Bloomberg asked the FCC to require Comcast to carry its Bloomberg TV network on a channel adjacent to a “neighborhood” of news programming on its cable systems serving its 35 largest markets. The complaint filed Monday is the first program carriage complaint against Comcast since it bought control of NBCUniversal. Its outcome may reveal both how Comcast and the FCC approach conditions imposed by the FCC on that transaction, industry and public interest attorneys said. “If Comcast is dragging its feet on a condition this clear, we can only imagine how they will live up to conditions that are potentially less clear, said Greg Babyak, head of government affairs for Bloomberg. “We think this is very much a test of how serious Comcast is about obeying the terms of the order,” he said in an interview.

Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Calif., plans Tuesday to reintroduce her broadband adoption legislation to create a USF Lifeline program subsidizing high-speed service for low-income Americans, a Matsui spokeswoman said. Matsui is a member of the House Communications Subcommittee. This year’s bill is largely the same as HR-3646 from the 111th Congress, but adds a provision to prevent duplication of subsidies. The bill may have to overcome concerns about government spending and balancing support to urban and rural areas.

The disparate lobbying on Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation regime reform has continued even as industry-wide consensus building talks press on. Last week, executives from mid-sized carriers CenturyLink, Frontier and Windstream joined an analyst from CostQuest on a conference call with commission staff to lobby on Universal Service Fund reform, CenturyLink said in an ex parte notice released Monday in docket 10-90. The telco executives urged “immediate adoption of reforms that would redistribute ongoing support within price cap carriers’ areas based on cost conditions in individual wire centers, rather than costs averaged across study areas or entire states,” the ex parte said. “We also explained how a regression analysis could enable prompt identification of the relative costs to serve price cap carriers’ individual wire centers,” the ex parte said. CostQuest has recently been retained to help industry come up with cost models as companies and trade associations try to come up with an industry endorsed universal service reform package (CD June 6 p1).

The FCC will spend “increasing energy” on broadband adoption programs, commission Chief of Staff Eddie Lazarus told an FCBA luncheon in Washington Friday. Adoption is Chairman Julius Genachowski’s top priority after spectrum and Universal Service Fund reform, Lazarus said. “I can guarantee you we will be working with everyone in this room,” Lazarus said. The commission is not clear on which “levers” it will use to increase broadband adoption, but one possibility is through merger conditions, as with the Comcast-NBCU deal. A former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, Lazarus said he thought broadband adoption was the “civil rights issue for its time.”

AT&T and T-Mobile made their case for why the FCC should approve their proposed merger in a 229-page “joint opposition” to the dozens of petitions filed by merger opponents last month (CD June 2 p4). Support for the merger is wide and deep and the deal is critical to getting AT&T the spectrum it needs going forward as demand for wireless continues to accelerate, AT&T argues. The filing invokes the name of the primary opponent of the merger, Sprint Nextel, more than 370 times, compared to, for example, only 35 times for Free Press and 17 for Public Knowledge.

A federal appeals court largely affirmed an FCC order asserting its program access rules over vertically-integrated and terrestrially delivered programming. But it vacated a part of the rule closing some of the “terrestrial loophole” that labeled some acts of withholding such programming as categorically unfair. That step was arbitrary and capricious, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found in Cablevision v. FCC. The decision led both proponents and critics of the rule to claim victory. “As we've said all along, and as this court reinforced, given the local and regional nature of terrestrial programming, such exclusives can be highly pro-competitive,” Cablevision said. Verizon, AT&T, USTelecom and Consumers Union praised the decision for affirming the FCC’s authority over terrestrially-delivered programming.

There’s disagreement along industry lines on whether changes to licenses that let pay-TV providers carry broadcast programming without signing deals with every copyright holder have import for retransmission consent deals. At a Copyright Office hearing Friday on changes it may propose to Congress on statutory licenses, broadcasters and some content creators said the licenses and retrans are unrelated to whatever the office ultimately proposes about phasing out some sections of the licenses. Cable, DBS and telco-TV providers said they may go hand-in-hand. PBS, which doesn’t strike retrans deals, doesn’t want to “become collateral damage” to any changes in that system, its lawyer said.

Universal broadband adoption will be as important to the news business as universal adoption of the delivery services for newspapers, radio and TV were to those media, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a speech at the Columbia Journalism School Friday. Genachowski, along with Knight Foundation President Alberto Ibargüen and FCC Senior Adviser Steve Waldman, spoke about the FCC report on the status and future of media (CD June 10 p1). Waldman was its primary author.

Finishing public safety network legislation before Sept. 11 will be a challenge, said Senate GOP aides at an event Thursday hosted by Politico and Microsoft. The Senate Commerce Committee approved the spectrum bill (CD June 9 p2) by Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Ranking Member Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, on Wednesday. But the bill must still get floor time in the Senate and win over House Commerce Committee Republicans who are skeptical of giving away the 700 MHz D-block for free to public safety, the aides said. Also at the event, an FCC aide provided an update on the agency’s work revamping the Universal Service Fund.

AT&T will file comments Friday that run more than 200 pages, along with nine affidavits, disputing arguments made in various petitions to deny by opponents of the AT&T/T-Mobile deal, Senior Vice President Robert Quinn said Thursday in a pre-filing briefing with reporters. Meanwhile, the California Public Utilities Commission voted to take a deep dive into information on the deal, launching a full review rather than just prepare comments to file at the FCC. Quinn said AT&T is not concerned about the CPUC investigation or any steps state regulators might take in California or elsewhere.