A two-front war against CableCARDs is escalating on Capitol Hill and is also taking place at the FCC. The cable industry has fought to end the cable integration ban, as players such as TiVo seek to save it amid lobbying and concerns. The integration ban calls for cable operators to use CableCARDs instead of built-in security in set-top boxes. Neither the cable industry nor CableCARD advocates in the consumer electronics industry said they know the feelings of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler on TiVo’s effort to have the agency bring back encoding and CableCARD support rules struck down by the EchoStar court decision early this year.

The Department of Defense believes coordination of spectrum sharing in the 3.5 GHz band presents an opportunity to improve spectrum sharing efforts “across the board,” said Fred Moorefield, director-spectrum, policy and programs for DOD’s Office of the Chief Information Officer, at an FCBA event Thursday night. Sharing on the 3.5 GHz band will be one of the first indications of how spectrum sharing “is going to work on this type of scale,” Moorefield said. DOD is “really trying to help” the FCC and NTIA coordinate sharing on the band, which DOD has said it will need to use for radar services for the foreseeable future, he said. DOD will reflect its willingness to cooperate when it releases its spectrum strategy Dec. 11, Moorefield said. The spectrum strategy will focus on “adaptability, flexibility, resiliency, maneuverability, technology and more spectrum sharing both ways,” he said.

The “nuclear option” invoked in the U.S. Senate Thursday will likely add three President Barack Obama-appointed judges to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, but that new Democratic majority is unlikely to strongly improve the FCC’s chances in defending net neutrality rules, industry observers told us Friday. Stifel Nicolaus analysts said the 7-4 D.C. Circuit Democratic majority could make it easier for the FCC to appeal a negative ruling by the three-judge panel that heard the case in September. But industry attorneys said that wouldn’t make a meaningful difference in the outcome, which could ultimately be determined by the Supreme Court.

The FCC understands consumer concerns about cellphone calls made during commercial flights and airlines would be free to impose rules as they see fit, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said Friday. The Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) called on the FCC to drop any plans to allow calling on cellphones by passengers while in flight. Industry officials, meanwhile, said they expect a huge, mostly negative response by the public to an NPRM slated for vote at the FCC’s December meeting, which will questions about the use of cellphones for data, text and voice (CD Nov 22 p3). Cellphones would not directly contact towers but use the picocell systems installed on some airliners.

The more than 2,800 low-power FM applications submitted to the FCC during the LPFM window didn’t come as a surprise to some advocates for the service, they said in interviews Friday. There were 2,819 applications for new stations, according to the FCC FM Query database (http://bit.ly/IkoiiY). The intensive application and lack of resources to prepare applications and to conduct more outreach are some factors that likely resulted in fewer than 3,000 applications, some advocates said. The number of applications filed is significantly lower than some earlier projections made by other advocates.

The U.S. needs to sustain its involvement in the intellectual property treaty process, and “90 percent” of compliance issues surrounding IP need the force of the private sector, said World Intellectual Property Organization Director General Francis Gurry at a George Washington Law School lecture Thursday night. He outlined a host of “shifts” facing the IP community, including how corporations are investing overwhelmingly in intangible goods, and the explosion of IP investment in such countries as China, Japan and Korea. Gurry said multilateral organizations like WIPO need to “resize” the scope of their “ambitions” to better serve the “extraordinarily dynamic” arena of IP.

The FCC’s 2010 net neutrality rules are having no effect to date on how USTelecom members do business, President Walter McCormick said during a taping of C-SPAN’s The Communicators, eventually scheduled to be telecast on the network. “I haven’t seen them have any effect, whatsoever, on either competition or on our members or on the way in which we do business,” McCormick said.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said Thursday the FCC will seek comment on whether to allow use of cellphones on airplanes. The NPRM is slated for a vote at the FCC’s Dec. 12 meeting. It will cover use of a phone for text, data and voice through the picocell systems already installed on some airliners, an FCC spokesman said.

The House Judiciary Committee cleared an amended version of the Innovation Act (HR-3309) Wednesday night, passing it on to the full House on a 33-5 vote. HR-3309, which would curb so-called patent litigation abuse, received unanimous Republican support, with most committee Democrats ultimately voting for it after last-minute negotiations yielded an amendment that moderated the bill’s fee-shifting provision.

The FCC should spend as much time and effort encouraging investment and innovation in broadcasting as it has in broadband, said NAB President Gordon Smith in a Media Institute speech Thursday. Smith said a list of the FCC’s achievements under former Chairman Julius Genachowski didn’t include any outside the realm of broadband. “Rather than supporting innovation in our industry and working with broadcasters so that we can continue to outpace the rest of the world, the commission has had a different, in fact, a myopic focus,” said Smith. The FCC under Chairman Tom Wheeler should pay more attention to broadcast to allow the industry the regulatory flexibility to “not fight with one or both arms tied behind our backs,” said Smith.