The FCC appears likely to adopt a business data service item without major changes, officials told us Monday. A combined draft order and two Further NPRMs are scheduled for a vote at the commissioners' meeting Tuesday. "It's looking pretty quiet," said a commission official. "If there are changes, they're going to be marginal." Still in play is whether rate-of-return incumbent telcos receiving fixed USF support will receive more than one opportunity to elect BDS incentive regulation, the official said. The commission may provide an additional opportunity for carriers to opt into a price-cap regime, said another official. ITTA and TDS Telecom sought an annual opportunity to make the election, or at least more the one transition opportunity the draft contemplates; AT&T opposed a change (see 1810190033).

Verizon Wireless said it's providing service "essentially everywhere it was before Hurricane Michael." Verizon is "back up and running in the Panhandle," said Tami Erwin, executive vice president-wireless operations, Monday. The carrier said it's crucial to avoid further cuts in fiber undergirding the wireless network: "Fiber, damaged in multiple locations from the impact of Hurricane Michael, then from early debris removal and other restoral activities, is stabilizing in the area, but any new fiber cuts risk localized area outages." Providers said 29.7 percent, 26.1 percent and 19.4 percent of cellsites are still out of service in Florida's Bay, Gulf and Gadsden counties, respectively, with the average for 21 affected counties 5.2 percent (down from 5.5 percent Sunday), the FCC reported Monday. There are 55,006 cable and wireline system customers without service in the affected counties, and one TV station, seven FMs and two AMs out. WideOpenWest said Sunday it had restored services to its customers in Panama City Beach and Inlet Beach. Public Knowledge and the FCC last week disputed whether federal and state telecom deregulation hampered service restoration (see 1810170025).

A key problem with U.S. privacy is few stakeholders fully understand the issues, said an expert who has discussed it with members of Congress at their request. "They don't know how it works," University of Pennsylvania communication professor Joseph Turow told C-SPAN. "It's very hard to regulate industries when the industries are the ones who are controlling the information, because the regulators, certainly in the Congress, have very little understanding of how this stuff works." He mentioned companies including or devices from Amazon, AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Verizon and brick-and-mortar retailers that may use people's information in ways Turow contends many don't understand. He worried about China's social rating-surveillance system slowly being adopted in the U.S. Those who can help privacy-caused ills are "all of the above" -- Congress, the FCC and FTC, states, tech companies and consumers -- Turow said on a Communicators episode to have been televised this weekend. "We have to make our regulators, our legislators understand this." The professor recommends educating students about such issues. Research, including what he's involved with, shows many people don't back trading some personal information for accessing tech services. It's not so much they "buy into" this but are "resigned," he said: "We are being trained to give away our data" and feel "there's nothing else we can do." He agreed privacy policies can be oxymoronic. "Most Americans have no clue really what the phrase 'privacy policy' means," surveys show, he said. They're "written by lawyers, to be read by lawyers, to be understood principally by lawyers," the academic said: Companies can do "almost anything they want to do if they write it in the right way." USTelecom members have long "embraced strong consumer privacy policies," a spokesman responded. "Privacy is a shared responsibility and the burdens and obligations cannot rest only with ISPs. Consumers expect and demand strong privacy protections," so Congress should "develop a national privacy framework" for the entire "internet ecosystem,” he added. The Association of National Advertisers, which earlier this year acquired the Data & Marketing Association, declined to comment. NCTA declined to comment, and the Internet Association didn't comment.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue's name was misspelled in a story noting his comments on a Rural Utilities Service broadband pilot program (see 1810180029).

Florida's Bay, Gulf and Washington counties remain particularly hard hit by Hurricane Michael damage, with 40.9 percent of Bay wireless sites, 30.4 of Gulf sites and 17.9 percent of Washington sites out of service, the FCC said Friday. It said one TV station, seven FMs and two AMs reported being off-air. Cable and wireline customers without service were 63,856, down from 103,811 the previous day. The agency deactivated the disaster information reporting system for Alabama and Georgia, but it remained activated in 21 Florida counties.

Net neutrality litigation is about whether the FCC may ensure "light touch" regulation of broadband, not about internet openness, said USTelecom, CTIA, NCTA, the American Cable Association and Wireless ISP Association in a supporting intervenor brief Thursday citing their commitment to an open internet. The Supreme Court's 2005 "Brand X makes clear that the Commission may do so, and the ["internet freedom"] Order demonstrates that the Commission’s decision to follow that path was reasonable," the ISP groups argued to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Mozilla v. FCC, No. 18-1051: The FCC "amply" justified returning to a "flexible" Communications Act Title I regime (see 1810120022). "Petitioners establish no distinction between the Order’s classification of broadband as an information service and the 2002 Commission decision reaching the same conclusion, which Brand X upheld," said the ISPs. "The Commission lawfully preempted state and local regulation of broadband, which is a jurisdictionally interstate service." The order rightly repealed the "unconstitutional" 2015 Title II net neutrality order that "violated" individuals' speech rights, argued intervenor Leonid Goldstein, of Austin. "So long as an agency acts within its realm of authority, its decision to alter a pol-icy decision -- or even reverse course -- is not subject to a special, enhanced standard of review," argued amici Texas, Arkansas and Nebraska. The Title I order "is eminently justified given the highly competitive nature of the broadband market and the importance of removing unnecessary barriers," argued the National Association of Manufacturers, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable and Telecommunications Industry Association. Petitioner network arguments that broadband internet access "can only be rationally classified" as a Title II service are wrong, argued network architect Richard Bennett and others. The court should resolve the legal questions "definitively to put an end to the regulatory 'ping pong,'" argued TechFreedom. Countries "with hard bright line rules do not exhibit increased innovation at the edge," argued scholar Roslyn Layton: "Increased edge innovation is seen in countries with soft net neutrality rules (e.g., Sweden, Norway, Denmark, South Korea)" or "no rules at all." Other amicus filers were: Technology Policy Institute, Tech Knowledge, Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy, Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council, International Center for Law and Economics, Phoenix Center, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Washington Legal Foundation and Southeastern Legal Foundation and Christopher Yoo.

Chairman Joe Simons defended FTC Privacy Shield enforcement efforts, as officials from the U.S. and the EU discuss extending PS. The FTC is committed to maintaining “a robust mechanism for protecting privacy and enabling transatlantic data flows,” he said in Brussels Thursday. Since 2017, the FTC brought eight PS enforcement actions. He cited 39 actions under the U.S.-EU safe harbor, which predated the Privacy Shield, and four actions linked to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperative’s Cross-Border Privacy Rules system. The Privacy Shield actions concerned entities falsely claiming program verification, failure to complete the verification process and failure to uphold program standards after leaving. The chairman cited the steady stream of press reports about privacy and data breaches, saying the agency is investigating Facebook and Equifax.

We incorrectly reported these people's names: Center for Democracy & Technology CEO Nuala O’Connor (see 1810090056); Facebook Vice President-Product Management Guy Rosen (see 1810030034); and National Tribal Telecommunications Association President Godfrey Enjady (see 1810040055).

Cable and telecom industry groups sued Vermont over its net neutrality law and executive order that restricted government contracts to companies that follow open-internet principles. Gov. Phil Scott (R) has vowed to fight the suit. It was the third state to enact a net neutrality law when in May the state put into statute Scott’s February executive order (see 1805240043). USTelecom, CTIA, NCTA, the American Cable Association and New England Cable and Telecommunications Association complained Thursday in the U.S. District Court in Burlington. Restricting state contracts are pre-empted under the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause by the FCC December order and the Communications Act’s ban on imposing common carrier obligations on mobile and information-service providers, the groups said. The Vermont actions "regulate outside the borders of the State of Vermont and burden interstate commerce in violation of the" Constitution's dormant Commerce Clause, they said. “Internet traffic flows freely between states, making it difficult or impossible for a provider to distinguish traffic moving within Vermont from traffic that crosses state borders.” States can’t “use their spending and procurement authority to bypass federal laws they do not like," but Congress should pass a national law, said a statement by the national associations. NECTA supports "federal legislation that would enshrine these principles permanently across the entire U.S.," said CEO Paul Cianelli. While Scott understands "consistent regulation is important to ensuring a vibrant and thriving telecom and cable sector, our obligation as a state government is to our citizens, who I strongly believe have a right to free and open access to information on the internet,” the governor said. “In the absence of a national standard to protect that right, states must act.” The national groups earlier sued California for a comprehensive net neutrality bill (see 1810030036). Other states with net neutrality laws (Oregon, Washington state) or executive orders (Montana, New York, New Jersey, Hawaii and Rhode Island) have yet to be sued. Washington has comprehensive rules, while the others restricted procurement.

Oral argument on DOJ's appeal of the U.S. District Court approval of AT&T buying Time Warner is Dec. 6 before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, said a clerk's order Wednesday (in Pacer, docket 18-5214).