The FCC Wireline Bureau granted Lifeline waivers because of program changes and events like Superstorm Sandy (http://xrl.us/bn4oia). Affordable, Absolute and Sprint Nextel don’t have to recertify Lifeline customers because the carriers aren’t serving any Lifeline after Dec. 31, Friday’s order said. “Requiring these subscribers to recertify their eligibility would likely cause confusion and frustration, and is not necessary because the remedy for identifying an ineligible subscriber is to de-enroll that subscriber -- which effectively is happening in any event because these ETCs will no longer provide Lifeline service to these groups.” Oregon continues to press the bureau about administrative burdens building up in an expiring waiver, as states asked to opt out of a national database, filings released Monday show.

TiVo has “reinvented the notion of what we should be,” said CEO Tom Rogers at the UBS annual Global Media and Communications Conference on Monday. Nine of the top 21 U.S. TV service providers have signed with TiVo for advanced television solutions, “and no one else has anything close to that kind of following among the operator base,” Rogers said. This follows a perception in the industry as “the guys who had been rejected by the cable industry” because cable operators found their own DVR solutions and “people thought TiVo had been passed over,” Rogers said.

The U.S. could find itself in a position where it has to offer compromises this week as the World Conference on International Telecommunications gets started in Dubai, observers say. They noted that Ambassador Terry Kramer has indicated the U.S. will stand firm on Internet governance at WCIT, though he must answer to the State Department and the Obama administration. If the U.S. decides it must move toward compromise, the decision won’t be Kramer’s alone.

Sirius XM is “interested” in settling its royalty rate dispute with SoundExchange, but it “holds out no hope” of reaching an agreement short of the Copyright Royalty Board decision this month, Sirius Chief Financial Officer David Frear said Monday at the UBS conference in New York.

Underperforming pay-TV networks may have trouble renewing their carriage agreements with Time Warner Cable. CEO Glenn Britt told investors at a UBS conference Monday that the Time Warner Cable will seek to eliminate little-watched networks from its channel lineup. “As our programming contracts come up for renewal, we're going to take a hard look at each [programming] service,” Britt said. “Those services that cost too much relative to the viewership or value of the service, we're going to drop them,” or put them on a different tier, he said. “We can’t keep carrying these giant packages of things with services that don’t carry their own weight."

DirecTV Latin America’s (DLA) Sky Brazil postponed launch of a 4G LTE wireless broadband service to 2013, as it works to resolve software issues and improve coverage, DLA President Bruce Churchill said Monday at the UBS conference in New York.

Whether to include data on “best efforts” Internet services in a special access market analysis remains the focus of negotiations between Republican FCC commissioners and their Democratic counterparts. The latest special access draft was distributed to commissioners Friday afternoon, but given the complexity of the subject matter and the number of changes that have been made, it wasn’t feasible to vote on it Friday, FCC officials said. “There’s been movement” from the Democrats’ and Republicans’ original positions, as both sides try to find common ground, one official said.

International governmental bodies and public interest groups urged Syria to restore its citizens’ access to the Internet after the nation allegedly instituted a blackout Thursday, days before the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) was set to begin. ICANN confirmed the outage Thursday, saying “service dropped from 100 [percent] to zero almost immediately.” However, Syria’s two country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs), .sy and .syr, are functioning, which indicates a local problem, it said. ICANN said it will continue to monitor and will provide further clarification.

The FCC approved rules moving toward implementing the Local Community Radio Act, which includes a fifth order on reconsideration that establishes a national limit of 70 applications, and a sixth report and order establishing a second-adjacent channel spacing waiver standard, during its meeting Friday. The FCC plans to open a filing window for new low power FM applications in October 2013.

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. -- The borderless world of wireless presents unique regulation challenges for app developers, said panelists at the Entertainment Apps Conference. Joleen Winther Hughes of Hughes Media Law Group said: “Developers want no boundaries or borders, but when you're trying to develop intellectual property, it’s crucial having ownership of it. Once you release an app in multiple jurisdictions, you must also be aware that there are different rules in different areas."