The GOP Steering Committee soon will begin considering candidates to lead the House Commerce Committee, voting as soon as Tuesday, said industry lobbyists, lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides watching the vigorous competition to chair the committee. It’s likely to amount to a contest between Fred Upton of Michigan; Ranking Member Joe Barton of Texas, a former Commerce chairman; and John Shimkus of Illinois, several communications industry lobbyists said. Upton is the senior-most committee member in contention for the top spot. Barton may need a waiver Republican caucus rules to again head the committee.

The FCC faces a risky day in court if it adopts net neutrality rules without reclassifying broadband as a telecom service, as Chairman Julius Genachowski proposes, the commission’s senior member and communications law professors watching the order’s development but not privy to internal deliberations told us. Copps and some professors said Genachowski’s plan, made public Wednesday, to keep broadband under Title I of the Communications Act appears to pose more risk than does reclassification of being thrown out in an appeal that many industry and commission officials believe is inevitable. While not relying solely on ancillary authority (CD Dec 3 p1) may help the regulator’s prospects in any case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, it’s unclear whether that will be enough for the FCC to win any lawsuit, said law professors we asked. Commission officials have said reliance on both ancillary and direct authority may make for a stronger order.

Commissioner Michael Copps is hopeful broadcasters and the FCC itself will engage with him in a dialogue on the types of requirements radio and TV stations should meet to renew their licenses, he told us after proposing a seven-point public value test. The senior commissioner on the FCC acknowledged he hasn’t yet gotten the momentum to move forward that he'd like from his agency or from the industry in his quest to shorten license terms and make broadcasters do more to get them. “I think we have the potential vote to do something,” Copps said Friday. He’s long sought beefed-up licensing procedures for broadcasters, and when he was interim chairman he wanted to reduce license terms to three years from eight (CD May 15/09 p1).

The first version of the draft FCC net neutrality order cites both direct and ancillary authority as giving the commission purview to bar ISPs from discriminating in the type of traffic they carry on their networks, agency officials said. Ancillary authority was a prominent issue in April’s Comcast ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which held that the commission was out of bounds in relying on Title I. But some law professors said there are risks to a Title I approach, even if specific sections of the Communications Act are also cited.

Career FCC staffers’ work on drafting an order on Comcast’s plan to buy control of NBC Universal may not result in the deal’s being approved as quickly as had been expected, because of the agency’s attention to net neutrality, said many agency and industry officials watching the review. They said staff work appears to be far along on the multibillion dollar deal, and ex parte filings indicate that the companies in the deal are discussing possible conditions on it. Conditions don’t seem to have been settled, agency and industry officials said. Chairman Julius Genachowski had at one point reportedly hoped to have an entire draft of the order available around Thanksgiving (CD Nov 5 p3).

The FCC proposes to give Congress a written record to consult as it weighs legislation to allow the agency to auction spectrum in such a way that the government will share the proceeds with incumbent licensees, Chairman Julius Genachowski said. A rulemaking notice on TV spectrum, approved at Tuesday’s commission meeting, would also help the FCC by giving it some technical wherewithal to hold the incentive auctions if lawmakers authorize them, he said. Genachowski spoke with reporters after the meeting, in which a rulemaking notice on experimental licensing and an inquiry on wireless spectrum innovation were approved 5-0, as expected.

Private equity firms are willing to finance the purchase of TV stations by companies run by veteran broadcast executives, as sharply reduced lending by banks has left few other ways to pay for mergers and acquisitions, said a top industry broker and one such broadcaster. They said the continued dearth of bank financing for radio and TV station M&A means operators either need to finance deals themselves with cash on hand or find private-equity partners. The broadcaster that broke a drought in purchases of Big Four network affiliated TV stations (CD Nov 5 p11) got such private equity backing, its chairman said.

Three spectrum items set for a vote Tuesday aren’t drawing much controversy within the FCC and seem likely to be unanimously approved in a final form that’s close to the first version of their drafts, agency officials we spoke with said. They said some commissioners are suggesting changes to a rulemaking notice on TV spectrum. Among the three items, that’s been drawing the most attention within the FCC and from the broadcast industry, which appears to have some concerns about it, agency officials said. Fewer changes are likely to be made to another rulemaking notice, on experimental licensing, and to a notice of inquiry on opportunistic use of spectrum, commission officials said. Altogether, the three items still aren’t likely to differ substantially from the first drafts from career commission staffers (CD Nov 16 p4), agency officials said.

Commissioners have approved all items relating to implementation of the Satellite TV Extension and Localism Act (STELA), which deal with how out-of-market TV stations can be carried by DBS providers, FCC officials said Monday. They said commissioners approved two orders, one from the Media Bureau on what DBS providers need to do to carry significantly viewed signals from outside the market where a station with the same network affiliation operates, and one from the Office of Engineering and Technology on DBS importation of broadcasters from far-away markets. Also approved was a rulemaking notice on use for DTV of the Longley-Rice model which predicts radio wave propagation, FCC officials said. They said all three items should be released soon by the commission. The FCC must implement STELA by Wednesday, under the legislation. A bureau spokeswoman declined to comment on items’ status, and an OET representative didn’t immediately reply to a message.

NCTA CEO Kyle McSlarrow’s decision Friday to leave this spring was the culmination of months of his considering what he wanted to do next, cable industry officials said. Now he’s looking to work as an executive on the operational end of a company, perhaps in the media or telecom sector and as a CEO, industry executives said. They said McSlarrow seemed to face no pressure to leave from members of NCTA, where his contract runs until 2012 and was extended for four years in 2008. Though he'd been considering leaving NCTA for some time, the decision came as some surprise to industry insiders and came two hours after he spoke to a panel about online video. (See separate report in this issue.)