The American Public Communications Council will ask the FCC for an emergency subsidy from Universal Service Fund cash to help keep its pay phone company members from collapsing, the group told us. The emergency petition will be accompanied by a petition for rulemaking asking the commission to consider using its Lifeline program to subsidize pay phones. The petitions could come as early as Monday afternoon, APCC President Willard Nichols said.

What was initially filed at the FCC International Bureau as a routine license modification request by LightSquared has drawn significant attention and complaint from major wireless companies and associations. Carrier interests including CTIA, Verizon Wireless and AT&T said LightSquared’s request for mobile satellite service/ancillary terrestrial component authority modification seeks what amounts to a major policy change for MSS/ATC and should be handled through a rulemaking. The filings are at http://xrl.us/bh969f.

Telecom ministers Friday preliminarily rejected a European Commission call for all EU members to make the 800 MHz band, freed by digital switchover, available for wireless broadband by 2013. The proposal is part of the EC’s first multiyear radio spectrum policy program (RSPP). Government officials -- who discussed the plan but didn’t vote on it during a Telecommunications Council session in Brussels -- said they generally favor the EC effort, but the timetable for rollout of “digital dividend” spectrum is one of several provisions that raise national sovereignty concerns.

Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Calif., hopes to bring certainty to industry next year on long-brewing telecom issues like net neutrality and Universal Service Fund reform, the House Communications Subcommittee member said in an interview last week. Providing subsidies to make broadband more affordable for low-income Americans and addressing fears about lack of privacy online are two important ways to motivate more people to embrace fast Internet service, she said.

Congress shushed loud TV commercials. In a voice vote Thursday night, the House passed the CALM Act (S-2847), which would require TV ads to be set at the same volume as regular programming. “It’s a simple fix to a huge nuisance,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., who sponsored the original House bill (HR-1084). Associations for advertisers and broadcasters said they don’t believe the new requirement will be onerous.

A wide array of communications technology standards groups is being asked to create a combined brain trust to ensure that cloud systems can work together, an organizer said. Robert Marcus, a consultant on telecom-cloud standards to Chinese equipment vendor Huawei, said he will propose to the representatives of more than 20 organizations Tuesday at the Telecom Cloud Information Workshop in Santa Clara, Calif., creation of a Cloud Experts Working Group. It would advise industry and particularly government, in aid of cloud interoperability. The group would offer advice on cloud technology, open source and reference architecture, he said.

The FCC should focus on helping the buildout and expansion of 4G services, Commissioner Meredith Baker said in a keynote at the Phoenix Center telecom symposium Thursday. She called moving forward on net neutrality rules “a legal and political mistake.”

The first version of the draft FCC net neutrality order cites both direct and ancillary authority as giving the commission purview to bar ISPs from discriminating in the type of traffic they carry on their networks, agency officials said. Ancillary authority was a prominent issue in April’s Comcast ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which held that the commission was out of bounds in relying on Title I. But some law professors said there are risks to a Title I approach, even if specific sections of the Communications Act are also cited.

TV and Radio broadcast groups are increasingly working with online companies to offer daily coupons, getting in on a craze highlighted this week by Google’s reported $5.3 billion bid for Groupon, industry executives said. “We're not sure if this is white hot for the next six months or the next six years, or even the next six days,” but “we love the space,” said Kerry Oslund, vice president of digital media for Schurz Communications. Radio stations have long offered half-off deals of the sort that have driven sites such as Groupon and Living Social to popularity, but the offers are newer territory for TV broadcasters, Oslund said.

A measure to block net neutrality rules has a very good chance of clearing Congress and confronting the president next year, even with the Senate remaining in Democratic hands, the Republican counsel to the House Communications Subcommittee said Thursday. A resolution under the Congressional Review Act to nullify the rules and bar any similar ones would be filibuster-proof and require only a simple majority vote of each house of Congress, said Neil Fried, the subcommittee’s senior minority counsel. Congress would have 60 days early next year to adopt the resolution, he said on a panel in Washington of the American Bar Association’s antitrust section.