielly spoke at an NTCA event (see 1410270035).

Customers of the largest U.S. consumer-facing Internet service providers “experienced dramatically poor performance” when connecting to core Internet transit infrastructure, according to a report by the Measurement Lab Consortium. The performance was often “well below" the FCC’s four-year-old "definition of 'broadband,'” said a New America Foundation Open Technology Institute news release about the report Tuesday. “The careful work done by M-Lab researchers exposes patterns of severe Internet performance degradation across the US, and suggests that ISP business relationships are a source of these problems,” said Vint Cerf, M-Lab steering committee member, in the release. “This is the first work of its kind, using open data and reproducible methods to expose complex performance issues at scale.

As the FCC takes up net neutrality, it should not ban user-directed prioritization, Bob Quinn, senior vice president-federal regulatory, and other AT&T officials told FCC General Counsel Jonathan Sallet and Associate General Counsel Stephanie Weiner on Oct. 22, according to an ex parte filing the company made available to us Monday. To AT&T’s knowledge, no ISP offers or plans to offer paid prioritization for mass-market Internet services, but user-directed service could “offer significant consumer benefits,” such as allowing consumers to choose to prioritize health-monitoring or home alarm devices, the filing said. Communications Act Section 706 offers “ample authority” to deal with any problems posed by non-user-directed paid prioritization, the AT&T officials said.

CenturyLink won't file a petition for reconsideration on the FCC Wireline Bureau’s decision to approve the proposed Level 3/tw telecom deal, a CenturyLink spokeswoman said Monday. CenturyLink had not pushed the FCC to deny the merger, but did urge the agency to impose conditions on the approval, including a requirement Level 3 give CenturyLink and other incumbent local exchange carriers access to the entrance conduit at Level 3’s on-net buildings (see 1410240028). The commission has previously ruled that LECs don't have a reciprocal right to gain access to the facilities of a competitive LEC under the Telecommunications Act’s Section 251(b)(4), the bureau said in an order Friday. Revisiting the determination of reciprocity is better done under a separate proceeding, the bureau said. Level 3 and tw telecom had argued the deal would improve competition because Level 3’s global footprint and tw telecom’s more extensive operations in metropolitan areas would allow it to more effectively compete for customers. “On balance, we find that any potential loss of competition that may occur as a result of the transaction is outweighed by the public interest benefits that will likely result from this increased competition,” the bureau said. The companies' shareholders still need to approve the deal Tuesday, a Level 3 spokeswoman told us. The FCC approval "does not come as a surprise. There is very little overlap between the two networks ... so the deal wasn't expected to raise anti-trust concerns," said Equity Research Senior Analyst Jennifer Fritzsche in a note to investors Monday.

Under a Title I regime, consumer and business usage of the Internet has tripled over the past five years according to Cisco analysis, USTelecom President Walter McCormick said in a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler (http://bit.ly/1tRynL9). “Given these growth projections and the success the nation has enjoyed under a Title I environment, we urge the Commission to avoid any proscriptive regulatory policy that would threaten future investment and innovation,” McCormick wrote. “Proponents of extreme measures, such as Title II reclassification of broadband, have not provided evidence to indicate that investment and traffic growth would be better under Title II, or that the entire sector -- edge, content, and broadband -- could be any more vibrant under Title II than it has been under the current longstanding Title I regime.”

The FCC should issue a notice seeking comment on “alternate approaches” to collecting special access market data instead of its current data collection effort, USTelecom said in an application for review Friday. USTelecom said the commission had ordered a two-year collection effort, but the Office of Management and Budget only approved a one-year effort. The one-year effort creates an “obvious conflict” with the commission’s “determination that a comprehensive review of the special access marketplace required the collection of data covering two years,” USTelecom said. The filing was not yet posted in docket 05-25.

The FCC, as it examines tw telecom's proposed acquisition by Level 3 (see 1409090067), should require Level 3 to stop withholding payments for telecom services, CenturyLink Vice President-Federal Regulatory Affairs Jeffrey Lanning and Senior Associate General Counsel Craig Brown told Wireline Bureau officials Oct. 21, according to an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/1sYFsGj) posted Friday in docket 14-104. The combined firm also should be required to provide access to its entrance conduit to on-net buildings at commercially reasonable rates, terms and conditions, the CenturyLink officials said. The deal increases the urgency for the commission to approve CenturyLink's forbearance petition (see 1410070050), said that telco. CenturyLink said it isn’t asking the FCC to deny tw telecom/Level 3. Level 3 was not immediately available for comment.

The “rants and wails of Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T over net neutrality" are like “Chicken Little, Henny Penny, and Ducky Lucky rushing to warn their friends of impending doom," wrote former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, who is special adviser to Common Cause's Media and Democracy Reform Initiative, on the Benton Foundation’s blog (http://bit.ly/1x9Zv5b) on Wednesday. “'The sky is falling, the sky is falling,' they clucked and quacked ... But the sky wasn’t falling; it was just a tiny acorn bouncing harmlessly off Chicken Little’s head,” Copps wrote. The FCC’s decision on whether to base net neutrality rules on Title II “is much less dramatic than ‘The Sky is Falling ISP Threesome’ endlessly contend,” wrote Copps. “It is whether to ensure that the government agency charged since the 1920s with protecting consumers, competition, and innovation in telecom still retains these responsibilities in the advanced telecom world of the broadband era,” he wrote. “Why anyone other than self-interested businesses would ever have argued otherwise has always been beyond me, but three successive chairmen of the FCC bought into the idea out of some bizarre combination of ideology and industry friendliness.” AT&T, Comcast and Verizon had no immediate comment. Those who argue reclassification under Title II would be easy are “at best, naïve,” wrote Center for Boundless Innovation in Technology Executive Director Fred Campbell on his organization’s blog (http://bit.ly/1sQg19M) Wednesday. Campbell wrote that he met with members of the FCC’s General Counsel’s office, arguing among other things that broadband does “not meet the statutory definition of 'telecommunications.'” The meeting was Tuesday, according to an ex parte filing posted Wednesday in docket 14-28 (http://bit.ly/1DBtUgQ).

Tuesday’s net neutrality forum in College Park, Texas, allowed the FCC to hear voices that weren’t heard during the agency's series of workshops on the issue, including those of smaller ISPs, Commissioner Ajit Pai told us after the event (see 1410210049). Representatives of ISPs had said during the panel that they could not handle Communications Act Title II's administrative burdens if the agency takes that path, and that dealing with high demands require network management. Members of the public, unlike during the workshops held at FCC headquarters, were able to speak at the forum at Texas A&M University, added Pai, who sponsored the event. Many who testified complained about a lack of choice in ISPs and the quality of service. Pai did not explicitly oppose a Title II approach when talking to us, but reiterated his past statements that FCC actions on net neutrality should not undermine “the business case” for deploying more broadband. Pai was the only commissioner at the forum. An aide to Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel noted the commissioner had attended a Sept. 4 net neutrality forum convened by Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Calif., in Sacramento (see 1409250037).