FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and key FCC staff still have not decided whether to allow AT&T to withdraw its application to buy T-Mobile (CD Nov 28 p1), agency and industry officials said Monday. Genachowski would like to make the staff memo on the deal public, regardless of whether the application is allowed be withdrawn “without prejudice,” officials said. If the staff report is released, it could become part of an upcoming trial of the government’s case against the deal in U.S. District Court in Washington. Commissioners have yet to approve through electronic voting either an order sending the application to an administrative law judge for hearing or an order Genachowski circulated the same day approving AT&T’s buy of 700 MHz spectrum from Qualcomm (CD Nov 23 p1), officials said.

Both sides of the debate on shared services agreements were disappointed in the timing of release of a Media Bureau order on a Honolulu SSA, and by what it said. Lawyers who filed the petition asking the commission to bar the deal said its release the day after Thanksgiving seemed designed to avoid attention. Foes of separately owned stations sharing news and other assets said the bureau should have found the SSA involving a major TV broadcaster and an investment firm violated rules barring two top-four rated stations from having common ownership within any market. Lawyers representing other TV stations said they worry that when licenses come up for renewal, broadcasters in SSAs could face questions because of what the order said about the Honolulu pact.

A rule pending before the Office of Government Ethics, to limit government employee attendance at trade shows, could be bad news for associations as well as policymakers, government and industry officials told us. The proposed rule would end the practice of government employees being given free admission to commonly attended events, when the offer comes from groups that employ in-house lobbyists, from CTIA’s annual meeting to the CEA’s International CES.

More ad agencies are expected to adopt a ban on discrimination in choosing which of all print, broadcast and pay-TV and online media to select in buying ads for clients. Some agencies large and small are in the process of implementing guidelines issued Oct. 26 from the industry’s main association. Others are likely to sign onto the guidelines. Many agencies already have policies in place to bar discrimination in ad purchases, according to industry executives we interviewed about the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ guidelines (CD Oct 27 p8). The rules, adopted four years after the FCC banned radio and TV stations from accepting contract terms that bar ads from being shown to urban or to Hispanic audiences, don’t apply to advertisers.

The FCC Media Bureau largely denied a complaint filed by Media Council Hawai'i against Raycom and MCG Capital alleging their shared services agreements violated the FCC’s ownership rules. The bureau said the shared services and asset transfer agreements between Raycom, which owns KHNL-TV and KGMB-TV Honolulu and MCG, which owns KFVE-TV Honolulu don’t violate any ownership rules. But it left the door open to address whether the agreements are in the public interest when it considers license renewals. And the order acknowledged that the bureau will address the issue of shared services agreements in its quadrennial media ownership rule review (CD Nov 22 p8).

AT&T took issue with claims that the FCC can reject AT&T’s request to withdraw its application to take over T-Mobile. The company announced Thanksgiving morning that it had tucked away the $4 billion breakup fee for this quarter and told the FCC it was pulling its application back to focus on next February’s trial in federal court in D.C. (CD Nov 25 Bulletin).

Forcing ISPs to monitor all e-communications on their network to prevent digital piracy would seriously infringe their freedom to conduct their business and may also breach customers’ civil rights, the European Court of Justice said in a closely watched opinion November 24. National authorities and courts must strike a fair balance between protecting intellectual property rights and operators’ businesses, something the Belgian court order against ISP Scarlet failed to do, the court said. The decision will dramatically affect the national and European debate on online copyright infringement, said telecom/Internet independent advisor Innocenzo Genna.

While the government focuses heavily on finding a solution to toughen protections against adversaries in cyberspace, there are key issues in cyber defense that need to be a bigger part of the dialogue, said technology security experts and analysts in interviews. The threat from adversaries backed by some nation states and veering away from a strictly “perimeter defense” model should inform the path to a solution, they said. The gaps in understanding how to truly defend networks are due to the fact that it’s still a comparatively new issue, said Larry Clinton, Internet Security Alliance president. “You have the problem that the cybersecurity issue is rapidly evolving,” he said. Because of the shift in the nature of cyber attacks, the government and private sector “must alter how we think about cyber attacks."

A proposed decision by the FCC to send AT&T’s buy of T-Mobile to an administrative law judge is expected to put more pressure on AT&T to reach a settlement with the government, industry and government officials tell us. AT&T officials have a meeting set up with the Department of Justice Monday to discuss a possible settlement (CD Nov 23 p1). A meeting that had been scheduled for Monday of this week was cancelled at the last minute.

Google and Microsoft continue to take a different view than the MPAA on whose duty it ought to be to ensure subscription-video and broadcast TV programming is captioned when it’s sent online using Internet Protocol. The companies and the association reported in docket 11-154 (http://xrl.us/bmjc36) on meetings with staffers in the FCC bureaus working on an order to require such captions. Internet companies want the responsibility for ensuring traditional video programming is captioned when it goes online to lie with video program owners, while those representing VPOs, including the MPAA, want the responsibility to be with TV stations and multichannel video programming distributors.