GENEVA -- African and Arab common proposals for the World Conference on International Telecommunications variously call for ITU treaty language to address certain service providers or to spur investment, representatives said Monday during a briefing on revising the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) in December. Common proposals from the Americas and Europe pressed high-level principles.

The FCC released a further notice of proposed rulemaking (http://xrl.us/bnsshn) Friday seeking comment on a series of questions about its program access rules. The notice was part of a broader rulemaking in which the commission let a ban on exclusive contracts between cable operators and the networks they own expire. In its place, the order adopted a case-by-case framework under Section 628(b) of the Communications Act for evaluating whether such arrangements hurt competition, with a rebuttable presumption that exclusive deals involving regional sports networks are considered unfair, industry and FCC officials said.

TOKYO -- Despite being Japan’s largest wireless carrier, NTTDoCoMo has no plans match its rivals in carrying the iPhone, preferring to sell its own content and services, International Public Relations Manager So Hiroki told us at the company’s headquarters here.

The FCC Enforcement Bureau is cracking down on the sale of illegal signal jamming devices on the Internet. The bureau served notice Friday it’s issued two separate citations, posting both on the FCC’s main webpage. The bureau issued a citation against a Florida man, for allegedly selling wireless signal jammers on Craigslist.org. Richard Naparty had advertised the device on the Internet site as a “high power cell phone and wireless device jammer with an effective distance of 100 ft. radius. Great for restaurants, doctors offices, stores or just plain fun,” the FCC quoted the ad as saying.

State regulators asked the FCC Friday to suspend an updated method of determining high-cost support from the USF (http://xrl.us/bnsr4j). The motion comes after months of debate and allegations from national and state entities that the year-old reform will hurt companies due to its unpredictability. “Clearly [the FCC model] is going to have the most impact on high-cost, rural-type carriers,” NARUC Telecom Committee Chair John Burke told us. It will impact states differently depending on how many such companies they have, he said. The FCC’s methodology of quantile regression analysis was introduced in its November USF/intercarrier compensation order, adjusted in April and determines more than 700 companies’ high-cost support as of this July. Other NARUC telecom committee members are “concerned,” Burke said.

Regulators “shouldn’t condemn the behavior of a dominant firm simply because it’s big,” said Gregory Sidak, law and economics professor at the Netherlands’ Tilburg University, at an American Enterprise Institute event Friday. He spoke about his recently released paper “What Does the Chicago School Teach About Internet Search and the Antitrust Treatment of Google” (http://xrl.us/bnsr5g). The paper, based on work commissioned by Google and written by Sidak and Robert Bork, the former U.S. Solicitor General and once a Supreme Court nominee, examines claims that Google violates antitrust laws through the lens of what’s known as the Chicago school of antitrust analysis. Based on a 1979 law review paper by Richard Posner, now a judge on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and still on the University of Chicago faculty, the Chicago school accepts that legitimately innovative and efficient firms will be rewarded with market success and market share, he said.

Judges had questions in the three major areas of Time Warner Cable’s challenge of the FCC’s ability to require continued carriage of an independent channel while an indie’s program carriage complaint is before the agency. The constitutionality, administrative process and statutory authority of the FCC to require standstill carriage were extensively raised in an oral argument Thursday, said communications lawyers in attendance allied with each side in Time Warner Cable v. FCC. Those issues were dwelled on in briefs at the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (CD Oct 4 p3). Onlookers said oral argument was notable for running more than quadruple the amount of time the 2nd Circuit had scheduled.

A program aimed at repurposing satellite components while in orbit can further collaboration between the government and the commercial satellite industry, industry and government officials said. Currently in its first phase, the Phoenix program is headed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA contracted with companies to research, develop and implement ways to take portions of decommissioned satellites and repurpose them. “Private industry is doing the bulk of the technology development under Phase 1 of the Phoenix effort, and thus is helping provide innovations to ultimately lower the cost of re-use and re-purposing components on retired assets in space,” David Barnhart, Phoenix program manager, said in an e-mail.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Those at the PCIA show were enthusiastic about recent growth of LTE technology, and the wireless infrastructure advances needed to support it including distributed antenna systems (DAS) and small cell towers, they said. Evercore analyst Jonathan Schildkraut wrote investors that enthusiasm in the industry appeared at “record highs” and forecast continued growth.

Legacy regulations developed to contend with monopoly copper providers have no place in today’s world of next-generation networks and “intermodal competition” among cable, carriers and telcos, FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai said. He said the commission could help the U.S. regain its leadership in the information, communications and telecom sector by doing three things: Act more quickly, get more spectrum into the commercial market and remove barriers to infrastructure investment. Companies have told Pai they are “sitting on billions of dollars on their balance sheets, in part because of regulatory uncertainty,” he said on C-SPAN. Those companies will be more hesitant to invest in fiber deployment or Internet infrastructure until the rules are “certain and predictable,” Pai said: The FCC’s regulatory framework should “give them the incentive to take those risks."