The FCC Media Bureau is monitoring the blackout of 15 Hearst Television stations on Time Warner Cable, without taking sides in the dispute over retransmission consent fees that entered a third full day Thursday (CD July 12 p10), industry officials said. The agency’s sticking to the standard practice that it used in some but not all retrans disputes in recent years, agency and industry officials noted. They said that means the office of Chairman Julius Genachowski and his colleagues aren’t getting updates from either side and are instead letting career commission staff monitor the blackout.

Public Knowledge, Free Press and the Diogenes Telecommunications Project filed separate petitions asking the FCC to reject the proposed Verizon/T-Mobile spectrum swap, in which the companies propose the purchase and exchange of AWS licenses in 218 markets. RTG also filed a petition to deny (CD July 11 p14). But whether the petitions will have much effect remains to be seen, especially since the FCC seems well on the way to approving deals linked to the swaps, in which Verizon will buy AWS licenses from SpectrumCo, Cox and Leap Wireless.

There’s no consensus on the level of transparency there should be for ITU procedures. At an ITU Council meeting in Geneva, member countries only agreed to publish the draft version of the future International Telecommunication Regulations. An initiative heavily pushed by Sweden to grant open access to all contributions to the World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT) was not accepted, confirmed Anders Jonsson, head of the Swedish delegation.

The FTC and Department of Justice took to Congress Wednesday to express concern about technology companies with standard essential patents (SEPs) running to the International Trade Commission for exclusion orders. An exclusion order directs U.S. Customs and Border Protection to bar infringing articles from entry into the country. The DOJ Antitrust Division is particularly concerned with SEPs involving mobile devices, because wireless devices depend on many standards for interoperability, Acting Assistant Attorney General Joseph Wayland said. Speaking at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the impact of exclusion orders on competition, he and FTC Commissioner Edith Ramirez argued exclusion orders are generally inappropriate remedies for companies that own patents used in industry standards.

SILICON VALLEY -- Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., promised to keep fighting to make spectrum available for unlicensed broadband uses. In a brief recorded message to a conference Wednesday at Stanford University about unlicensed, Eshoo took credit for provisions in the recently enacted spectrum law allowing “the FCC to preserve existing white spaces” and to use for unlicensed purposes some frequencies to be given up by broadcasters. The “future of unlicensed spectrum” had been “called in question” in the legislation’s creation, she said.

Of the dozens of comments filed this week in response to the FCC’s rulemaking on USF contribution reform, there was little agreement about whether to stick with a revenue-based system for assessing contribution fees, to move to a system that uses connections or numbers, or even whether to assess fees on broadband service. The only universal sentiment that might be teased out of the plethora of comments filed is that, as AT&T put it, the current system is “dysfunctional.” Carriers differed, but generally supported a modified revenue-based system, while VoIP providers preferred a connections-based system.

Expanding relationships with other enterprises and federal agencies and providing cutting-edge services can help small, minority and women-owned businesses obtain procurement agreements with large companies and agencies, telecom and government executives said. Working groups and training and mentoring programs were developed at some corporations and in the government to support small businesses and entrepreneurs and to produce a diverse list of prospective vendors for entities to do business with, they said Tuesday at a supplier diversity conference at the FCC.

A year after former FCC Managing Director Steve VanRoekel left the agency to become federal chief information officer, questions remain about the FCC’s revised website. Frequent users of the site say they continue to rely on the old version, the old blue and gold site, still available as the transition website. Meanwhile, the FCC has markedly decreased the number of blog entries it posts each month. The blog averaged 25 posts per month in 2010, but only about a fifth as many per month so far this year.

The FCC hopes more operators agree to use a yet-to-be-deployed type of stripped-down set-top box lacking a DVR for subscribers whose cable-connected consumer electronics lack CableCARDs, industry officials said. That would let the CE devices get scrambled broadcast and basic-cable channels, and the commission hopes that happens before an encryption order circulates, the officials said. They said some at the agency have signaled to the cable industry that the Media Bureau and Chairman Julius Genachowski’s office would like additional operators to agree to a hardware workaround for clear QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) products from CE companies including Boxee to get encrypted content.

The FCC’s plans for special access reform became a prominent issue during a House Communications Subcommittee hearing Tuesday where members queried the commissioners on a broad spectrum of regulatory issues. Chairman Julius Genachowski conceded that the current framework for special access is “not working” but said the commission lacks the necessary data to determine how exactly it should be reformed.