Matt Daneman

While the Enforcement Bureau shot down Game Show Network's retiering complaint against Cablevision, it remains to be seen how Chief Administrative Law Judge Richard Sippel takes that into account in his own ruling. Sippel typically doesn't automatically follow bureau recommendations, but it's hard to say how much weight he might give the GSN/Cablevision comments, a lawyer with ALJ experience told us.

From extending its voluntary concessions for several more years to "synthetic bundles" of Charter Communications broadband with other providers' cable services, opponents of Charter's purchase of Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable had plenty of suggestions on how to make the deal more palatable. The comment deadline on the FCC review was Tuesday, with replies due Nov. 2.

Any worries about price regulation under the Title II net neutrality order are "somewhat overblown," FTC General Counsel Jonathan Nuechterlein said Friday at The Future of Video Competition and Regulation conference. ISPs are barely any more regulated under Title II than they were prior, when there were other theoretical regulatory routes for price controls, he said. "The question of Title II or not Title II is not that relevant," he said at the event put on by the Duke University School of Law Center for Innovation Policy. FCC General Counsel Jonathan Sallet agreed Title II "doesn't regulate and won't regulate retail rates," much the same way it wasn't used to regulate voice pricing.

Satellite operators increasingly are struggling with a data price war, as prices have dropped precipitously in some parts of the world over the past 12-18 months, Christopher Baugh, president of satellite market research firm Northern Sky Research, said Thursday during the annual Hosted Payload and Smallsat Summit. "It's bargain basement pricing," Baugh said. "The yield on a per-megahertz basis is particularly low. [And] these lower prices are here to stay."

The FCC net neutrality order was seemingly the stimulus for an agreement ending the long-running Cogent/Time Warner Cable interconnection feud, and could motivate other companies to sign similar agreements, Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer said Thursday, after the companies announced signing an interconnection agreement for their public IP networks. "Talks had been going on for a very long time, but they were going nowhere until there was a legal framework that had penalties for violating the open Internet order," Schaeffer told us. He said in past interviews that TWC was among those ISPs the Internet backbone company was considering filing a net neutrality complaint over (see 1505010033).

LTE-U's backers and critics agree the technology shows immense promise. Beyond that, consensus starts to break down on how to best implement it so as not to cause interference with Wi-Fi, according to panelists at a Monday night FCBA seminar on Wi-Fi-LTE-U. "These unlicensed bands are great [and] there's promise we can still avoid the rocks," said panelist Paul Margie of Harris Wiltshire, whose clients include wireless companies and ISPs.

The fate of a DirecTV legal fight with former customers likely will rest on the issue of how involved the Supreme Court believes the federal government should be in contractual disputes, based on the item the justices kept returning to during oral argument Tuesday in DirecTV v. Amy Imburgia. "It generally is a matter of state law," Justice Samuel Alito said, challenging Christopher Landau of Kirkland & Ellis, representing DirecTV, to define the border where the federal government should and should not involve itself in such contractual disputes.

The Supreme Court case pitting DirecTV against ex-customers over its arbitration policy points up what critics contend are problems with forced arbitration, while backers say it's a cost-effective way of settling disputes over small sums. During oral argument Tuesday, at issue will be language in customers' contracts requiring arbitration for disputes unless applicable state law forbids it, and whether the arbitration agreement is unenforceable. That is according to briefs in the case and comments from participants.

The FCC is considering a revamp of broadcast foreign ownership rules to bring them in line with the same review processes governing foreign ownership of common carriers and aeronautical licensees in what Chairman Tom Wheeler said was regulatory simplification. The broadcast ownership NPRM -- docket 15-235 -- is part of the agency's tentative agenda released Thursday for its Oct. 22 meeting.

Don't expect to see many mergers or acquisitions in the satellite industry despite the benefits of such consolidation, Intelsat Chief Financial Officer Michael McDonnell said Tuesday at a Deutsche Bank's investor conference. The few such M&A transactions in the industry -- such as Eutelsat's 2014 takeover of SatMex -- sometimes come with high price tags, and many smaller operators' governments aren't as interested in consolidation as their owners, McDonnell said. He declined to address directly what he called rumors of Intelsat considering a sale of some assets, except to say its satellite fleet is designed so most of them carry a variety of customer sets and they are supported by a common platform. "We don't really have any assets we consider to be non-core," McDonnell said. While the company's network services revenue has been declining in recent years, its high-throughput Epic satellite platform going online next year opens the door to expansion into markets such as connected cars and IoT and "is our path back to growth," McDonnell said. The company has four launches planned for 2016 -- Intelsat 31 and 29e in Q1 and 33e and 36 in the second half of the year -- and most of its satellites planned in coming years are Epics, he said.