With TV stations expected to bring in record political ad revenue this year, broadcasters’ windfall could limit participation in the upcoming incentive auction of broadcast licenses, industry and government sources warn. The political ad windfall could be nearly $3 billion, with both presidential campaigns eschewing spending limits and in the aftermath of a 2010 decision by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC, in which the court said the First Amendment prohibited the government from restricting independent political expenditures by corporations and unions. But several broadcast industry experts said these fears may not come to pass.

The FTC shouldn’t find Google guilty of antitrust law violations, the company and its supporters said after an event last week organized by opponents of the company. Panelists there said Google violates antitrust laws and should face government intervention as a result of the FTC investigation.

Cable operators are preparing to test and deploy the industry’s next-generation access architecture, as their technology vendors start to churn out the necessary equipment for the converged cable access platform (CCAP). In recent interviews and webinars, cable executives said they're getting ready to try out CCAP technology in labs and in small field trials. Others said they've already started testing the new advanced technology for broadband and video service delivery, targeting commercial deployments by the end of this year or the beginning of next. Tech vendors are producing new CCAP equipment, and plan to demonstrate their gear at the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers show in Orlando, Fla., next month.

A draft FCC order doesn’t extend a prohibition on exclusive deals for carriage of channels that are affiliated with cable operators beyond the current Oct. 5 sunset, agency officials said. A program access order addressing the sunset circulated late Friday, the officials said. Industry officials had said they expected the office of Chairman Julius Genachowski would circulate a draft Friday, three weeks before the rules expire.

The post-derecho 911 outages in northern Virginia were “very serious” and bordered on “catastrophic,” the Virginia State Corporation Commission wrote in an interim report Friday (http://xrl.us/bnpspc). The SCC, along with the FCC and other entities, have been investigating the outages since they occurred over a few days starting June 29.

Neutrality in local number portability administration is crucial to ensure the integrity of the porting process, telecom officials agreed in documents posted Friday in response to the FCC’s request for comment on the procurement documents submitted for the LNP database platforms and services. Most commenters encouraged quick approval of the documents submitted by the North American Portability Management’s “Future of Number Portability Administration Center Subcommittee” (FoNPAC). But Comcast asked for a revision to enable more competition on the regional level, and Telcordia Technologies said it wanted more guidance on how the neutrality provisions would be applied.

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai blamed regulatory uncertainty for a sluggish economy and slow job growth, in remarks Friday to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Pai, a Republican, presented a counter argument to Chairman Julius Genachowski, who has linked broadband expansion and job growth in numerous speeches over the last year (CD June 4 p1).

The FCC’s budget for salaries and expenses would be cut 8.2 percent, equal to roughly $28 million, if a Congress doesn’t act to stop sequestration before Jan. 2, the White House said. The news came in the administration’s much anticipated sequestration report Friday, which detailed sharp across-the-board cuts to the budgets of most federal agencies. An industry group and a union representing FCC employees said the report shows the negative impact that sequestration will have on federal employees, private industry and the economy as a whole.

In a proposal that is raising some concerns internally at the FCC, a notice of proposed rulemaking on rules for an incentive auction of broadcast spectrum proposes that a reverse auction, where broadcasters will propose to sell their spectrum or opt to share spectrum, and a forward auction, where the agency will offer the licenses for 4G and LTE, take place concurrently, officials said. The NPRM was circulated by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski Sept. 7 (CD Sept 10 p1) and it was being reviewed by the various commissioner offices last week. The NPRM is slated to get a vote at the FCC’s Sept. 28 meeting.

Government agencies don’t distribute emergency alert system warnings to radio listeners and viewers of over-the-air and pay TV only via the Internet, state and federal originators of EAS alerts and industry executives said. During Hurricane Isaac, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s new Web-based EAS distribution system wasn’t used by agencies serving the Gulf Coast that responded to our survey. Instead, the traditional method of distributing storm and disaster alerts by broadcasting them to all radio and TV stations and multichannel video programming distributors in a region was used late last month, as it continues to be.