FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai was the lone dissenter from an order (http://bit.ly/1yNJzdY) denying a January 2013 application for review of a 2012 Freedom of Information Act request from telecom provider OpenBand, said an order released Wednesday. The commission affirmed an Office of General Counsel decision to redact and withhold documents containing “communications between Wiltshire & Grannis and the Commission” on OpenBand v. Lansdowne, a case OpenBand lost last year in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (CD April 9/13 p21) the order said. The case concerned an arrangement between a Virginia land developer and OpenBand that made the company the exclusive video provider for a residential subdivision, and though the FCC wasn’t a party in the case, it did file an amicus brief against the arrangement, which means communications between it and Wiltshire Grannis are privileged, intra-agency communication, the order said. That’s “a bridge too far,” said Pai’s dissent. Wiltshire Grannis is not part of the FCC, Pai said. “Its attorneys certainly are not compensated pursuant to the GS scale. And when they come to lobby the Commission, its attorneys must comply with our ex parte rules.” The commission’s intra-agency argument might apply if Wiltshire Grannis had been representing the FCC, but it was representing Landsdowne, Pai pointed out. “In its communications with the Commission, Wiltshire Grannis was pressing its client’s interest, not the government’s.” Though OpenBand had argued that a former FCC general counsel at Wiltshire Grannis had induced the FCC to file the amicus brief, the agency said there’s “no support” for OpenBand’s argument that there was a criminal conflict of interest. “The 2007 Exclusivity Order proceeding that promulgated the bar on exclusive arrangements at issue in the OpenBand litigation was conducted long after the former FCC General Counsel’s departure from the agency in 2001,” said the order. Wiltshire Grannis attorney Christopher Wright, the referenced former FCC general counsel, said it’s important for the agency and private parties on the same side to be able to communicate in legal proceedings.

The Telecommunications Industry Association Wednesday named Scott Belcher as CEO. TIA President Grant Seiffert will report to Belcher, the group said (http://bit.ly/1pR99Fp). Belcher was CEO of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America, which has been battling the wireless industry on proposals to use the 5.850-5.925 GHz band for Wi-Fi. Belcher’s group has lobbied on behalf of the automotive industry, which plans to use the spectrum for vehicle-to-vehicle crash avoidance systems and has been worried about Wi-Fi interference (CD Feb 4 p4). Industry officials said in June the TIA board was looking for a new CEO and had hired a major head-hunter firm to identify and vet candidates (CD June 9 p11). Seiffert had been the top official at the group since January 2007. Belcher takes over Nov. 9. As CEO, Belcher “will have responsibility for managing TIA’s overall operations and providing long-term strategic direction,” said TIA Chairman Tom Stanton, CEO of Adtran.

The pending Local Number Portability Administrator (LNPA) selection process has put too much emphasis on recommendations from the North American Numbering Council “with little focus on important public policy issues such as the potential impact on telecommunications competition or consumers, particularly if there is an LNPA transition,” Neustar said in a filing last week at the FCC. Neustar said under the law, the FCC must select “any new LNPA through a rulemaking proceeding.” A rulemaking proceeding “will ensure that important public policy issues raised by the selection and a possible transition can be aired and reviewed through a more transparent process,” Neustar said (http://bit.ly/Zredtv). Neustar also noted the importance of LNPA selection to competition. “Most number porting today is wireless-to-wireless and wireline-to-wireless, reflecting the dynamic nature of today’s wireless industry,” it said. About one in 20 wireless and wireline numbers is ported every year, Neustar said. The filing is in docket 95-116. Also in the docket North American Portability Management (NAPM) said despite earlier comments filed by Neustar it had conducted a “formal analysis” of bids submitted by companies looking to serve as the LNPA (http://bit.ly/1vI2Qb4).

Marriott International and its subsidiary, Marriott Hotel Services, will pay $600,000 to resolve an FCC investigation into whether Marriott intentionally interfered with and disabled Wi-Fi networks at a Tennessee convention center, the agency said Friday (http://fcc.us/1rRzKH2). Marriott employees had used containment features of a Wi-Fi monitoring system at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville to prevent individuals from connecting to the Internet via their own personal Wi-Fi networks, the agency said. At the same time, Marriott charged consumers, small businesses and exhibitors as much as $1,000 per device to access Marriott’s Wi-Fi network, the agency said. The actions violated Section 333 of the Communications Act, said the commission. “It is unacceptable for any hotel to intentionally disable personal hotspots while also charging consumers and small businesses high fees to use the hotel’s own Wi-Fi network,” said Enforcement Bureau Chief Travis LeBlanc in a news release. “This practice puts consumers in the untenable position of either paying twice for the same service or forgoing Internet access altogether.” Marriott also agreed under a consent decree (http://bit.ly/1BDuFDj) to cease the unlawful use of Wi-Fi blocking technology and take steps to improve how it monitors and uses its Wi-Fi technology at Gaylord Opryland, the release said. Marriott must put in place a compliance plan and file compliance and usage reports with the bureau every three months for three years, including documentation of any use of access point containment features at any U.S. property that Marriott manages or owns, the release said. Marriott was not immediately available for comment.

Correction: The only category of repacked TV stations that doesn’t need to file FCC incentive auction reimbursement forms by a three-month deadline are those seeking new channels that were assigned channels that can’t be built out (CD Oct 2 p5).

At the end of two hours of discussion at Thursday’s FCC workshop on the economics of the net neutrality debate (CD Oct 3 p6), Chairman Tom Wheeler asked what economic model would assure the continued innovation by Internet startups that he said is key to the U.S. economy. In the back and forth that followed, Wheeler noted the role regulation played in supporting the Industrial Revolution. Responding to Wheeler’s question, Nicholas Economides, an economics professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said banning paid prioritization is key to supporting Internet startups. Others disagreed. The best way to sustain the innovation is “the regime that brought it, and that regime is one that’s worked very well,” said Thomas Hazlett, a Clemson University economics professor. What has never happened is the “radical principal of zero price” for access to infrastructure as edge providers want in opposing paid prioritization, said Economics Inc. Principal Hal Singer. That’s not necessarily true, said Christiaan Hogendorn, a Wesleyan University economics associate professor, citing the role unfettered access to U.S. highway and electricity systems played in the growth of businesses. And that, Wheeler said, “came only after regulations were imposed.”

The FCC stopped the 180-day shot clock on the review of Comcast buying Time Warner Cable, the commission said Friday in a letter to the companies involved in the deal and a related divestiture. Responses to information requests sent to Comcast, TWC and Charter Communications weren’t complete, the FCC said, and the commission needs time to analyze voluminous economic submissions by the companies. The commission also has pushed back the deadline for response comments on petitions to deny Comcast/TWC to Oct. 29, the letter said. Because of all these factors, the FCC is stopping the shot clock until Oct. 29, or until Commission staff has determined that the information responses are complete, “whichever is later,” the letter said.

CTIA asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to let it intervene in support of the FCC against the legal challenges brought against incentive auction rules by NAB and Sinclair, said a motion to intervene filed Thursday (http://bit.ly/YTCQyL). CTIA’s interests “will be substantially affected by this Court’s review of the challenged order,” the motion said. The Expanding Opportunities for Broadcasters Coalition and CEA filed motions to intervene in support of the FCC (CD Sept 30 p12), opposing only the Sinclair petition, which has been described as having broader objections to the auction order than the NAB petition did (CD Sept 22 p4).

The FCC’s latest technical difficulty that forced it to extend the deadline to file Form 477 submissions (CD Oct 1 p14) is unrelated to the large number of net neutrality comments that continue to slow the Electronic Comment Filing System, an agency spokeswoman told us. The agency created a new online interface, separate from ECFS, for broadband and voice providers to submit broadband deployment data as part of the commission’s new effort to collect the data as part of its twice-annual census of providers, she said. While monitoring the data to make sure the new system was working, staff noticed “an anomaly,” and “in an abundance of caution,” halted submissions until the problem is fixed, said a commission spokesman. In a public notice, the Wireline Bureau gave no timeline for the repairs (http://bit.ly/1ovVALd), saying it’s trying to resolve the problem “as quickly as possible.” Meanwhile, ECFS is running more slowly than normal, the spokeswoman acknowledged, attributing it to “several very large searches that download a large number of comments sequentially.” That “tends to tie up the system and slow down query response times,” she said. The large influx of comments in some dockets, including the net neutrality proceeding, is also adding to the delays, she said: “Our [information technology] team is doing what it can to find workarounds to the issues.”

Several groups warned the FCC that the agency seems to be losing objectivity in recent proceedings, citing the net neutrality rulemaking, but the FCC defended its actions. The groups, including American Commitment, the Center for Boundless Innovation in Technology, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance and TechFreedom, sent a letter to the FCC Thursday (http://bit.ly/1vBp9jM). “Increasingly, however, FCC staff appear to be disregarding arguments that do not fit a preconceived agenda; and worse, they may be actively manipulating media coverage around controversial issues,” the groups said in the letter. They point to recent media reports that some FCC staffers may have “helped spin media coverage in favor of those pushing the FCC to invoke Title II.” The FCC said its involvement was to make sure all parties could comment in the proceeding. The agency’s information technology “team worked with multiple parties to ensure everyone was able to successfully submit comments to the agency on the Open Internet proceeding,” an FCC spokeswoman said. “After receiving a surge of comments leading up to the reply comment deadline, the IT team created a third option for filing bulk comments. This option was made available to all interested parties at the same time via a blog post on our website.”