The San Jose, Calif., City Council voted Tuesday not to join the Bay Area Broadband Enhanced Wireless Project (BayWEB), funded with a $50 million BTOP grant to Motorola from NTIA. The city will send letters to NTIA asking the agency to reallocate the money to Bay area cities and counties, a San Jose official told us. The project will move forward, and if any city drops out of the project, it’s out, an NTIA spokeswoman said. Applying for the money is no longer an option, she said.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said the FCC has a big role to play in sparking a national discussion about sexting, texting while driving, and other wireless bad behavior by teenagers. The comments came Tuesday during an FCC “Generation Mobile” forum Tuesday at McKinley Technology High School in Washington. Genachowski also told students that net neutrality rules, set for a vote next week, have broad support.

Getting access to additional spectrum is the consumer electronics industry’s 2nd-highest priority, behind solving the federal deficit and economic issues, CEA President Gary Shapiro said in a meeting with reporters Tuesday. He said there’s bipartisan support for freeing up spectrum, and suggested that ultimately broadcasters might even be in favor.

An FTC official signaled that the commission’s staff is already prepared to back off, in the face of pushback, its proposal this month that an online “do not track” mechanism be browser-based. “We really need to open our minds to some other alternatives,” said Jessica Rich, the Consumer Protection Bureau’s deputy director. Speaking Tuesday on a teleconference of the American Bar Association’s Antitrust Section, she said, “Maybe the browser-based system isn’t the best solution.” Rich declined to embrace a new technology offered by Microsoft.

Fights in the court and on the Hill are likely after the FCC’s net neutrality decision, speakers said during a NATOA (National Association of Telecom Officers and Advisors) webinar about top communications issues in 2011 Monday. They urged state and local regulators’ input over issues like taxation, the proposed Comcast/NBC Universal merger and pole attachments.

A review by career FCC staffers of Comcast’s planned purchase of control of NBC Universal is intensifying, said agency and public interest officials outside the negotiations. They said commission staffers and executives of the companies continue to discuss conditions for possible approval, and an order may circulate soon. Ex parte filings show that FCC and Justice Department staffers reviewing the deal have in recent days been talking about possible conditions (CD Dec 13 p9). The talks appear to be intensifying and may end soon with a proposed order from the Media Bureau, said officials inside the commission and out. Antitrust experts and analysts have predicted the deal will be approved, with many conditions.

Microsoft and Electronic Arts filed a joint brief supporting Viacom’s case against YouTube at the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, one of several briefs from Viacom supporters that came in Friday just before a deadline that day. A group of music publishers including BMI, ASCAP and SESAC, a group of book publishers, plus labor unions including the Directors Guild, Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of TV and Radio Artists also lodged their arguments against YouTube on Friday. Several scholars, economists and law professors chimed in on Viacom’s side. Counsel for YouTube asked the court for a March 31 deadline for briefs from the company and allies. YouTube’s owner, Google, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee is poised to approve a compromise on a report on incentives for getting more government spectrum into play for commercial use. It stops short of recommending charging government agencies fees for the spectrum they use. Members of the committee discussed the report Monday on a teleconference and put off a vote until Jan. 11, when the current CSMAC is expected to meet for the last time.

The FCC can impose net neutrality by directly implementing at least four sections of the Communications Act, under a draft of the order set for a Dec. 21 vote, according to agency, industry and public-interest officials briefed on the rulemaking. Several other parts of the Act are mentioned in the draft order as giving the commission authority, they said. With the sunshine period on the order set to begin Tuesday night under usual commission procedure, lobbying on the eighth floor continues by those supporting and opposing Chairman Julius Genachowski’s plan to adopt nondiscrimination rules without reclassifying broadband as a telecom service, filings in docket 09-191 show. Some companies and groups that support net neutrality rules but oppose reclassification suggested that they're dissatisfied with the draft.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- The rise of cloud services will mean the arrival of the “cloud phone,” with some hardware specifications reduced from those of high-powered smartphones that perform many functions locally, said Satya Mallya, director of mobile for the carrier Orange. “Cloud services are really going to take off,” and with HTML5 Web technology and quality-of-service guarantees, “from enterprise to consumer, you'll see a whole range of services,” he said last week. Mallya spoke at the Mobile Internet Tsunami Conference of the SDForum emerging technology business network.