FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen’s call for a free-market approach to net neutrality Friday didn’t surprise lawyers, advocates and technologists, but her technological rationale caught some off guard, they said in interviews. “This sort of came out of nowhere,” said Joe Hall, senior staff technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. During a speech on the FTC’s oversight role in the growing Internet of Things (CD Oct 21 p11), or IoT, Ohlhausen’s focus on the network traffic levels missed the point, said Hall and others. Other lawyers and free-market advocates supported Ohlhausen’s overall vision of the FTC taking a bigger role in overseeing net neutrality without further regulating the market.

Comptel criticized a paper commissioned by the Internet Innovation Alliance that ILECs have been touting as evidence that the IP transition is well underway, with only 5 percent of American households relying solely on wireline services. Many of the paper’s claims (CD Oct 10 p8) weren’t supported by the underlying data, which was neither accurately portrayed nor analyzed, Comptel said in a statement Monday. The paper’s author, Georgetown Visiting Senior Policy Scholar Anna-Maria Kovacs, couldn’t be reached for comment. An IIA representative defended the paper’s findings.

AT&T agreed to sell Crown Castle International ownership or leasing rights to about 9,700 of its approximately 10,000 cell tower sites for $4.85 billion. The deal, announced Saturday, gives Crown Castle full ownership of 600 AT&T tower sites and full leasing control of 9,100 sites for an average of 28 years. Crown Castle has the option to buy the leased towers for $4.2 billion at the end of the lease period. AT&T said it will lease back space on the towers for at least the next 10 years at a starting price of $1,900 a month per site; leasing prices will rise by 2 percent a year. AT&T has the option to re-up its leases for a total of 50 years (http://soc.att.com/17Zl624). The deal is one of the latest in a string of sales of wireless carriers’ tower sites to tower companies -- and it may be one of the last major ones for the foreseeable future, industry experts told us Monday.

The FCC delayed to Jan. 22 the start of the H-block auction, which had been scheduled to get underway Jan. 14, it said in a notice released Monday (bit.ly/1i94GKc). The auction’s timing had been a bone of contention at the FCC, with Commissioner Ajit Pai favoring the earliest possible auction and Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel favoring a sale later in the year. In September, the bureau scheduled a Jan. 14 auction with a $1.6 billion reserve price (CD Sept 16 p1) after Dish Network agreed to meet that price. Carriers are also interested in the band, which is adjacent to the PCS block, FCC officials said in September.

The extension of the low-power FM application window makes up for the time that LPFM hopefuls lost during the 16-day government shutdown, rather than giving applicants more time to work on their applications, some LPFM advocates said. The FCC Media Bureau opened the window last week and will accept applications until Nov. 14, the bureau said in a public notice (http://bit.ly/1fQRooX). It also will hold a webinar Thursday, it said. The Q-and-A session was rescheduled from Oct. 3 (CD Oct 4 p2).

A compromise package for reform of Europe’s data protection rules set for a vote this week in the European Parliament Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) Committee could either boost safeguards for online users or threaten the very existence of some Internet business models, stakeholders said. LIBE members were scheduled Monday to debate the parliamentary report by Jan Philipp Albrecht of the Greens/European Free Alliance and Germany, but it was unclear whether the vote would take place Monday after our deadline or Thursday, said Morrison Foerster data protection and e-commerce attorney Karin Retzer in an interview. Efforts to update data protection law have likely been given a shot in the arm by the revelations of massive U.S. and U.K. telephone and Internet spying, said Retzer and European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) Director General Monique Goyens. Digital rights activists said some of the amendments are good, but others are a threat to privacy.

President Barack Obama nominated former Department of Defense General Counsel Jeh Johnson Friday as secretary of Homeland Security, to replace Janet Napolitano, who resigned in September. As DOD’s top lawyer, Johnson was a party to the development of DOD’s cybersecurity efforts -- an asset given DHS’s prominent role in U.S. cybersecurity matters like the implementation of Obama’s cybersecurity executive order, said former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense-Cyber Policy Bob Butler. Johnson has been a partner at the Paul, Weiss law firm since resigning from DOD in December.

Dish Network alleged in a complaint to the FCC that Media General isn’t negotiating in good faith to renew a retransmission consent agreement for the DBS company to transmit programs from the broadcaster’s stations in Augusta, Ga., Columbus, Ohio, Jackson, Miss., Raleigh-Durham, N.C., and other markets. Dish said it “repeatedly has offered to enter into a temporary extension of the entire expiring agreement in order to prevent disruption to viewers, but Media General refused all such offers” (http://bit.ly/1ex0mV3). Broadcasts from stations in 17 markets haven’t been available to Dish subscribers there since Oct. 1 (CD Oct 3 p13).

The FCC missed during the government shutdown a legislative deadline to approve accessibility rules for user interfaces and program guides (CD Oct 15 p1). That won’t necessarily mean negative consequences for consumers or the industry, said the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), CEA and communications attorneys in interviews. The proposed user interface and program guide rules are mandated by the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA). The FCC was required to implement them by Oct. 8, and companies were to be in compliance that same date with several previously approved CVAA rules.

An NTIA pilot project designed to monitor spectrum use in real time in select communities should yield information that will help policymakers make informed decisions, but needs to be a collaborative effort to be most effective, Microsoft told NTIA. Monitoring should include a wide range of federal users, and the data should be made available to industry, T-Mobile said. NTIA sought input on what’s expected to be a $7.5 million, two-year project, created as part of the June presidential Memorandum on Expanding America’s Leadership in Wireless Innovation. The agency posted the comments (http://1.usa.gov/1c1XzWl) following the reopening of the government Thursday.