The FCC’s path to signoff on Deutsche Telekom’s buy of MetroPCS to fold it into T-Mobile appears to be reaching the end stages. The commission is expected to endorse the deal with minimum conditions, officials say. One remaining question is whether the full FCC will vote on the transaction or whether it will be approved as a Wireless Bureau order, without a full commission vote. T-Mobile has pressed for a bureau-level order in the interest of speeding up approval.

The FTC’s notice and consent-based regulatory model has worked fairly well, but it has its limits, FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen said Thursday at an International Association of Privacy Professionals conference. FTC Commissioner Julie Brill, in a separate event at the same conference, had discussed moving away from that model -- and toward a model that focuses on data use. “We've done pretty well with the deception-based model, and I wouldn’t want to give that up too easily,” Ohlhausen said. “With that being said, I think there is a role for unfairness. … But I think it’s important for us to follow the guidance Congress has set out in the statute for unfairness.” The FTC can declare a specific company action as deceptive or unfair -- and therefore unlawful -- under Section 5 of the FTC Act.

A handful of the Senate’s top cybersecurity hawks commended President Barack Obama for issuing a cybersecurity executive order to improve the security of the nation’s most critical infrastructure, at a joint hearing Thursday by the Senate Commerce and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees. Despite previous warnings that an order would actually hurt U.S. companies’ ability to protect themselves from cyberattacks, even some Senate Republicans offered veiled praise for the order. Agency leaders at the Department of Homeland Security and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which are tasked by the executive order to help U.S. owners of critical infrastructure, told lawmakers that they're working hard to comply with the order but said they are concerned the sequester may negatively affect their agencies’ ability to protect the nation from attacks.

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai threw his weight behind an IP pilot program, based on AT&T’s proposal for deregulatory trials in various wire centers around the country, in a speech Thursday at the Hudson Institute (http://bit.ly/WNAjif). The program would allow “forward-looking companies” to select wire centers where they could “turn off their old TDM electronics and migrate consumers to an all-IP platform.” Some criticized Pai’s proposal as going even further than AT&T’s original “beta trials,” warning that the deregulatory proposal could harm consumers without leading to any real data.

The FTC sued alleged text-message spammers and personal data collection website operators, it said Thursday. The U.S.-based defendants named in the eight actions allegedly sent at least 180 million unsolicited text messages alerting recipients that they had won free $1,000 gift cards to stores like Walmart and Best Buy, said Steve Baker, director of the FTC’s Midwest Region, during a press call. The text messages directed recipients to websites where they would have to enter contact and personal information and provide credit card information before they could receive the “free” gift cards, he continued. Baker said the agency received 20,000 complaints about these messages, with additional complaints received by the FCC.

The Department of Energy took what it called “a step in this process” toward regulating how much energy set-top boxes can use, with Thursday’s release of data tables estimating the impact on such rules. Based partly on the government regulatory impact model, DOE issued tables that “assess the economic impact of potential standards on set-top box manufacturers and multichannel video programming distributors.” After negotiations between nonprofits that seek lower energy use and representatives of MVPDs and makers of consumer electronics ended in the fall, “DOE has since moved forward with the regulatory process,” a notice in Thursday’s Federal Register said. It pointed to January’s notice of proposed rulemaking, or NOPR in DOE nomenclature (CD Jan 23 p14), on standards to test the power consumption of set-tops.

The FCC’s World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) Advisory Committee (WAC) endorsed a resolution Thursday defending the continued use of the 1435-1525 MHz for aeronautical mobile telemetry (AMT). The WRC meeting in 2015 is slated to examine use of the band internationally for wireless broadband.

The landmark order reforming the USF and intercarrier compensation system was a bastion of reasonableness, the FCC argued in the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Wednesday. In two briefs totaling more than 130 pages -- one devoted to USF issues, the other to ICC issues -- the commission argued its 2011 USF/ICC order was lawful, necessary and well within the FCC’s authority. Challengers to the order are merely “seeking to preserve the status quo,” the FCC said, arguing the claims of overstepping jurisdiction and violating procedure are “baseless."

AT&T believes it can attract new customers -- and keep its existing ones -- because of its Mobile Share shared-data plans, as well as new opportunities in home automation and connected car services, said AT&T Mobility Chief Financial Officer Pete Ritcher Wednesday at a Deutsche Bank investor conference. More than two-thirds of the carrier’s smartphone subscribers -- 31.7 million -- are on tiered data plans like Mobile Share, he said. AT&T said 6.6 million subscribers were on Mobile Share plans as of Q4 (CD Jan 28 p19). Subscribers on Mobile Share plans will likely “buy bigger buckets” of data over time, Ritcher said. “As the usage grows on those devices … then we have an ability to build and sort of capitalize and grow our data revenues that are associated with that,” he said. AT&T hopes to increase revenue from each user on those plans as they begin to upgrade from smartphones using 3G technology to ones that utilize LTE, Ritcher said.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski circulated a draft order Wednesday proposing limited trials allowing VoIP providers direct access to numbers for set periods in a few unspecified markets, with regular reporting back to the commission, agency officials said. Genachowski also circulated an NPRM and an NOI further exploring questions about giving VoIP companies like Vonage direct access to numbers. All three items would have to be approved by commissioners.