BOSTON -- NCTA’s CEO on Monday took issue with his industry’s “naysayers,” who he said are objecting in Washington to cable operators’ changing prices and other practices to meet consumer demand for more services and content. “For all cable has proudly done so far,” including spending almost $200 billion of “private capital” on networks and increasing in the past decade broadband speeds more than 900 percent, “we owe the consumer more,” Michael Powell said at the NCTA convention. “The consumer experience should be simpler” with content easier to find, easier user interfaces “and less reliance on clunky set-top boxes,” he told the convention. “You should get greater value for what you pay."

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell said he backs Chairman Julius Genachowski’s remarks on the agency’s handling of allegations in the U.K. that News Corp. journalists hacked into phones of people in Britain. Genachowski told a Senate Commerce Committee hearing where McDowell also testified Wednesday that the commission is monitoring the situation (CD May 17 p1). McDowell knows of no investigation by the agency, “but I may not know” if there’s one being done by career staff, he said Thursday. “We have an Enforcement Bureau that can investigate things on their own,” he said in a videotaped interview to be shown on C-SPAN’s The Communicators this weekend. Any inquiry “will follow the facts and the law and established commission precedent and procedure in this case, should it become a case,” which is true for any other matter, McDowell said. Media ownership laws need to be “updated,” he said as the commission continues its review of such rules that was due in 2010 under the Telecom Act. “We need to forget about these stovepipes” with different limits for various types of content, such as cable versus broadcast, he said. “We need to look at competition law and concentrations of market power and abuses of that power, and I think a new statutory construct should be based on that.” There’s “tremendous competition in video right now” overall, McDowell said. The last FCC report on that subject was completed in 2009 “in the waning days of the Kevin Martin chairmanship” and had data from 2006, he said of the study Congress required be done yearly. “We're way overdue,” McDowell said: “I think when Congress said one year, they meant an Earth year,” not a year on another planet.

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell wants President Barack Obama to make federal agencies give the government more cooperation as the administration, commission and lawmakers want to reallocate public and privately held frequencies for wireless broadband. “I've been disappointed, I think, in the executive branch” for not doing more to encourage government to find frequencies it can move off of in favor of commercial deployment, he said Thursday. He praised the NTIA’s March report pegging at $18 billion what it would cost the government to vacate the 1755-1850 MHz band in a process it said would take 10 years (CD March 28 p1), saying that agency may not have gotten all the cooperation it needed from others. McDowell also said that at initial impression he prefers that telcos contribute to the USF based on a metric related to the amount of phone numbers a company has, he said in a taped interview to be shown this weekend on C-SPAN.

National Weather Service tests of warning messages integrating some traditional emergency alert system (EAS) features with wireless carriers are going well, a government contractor working on the project said Wednesday. The Integrated Public Alert and Warning System tests by the NWS, the most frequent federal user of EAS (CD March 14 p8), show the system “seems to be working,” said IPAWS architect Gary Ham. “The tests seem to be going pretty well” and some alert originators have had public alerting authority given to them, he continued. A technical problem that caused a delay related to some alerts has been identified and a solution is being implemented, Ham said on a webinar organized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Comcast mounted its lengthiest defense of exempting from broadband data caps Internet Protocol streams of VOD sent to videogame consoles over its managed network and not the public Internet. The cable operator said its exception for IP streams sent to Xbox 360s isn’t a violation of net neutrality rules or what it agreed to with the FCC and Justice Department to buy control of NBCUniversal. Netflix has said such exemptions are a violation of net neutrality rules, and Level 3 and others have expressed concern over Comcast’s policy (CD May 15 p3). Some nonprofits that back net neutrality rules have also expressed concern.

The full FCC put on hold implementation of an administrative law judge’s December decision requiring Comcast to carry the Tennis Channel as widely as sports networks owned by the cable operator. The new decision largely reflects an Office of General Counsel order earlier this month staying implementation of the ALJ decision in the program carriage complaint where the independent channel alleged Comcast discriminated against it (CD May 5 p3). The new stay said it “will preserve the status quo while the Commission has an adequate opportunity to examine the record and the ALJ’s disposition of each issue closely.” The cable operator challenged Chief FCC ALJ Richard Sippel’s decision, while the indie sought an order requiring the wider carriage.

The Distributed Computing Industry Association and Level 3 share Netflix’s concerns over ISPs that exclude from data caps traffic not sent on the public Internet, such as streaming video to Xbox 360 videogame consoles. The association for cloud-computing providers and Level 3, which speeds delivery of content including Netflix to broadband subscribers of companies like Comcast, were the only two entities in the Internet content realm to tell us they take issue with exceptions to data caps.

Legislators and regulators from both parties said there’s broad support on Capitol Hill and in industry for some sort of do-not-track standard for websites targeting children. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., used his time at a children’s media conference Thursday to push for passage of the Do Not Track Kids Act (HR-1895) sponsored by him and Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, the other co-chairman of the Congressional Privacy Caucus. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., would like to see similar legislation advance in the Senate, though he said it’s unlikely any such bill would pass this year. FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz noted at the Capitol Hill event that there’s bipartisan support for a DNT system, and Democratic FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn and ex-GOP FCC Commissioner Deborah Tate said any solution must involve the largest number of possible stakeholders.

Netflix made a rare visit to the FCC to lobby against three top ISPs’ exclusion of some video transmitted by Internet Protocol from broadband data caps. The company said the exclusion is a net neutrality issue and doesn’t necessarily fall under statutory exemptions on preferential treatment of cable programming. The online video streamer took aim at AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, during executives’ first visit to lobby the FCC in two years.

FCC staff took action on a second program carriage case in as many weeks. The Media Bureau on Wednesday sent the Game Show Network’s complaint against Cablevision to a hearing before an FCC administrative law judge. Seven days earlier the Office of General Counsel put on hold the same ALJ’s order that Comcast begin carrying the Tennis Channel as widely as other sports networks that the cable operator owns (CD May 4 p3). GSN made a case on its face that Cablevision favored its own affiliated networks over the independent channel in moving the complainant from an expanded-basic tier bought by most of the operator’s subscribers to a less-popular sports tier, the bureau said.