The California Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that police may search an arrested suspect’s cellphone without a search warrant. The Ohio Supreme Court reached the opposite conclusion last year.

The FCC acted within its authority under the Communications Act in approving in 2008 a shot clock for wireless tower zoning decisions, CTIA and Verizon Wireless said in a filing with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. The court hasn’t set a date for oral argument in a challenge to the rule filed in October by Arlington and San Antonio, Texas.

The FCC will take back high-cost universal service money given up by eligible telecommunications carriers and reduce the caps in the states where the relinquishing telcos had been operating, the commission said in an order published late Thursday. The commission said redistributing the forgone cash to competitors wouldn’t necessarily help deploy high-speed broadband and “could simply subsidize duplicative voice service.” The order (dockets 05-337 and 96-45) paves the way for commission to offer direct USF subsidies for broadband. It takes effect immediately.

Reversing the FCC on net neutrality will be one of the House Commerce Committee’s “first big tests,” and the subject of one of the committee’s “first big hearings,” said the committee’s new chairman, Fred Upton, R-Mich. In an interview Friday with conservative radio talk host Hugh Hewitt, Upton said he hopes to find bipartisan support for a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act. Meanwhile, new Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said he plans hearings on whether the Obama administration plans to “abuse the regulatory process” and how to stop leaks of confidential information on the Internet.

In a precedent-setting move, the cable industry will embrace a telco-style PON (passive optical network) technology for delivering multimedia services over new fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) networks.

The FCC has fallen months behind its aggressive schedule for issuing follow-up orders to the National Broadband Plan. By the FCC’s latest count, 21 of 68 action items set up by the report remain incomplete. The agency has made “incremental progress” on two others, an agency spokesman said Friday. Two items which were scheduled to be wrapped up by the end of June remain on the FCC’s to-do list. Critics of the net neutrality order approved by the agency Dec. 21, including Republican Commissioners Robert McDowell and Meredith Baker, say the agency’s months’ long focus on that order is in part responsible for sometimes slow progress implementing the plan.

As federal agencies and private sector companies are transitioning from IPv4 technology to IPv6, the National Institute of Standards and Technology provided final guidelines to aid in a secure deployment. The guide identifies security challenges and offers recommendations for overcoming obstacles tied to IPv6 deployment.

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, will look into illegal VoIP services in the country, the country’s telecom regulator said in a notice last week. The move is expected to make services like Skype unavailable in the country, some analysts said.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is teeing up an order that takes on a number of lingering public safety communications issues possibly for the Jan. 25 meeting, industry officials said Wednesday. The meeting will be the first since last week’s meeting, in which the FCC approved controversial net neutrality rules. Orders are expected to circulate among the other commissioner offices Tuesday, three weeks before the meeting date.

The FCC should force Time Warner Cable to drop some Nexstar and Mission Broadcasting TV signals in markets where Smith Media owns or manages the local station, Nexstar and Mission said in an emergency petition filed with the agency this week. The petition came after Smith and TWC reached an impasse in retransmission consent negotiations covering three northeastern TV stations Dec. 15, and TWC began importing Nexstar and Mission signals to replace them. TWC didn’t properly notify Nexstar, Mission, local subscribers or franchise authorities before adding the out-of-market stations, Nexstar and Mission said in the petitions. They also asked the FCC to immediately give Smith its network non-duplication rights and waive a standard 60-day notice requirement.