Matt Daneman

FCC approval of Altice buying a majority of Suddenlink in a deal worth about $9 billion without any major conditions was expected, since there were no competitive worries or potential consumer downsides associated with the deal, one communications industry lawyer familiar with the deal told us, saying it would have been surprising if the agency had imposed any conditions. But how the approval granted Friday affects Altice's planned buy of Cablevision remains to be seen, the lawyer said. Altice and Suddenlink filed a joint application seeking regulatory approval in June (see 1506040047) and Altice said it hoped to close on the deal by year's end.

LightSquared's settlements with three GPS companies could carry considerable weight with the FCC as LightSquared seeks modification of its Ancillary Terrestrial Components (ATC) license to allow its proposed L-band terrestrial broadband service, people familiar with the company tell us. "Typically, when industry can work these kinds of issues out, that's well received" by the agency, company President Doug Smith said Friday.

Despite reluctance in much of the rest of the world, the U.S. plans to plow ahead on making spectrum available for 5G "in a timely manner," FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said Thursday. That the World Radiocommunication Conference-15 said it would look at bands above 6 GHz for 5G but not the 28 GHz band (see 1510230050) -- which had been an FCC priority -- "will not slow the activity in this country," Wheeler said as the commissioners heard a report on WRC-15, which wrapped up last month. Minus 28 GHz, the bands identified by WRC-19 and the bands part of the FCC spectrum frontiers NPRM have significant overlap, said International Bureau Chief Mindel De La Torre. Spectrum frontiers likely will be complete by WRC-19, she said. Identifying global allocations of spectrum is increasingly difficult, De La Torre said. Regional allocations "might be more realistic," she said: WRC footnotes denoting the policy of one or a small collection of nations are increasingly common.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and the two Republican commissioners are at odds over letters the agency sent Wednesday to AT&T, Comcast and T-Mobile, seeking input on zero-rating product offerings that could have net neutrality implications. "This is not an investigation," Wheeler said Thursday during the commission's meeting. "These were 'let's get informed.' This is to help us stay informed as to what the practices are." On the contrary, Commissioner Ajit Pai said later as he and Commissioner Michael O'Rielly criticized the letters and the way they were issued: "This is an investigation. This is not simply benign."

The FCC's new two-degree spacing rules for satellites are "a middle ground" between extremes that had been staked out by different parties in the satellite industry, said Jose Albuquerque, chief of the International Bureau's satellite division, Thursday. The Part 25 Report and Order passed 5-0 Thursday follows a similar set of Part 25 rules changes approved in 2013 and was aimed at relieving regulatory burdens on applicants and deterring spectrum warehousing, IB Chief Mindel De La Torre said. The FCC will undertake a rulemaking in the future specifically on the two-degree spacing changes to assess their impact, Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said.

A decision in Tennis Channel's legal complaint against the FCC could come within a couple of months, or might take longer if the federal appellate court decides to schedule oral argument, Stephen Weiswasser of Covington and Burling, representing Tennis Channel, told us. Friday was the deadline for the agency, Tennis Channel and intervenor Comcast Cable Communications to file in the case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

The FCC went dramatically overboard in response to Congress' desire to streamline the cable-TV effective competition petitioning process when it decided the cable market is effectively competitive in every franchise area and put the onus of rebutting that presumption on franchising authorities, said NAB, NATOA and Minnesota's Northern Dakota County Cable Communications Commission (NDCCCC) in a brief. It was filed Monday, the deadline for those petitioners to file their initial brief in their lawsuit against the FCC at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. NAB, NATOA and Minnesota's NDCCCC -- whose executive director, Jodie Miller, is president of NATOA -- sued the FCC in August (see 1508280033), asking the D.C. Circuit to reject the June order (see 1506020060).

The long-sought goal of the commercial communications satellite industry to get more Defense Department traffic on its satellites is closer than ever due to the increased commercialization of space, growing space-based national security threats, and federal budget sequestration meaning "no more open checkbook," Intelsat General President Kay Sears said Tuesday during a Washington Space Business Roundtable panel discussion on the possibility of DOD and the Air Force using more commercial satellites for communications.

The Supreme Court's ruling for DirecTV on binding arbitration language in customers' service agreements has little applicability in the real world, "but the consequences are profound" since it marks a landmark reversal of a state court decision on arbitration, on the grounds a state court misapplied state contract law, said Harvey Rosenfield, a founder of Consumer Watchdog. As a result, the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) now seems to supersede everything, including parties' contract terms, legal experts tell us. "What the majority did here was dangerous and leads to a very slippery slope. In effect, the majority just federalized a big area of contract law, which has traditionally been a subject of state regulation and oversight," said Imre Szalai, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans and co-author of an amicus brief in the case.

The new iteration of FCC.gov is functional and -- at the very least -- doesn't make the site less usable, unlike the last upgrade and redesign, communications regulation practitioners told us Friday, the second day it had been live. "It seems to be easier to read, generally more like what you'd expect a modern website to look like," said Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld: "It looks like my internal bookmarks to things like ECFS [Electronic Comment Filing System] still work."