Correction: Matthew Berry, aide to Commissioner Ajit Pai, said the FCC has enabled the cable industry to make better use of spectrum (CD May 2 p1), not that the industry needs to make better use of it.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s fellow commissioners weighed in on net neutrality at a Cable Show policy luncheon Thursday, but didn’t comment directly on whether they agreed with his proposal (CD May 1 p1). The commission should seek congressional guidance on how to proceed before taking action, said Commissioner Ajit Pai, who called the matter “a solution in search of a problem.” Commissioner Mike O'Rielly said he worries that the agency doesn’t have jurisdiction over the Internet, though he added that he would keep “an open mind.” Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Mignon Clyburn said they support an open Internet, and that they were still considering Wheeler’s NPRM, which is currently circulating on the eighth floor. (See separate report above in this issue.) Clyburn said she is “still evaluating what the chairman circulated. Rosenworcel has “heard a lot from a lot of people” and said she will take “a hard look” at the proposal and the public perception of it.

Applications will be filed “expeditiously” on cable system divestitures among Charter Communications, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, executives for those companies told acting FCC General Counsel Jonathan Sallet and another staffer in his office. The companies asked the commission to consider those coming applications contemporaneously with Comcast’s applications to buy Time Warner Cable, said a filing posted Thursday in docket 14-57 (http://bit.ly/1miNoSp). The companies agreed this week (CD April 29 p4) to system deals that will expand Charter and reduce the size of Comcast/Time Warner Cable, which they noted to the FCC will mean the combined company would have less than 30 percent of U.S. pay-TV subscribers as previously promised to the agency. It’s hard to suggest that Comcast’s plan to divest 3.9 million subscribers doesn’t advance the company’s Time Warner Cable acquisition case by alleviating claimed competitive concerns, said Free State Foundation President Randy May. The end result is that Comcast’s total number of subscribers, post-acquisition, will be less than 30 percent of all pay-TV subscribers, he said in a blog post Thursday (http://bit.ly/1lElSMz). It’s a bit “out of sorts” to use the occasion of the announcement “as another opportunity to engage in overheated anti-merger rhetoric,” he said. “It would seem more fitting to acknowledge that such subscriber divestitures at least lessen professed concerns about concentration.” The competitive impact of the proposed combination relative to the broad broadband market should be the primary focus of the acquisition review, he said.

Cable providers cutting a deal to provide faster service to certain companies isn’t bad for their other customers, said Cox Communications President Patrick Esser at the NCTA Cable Show’s general session Thursday here in Los Angeles. “I don’t think if Netflix is getting a faster lane that I'm hurting anybody,” Esser said. The cable CEO emphasized that his company would never block customers from having access to Internet content. Blocking access would be “the worst decision” a company could make, Esser said. However, he distinguished allowing access for all from deals granting faster access to certain parties. “We do commercial arrangements in our industry every day,” Esser said. He also commented on the Comcast/Time Warner Cable deal and Charter’s involvement, saying that greater cooperation in the industry is good for all. Several industry observers told us that Cox had been interested in acquiring the 3.9 million divested subscribers from Comcast before the announcement of the deal sending them to Charter. Asked about whether the growth of Comcast and Charter might lead to higher or lower programming costs for Cox, Esser disagreed with the question. “I don’t think it’s a content discussion, it’s a platform discussion,” he said. Platforms and increased use of the cloud are the future of the cable industry, said Rob Lloyd, Cisco president-development and sales. Companies will increasingly update their systems through software updates rather than new hardware, and cloud technology will eventually replace much of the functionality of set-top boxes, he said. These new systems will test new features and be updated in much the same way smartphone apps are, Lloyd said. The cable industry will move to the cloud as the new “manufacturing plan,” Lloyd said.

An April 9 and 10 outage that resulted in thousands of failed 911 calls in Washington state also disrupted calls in Minnesota and North Carolina, CenturyLink acknowledged in an April 24 major outage report (http://1.usa.gov/1hVzai5) filed with the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission (WUTC). The incident occurred when a public safety answering point trunk member (PTM) threshold counter, which routes calls to the appropriate PSAPs, ran out of capacity, CenturyLink said. The PTM is run by CenturyLink contractor Intrado, in the Englewood, Colo., Emergency Call Management Complex. When the counter reached capacity, calls couldn’t be assigned a trunk for delivery, said the telco. It said Intrado has increased the thresholds “so that it is not theoretically possible to exhaust the threshold ranges” and has created an alarm should the threshold be met. The contractor will also begin manually checking to see if the system is nearing capacity, said CenturyLink. A spokeswoman said the majority of the 4,500 calls impacted nationally were in Washington state but had no breakdown of how many calls were affected in North Carolina and Minnesota. John Garrison, director of the North Carolina Utilities Commission, said the outage affected PSAPs in a small number of rural areas in eastern North Carolina, and the PUC likely would not open an investigation. Intrado referred questions to CenturyLink. The WUTC has opened an investigation into the case (CD April 18 p11) and plans to hold an as-yet-unscheduled public hearing, a spokeswoman said. The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission isn’t investigating the outage, a spokesman said.

The key issue in any FCC preemption of state anti-municipal broadband laws is whether Telecom Act Section 706 would give the agency that authority, said Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood by email Monday: “It doesn’t so much matter whether the Commission takes up that debate in the Open Internet or Technology Transitions proceeding.” Wood was responding to FCC plans to take up anticompetitive state bans and other barriers to broadband competition as part of the “managerial framework” to deal with issues around the IP transition (CD April 29 p3). It will not be included in the draft rulemaking on net neutrality rules. “The FCC has a lot of big issues to tackle, but the central question is whether it has authority over broadband communications networks,” said Wood. “The answer is the same in each case: Title II is the best and strongest authority for any meaningful FCC effort to prevent discrimination, promote competition and ensure the availability of affordable services for everyone."

Telecom customers “care very deeply” about personal information contained in their customer records, Public Knowledge told the FCC Thursday, an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/S72QUv). “The FCC must clarify what constitutes individually identifiable [customer proprietary network information], and that individually identifiable CPNI includes non-aggregate customer information that has been ‘de-identified,'” PK said. “When Congress created Section 222 of the Communications Act, it did not do so with the intention that telecommunications carriers decide for themselves what constitutes individually identifiable customer proprietary network information ... and what does not.” The FCC should define individually identifiable CPNI “broadly,” PK said. “Once consumers have suffered the harm of having highly personal information about themselves released, that harm can never be undone.”

Fifth, and final, FTC Commissioner Terrell McSweeny began her new role Monday (http://1.usa.gov/1lpVPIT). After months of stalling since President Barack Obama said he would nominate her (CD June 24 p12), the Senate finally voted to confirm McSweeny April 9 by a 95-1 vote (CD April 10 p29). FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez said of McSweeny: “Her considerable experience in the law and public policy will be an asset to the agency as it continues to pursue its missions of protecting consumers and promoting competition.” McSweeny comes to the FTC from the Department of Justice, where she was chief counsel for competition policy and intergovernmental relations.

The 1996 Telecommunications Act “was completely outdated” within “six months” of its original passage, said Secretary of State John Kerry at the Freedom Online Coalition conference in Tallinn, Estonia. As a senator at the time, “I helped write the law,” he said. “I actually remember distinctly when we wrote that law,” lawmakers were focusing on “telephony,” he said. That makes the law “inadequate” for today’s landscape, he said, without giving specifics. An update to that law is needed to help establish the “open, interoperable and inclusive Internet” that the U.S. and many countries desire. “Now we face a choice about how we organize ourselves as societies,” he said. “The choice is a choice between those who demand dignity and respect for rights and those who are prepared to deny it.”

Defense Department Chief Information Officer Teri Takai will leave the department at the end of the week, a DOD spokesman confirmed Monday. Takai took the job in 2010 and is widely seen as a key government official as carriers promote greater sharing of federal spectrum in some bands and clearing others to be sold at auction. No successor was named, the spokesman said. Takai also is on the FirstNet board. She’s formerly CIO of the states of California and Michigan.