Several groups argued that President Barack Obama’s recent comments on net neutrality (CD Aug 7 p2) differ from the FCC’s rulemaking notice, and asked for Obama’s help. “Your vision of net neutrality is fundamentally incompatible with FCC’s plan, which would explicitly allow for paid prioritization,” the groups said in a letter to the White House Friday (http://mzl.la/1B12X5V). “The only way for the FCC to truly protect an open Internet is by using its clear [Communications Act] Title II authority. Over the next few months, we need your continued and vocal support for fair and meaningful net neutrality rules.” The letter’s signers include the American Civil Liberties Union, Common Cause, Consumers Union, Demand Progress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Press, MoveOn.org, Mozilla and Public Knowledge. The FCC had declined comment on the allegation of any difference between Obama and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, and the White House has not responded to requests for clarification on where Obama stands. Wheeler has defended his commitment to protecting the open Internet and has said the NPRM asks many questions rather than prescribes any one path.

The FCC Media Bureau seeks comment on a petition for rulemaking for expanding online public file obligations to cable- and satellite-TV operators. Comments are due Aug. 28, replies Sept. 8, the bureau said Thursday in a public notice (http://bit.ly/1r1T0yf). The petition was filed by the Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause and Sunlight Foundation, it said. The bureau also seeks comment on whether the FCC should begin a rulemaking proceeding to require radio stations to use the online public file, it said. Because all comments will be posted in the FCC Electronic Comment Filing System, “we hereby waive the requirement that parties be served copies of the comments and reply comments,” it said.

The FCC seeks comment on AT&T’s proposed buy of DirecTV. Initial comments and petitions in docket 14-90 are due Sept. 16, the FCC said Thursday in a public notice (http://bit.ly/1sAYySe). Responses to comments and oppositions to petitions are due Oct. 16, replies and further oppositions Nov. 5, it said.

Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood fired back at industry officials questioning the group’s statements that President Barack Obama’s views on net neutrality go well beyond policy advocated by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler (CD July 14 p2 or WID July 14 p4). One commenter suggested Free Press is living in a fantasy land. “Prepaid pundits are free to spout off whenever they want,” Wood said Thursday. “There is indeed a Title II crowd” that believes broadband should be reclassified, Wood said. “It’s made up of millions of Americans,” he said. “It includes thousands of civil society group and grassroots leaders. It counts hundreds of innovative edge companies, venture capitalists, and dozens of real broadband providers among its numbers. It also has a growing list of lawmakers at the local, state and federal level.” Obama mentioned the Internet for a second time in a week Wednesday, at a news conference. The administration is “disturbed by efforts to control the Internet,” Obama said (http://1.usa.gov/1qYUEFD). Over the past decade the growth of “new media, new technology allow people to get information that previously would have never been accessible, or only to a few specialists,” he said. “Now people can punch something up on the Internet and pull up information that’s relevant to their own lives and their own societies and communities.” Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said in an interview Thursday Obama’s statement on Tuesday made clear the president “understands the stakes” involved in the open Internet proceeding. “I think he did it with clarity and with a clear-headed approach to what the cost of a ‘fast-lane, slow-lane’ Internet would be,” Copps said. “I would hope that the commissioners would be looking at that and listening to that.”

Many FCC staffers worked from home Tuesday, at the request of FCC security, to avoid the general disruption from the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit at the nearby Mandarin Oriental Hotel, agency officials told us. But the FCC was largely back to normal Wednesday, officials said. Tuesday was the peak day of the summit, featuring remarks by President Barack Obama and meetings at the Mandarin.

Emmis Communications has encountered a diversity of resistance among wireless carriers in getting them to adopt the NextRadio FM reception app in smartphones (CD Aug 5 p7), Chief Technology Officer Paul Brenner told us Monday by email. “It seems that the varying carrier strategies have an equally varying effect on acceptance.” Among the benefits of the app that Emmis extols is that NextRadio saves smartphone owners on data usage and battery life, compared with streaming audio. But “one carrier is all about making money from data usage so an offload of streaming to FM tuners is a negative impact to ARPU,” he said, referring to the average revenue per user metric that carriers use to measure financial performance. “Another carrier focuses attention on their own marketing analysis of their own consumer expectations and the third is the un-carrier that refuses to require handset modifications.” Brenner said he’s not certain whether the growing NextRadio adoption among the carriers can be attributed to the FreeRadioOnMyPhone.org campaign in which consumers were urged to contact their carriers to support NextRadio. “The HTC multi-carrier penetration is not something we can necessarily equate to the freeradioonmyphone.org launch because those phones were probably in the pipeline long before we launched that site,” he said. “HTC was our launch phone in 2013 mostly because they have always provided embedded support for FM radio, which probably makes it harder for non-Sprint carriers to actually disable the functionality. That is an educated guess on my part.” At the same time, “what we do see is our daily registered user count is increasing, so it appears our work with NPR, American Public Media and K-Love/Air-1 is making some difference there,” he said. The Emmis team “does not stop reaching out to the other carriers and showing them that NextRadio can benefit them and more importantly the American consumer,” Brenner said. “Hopefully at some point they recognize the benefits that Sprint did more than a year ago and their customers are now enjoying. Strangely enough, international adoption of FM in smartphones is prominent and we are getting direct inquiries for NextRadio outside of the US.” None of the major carriers commented on NextRadio adoption.

The White House big data reports “can serve a very useful purpose if they refocus privacy discussions where they should be focused -- on actual harms to individuals,” said Technology Policy Institute (TPI) President Thomas Lenard in comments filed Tuesday to NTIA (http://bit.ly/1v7HFTO). Tuesday evening was the deadline for stakeholders to submit comments to NTIA following the White House’s big data report release (CD May 2 p3), but as of our deadline, almost all major organizations told us they were still finalizing their comments. TPI’s comments said the White House report added to government and academic research that has “not found evidence of harms from the use of data for commercial and other non-surveillance purposes.” The White House report recommended restarting discussions over a broad consumer privacy legislative proposal, but asked NTIA to first seek comments on what such a proposal should entail. “If evidence of harm is found, the next question for policy makers would be whether there is a remedy available that reasonably can be expected to yield benefits greater than costs,” Lenard said. Other organizations -- including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Action, the Direct Marketing Association, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, the New America Foundation, Public Knowledge and TechFreedom -- told us they planned to either submit or sign on to comments by Tuesday evening’s deadline.

The FCC is making more than 1.1 million net neutrality comments available as a series of six XML files, containing 1.4 GB of data, said Gigi Sohn, special counsel to Chairman Tom Wheeler, Tuesday in a blog post (http://fcc.us/1qSmGh3). Releasing the comments as open data in a machine-readable format “will allow researchers, journalists and others to analyze and create visualizations of the data so that the public and the FCC can discuss and learn from the comments we've received,” Sohn said. The files are big, she noted, containing 2.5 times the amount of plain-text data in the Encyclopedia Britannica. “We recognize that not everyone may have the requisite technical skills to build visualizations and analyze raw XML data,” Sohn said. “However, we're hoping that those who do have the technical know-how will develop and share these tools for the public to use.” Sohn stressed “every” comment submitted to the FCC will be reviewed as part of the record of the proceeding.

The FCC Enforcement Bureau proposed a $100,000 fine against a small Oklahoma phone company for allegedly routing 911 calls from the state’s Caddo County to an automated AT&T operator message, which instructed callers to “hang up and dial 911” if the call is an emergency. The Hinton Telephone Company allegedly allowed calls to be routed to the automated message even after company officials discovered what was happening, the bureau said Monday (http://bit.ly/1p5flg5). Hinton made changes only after contacted by an FCC investigator, the bureau said. The FCC charged Hinton with “repeatedly violating our rules, and created a significant threat to the life and property of the residents of Caddo County.” The order calls the company’s actions “unconscionable” and said they warrant “a substantial penalty.” The bureau noted the importance of 911 to all callers: “911 is the single most critical tool for citizen emergency communications. The American public universally relies upon 911 in a time of crisis."

Comcast’s plan to buy Time Warner Cable should be denied, Dish Network executives told FCC General Counsel Jonathan Sallet, Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake, several members of the FCC’s Comcast/TWC review team and staff from multiple FCC bureaus in a meeting Wednesday, said an ex parte filing posted Monday in docket 14-57 (http://bit.ly/1APiG84). “There do not appear to be any conditions that would remedy the harms that would result from the merger.” Those harms would mainly affect over-the-top video services that might compete with Comcast/Time Warner Cable, the filing said. Choke points are the Internet channel to the consumer; the interconnection point; and any specialized service channels acting as high-speed lanes and restricting the bandwidth available for “the public Internet portion of the pipe,” Dish said. “Each choke point provides the ability for the combined company to foreclose the online video offerings of its competitors.” Comcast/Time Warner Cable would also be able “to exercise its enormous size to leverage programming content in anti-competitive ways,” said Dish. The low prices the new company would require from programmers would force them to make up the difference from companies like Dish, it said. “A combined Comcast/TWC will have the incentive and ability to restrict programmers’ ability to grant digital rights to competing pay-TV and OTT video providers.” Meanwhile, members of Congress sought FCC conditions on deals like Comcast/Time Warner Cable. (See separate report above in this issue.)