Commissioner Robert McDowell announced Wednesday he will leave the FCC in a matter of weeks, after seven years on the commission. Attention immediately focused on who will replace the Republican, with House Commerce Committee aide Ray Baum, a former chairman of the Oregon Public Utility Commission, and longtime congressional aide Michael O'Rielly, who now works for Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, early front runners in the view of government and industry officials. Also getting some mentions by lobbyists are Neil Fried, chief counsel to the House Communications Subcommittee, and former State Department official David Gross, now at Wiley Rein. One unknown is whether Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member John Thune, R-S.D., will have a candidate of his own.

Google Fiber is coming to another city -- Olathe, Kan., the fifth-most-populous municipality in the state and located not far from the Kansas City area where Google has begun building its gigabit network. Olathe has about 125,000 residents and is about 20 miles southwest of Kansas City. The Olathe City Council unanimously voted in favor of an agreement with the tech giant Tuesday night, the city said (http://bit.ly/WDJsgw), as the company hints at more such announcements to come.

The FCC asks a battery of questions in an NPRM approved Wednesday that tries to get to the bottom of what went wrong in June when the derecho storm led to problems at 77 public safety answering points across Ohio, the central Appalachians and the Mid-Atlantic states, with 17 PSAPs losing service completely. FCC officials said the NPRM is open-ended and doesn’t draw tentative conclusions, though it could lead to new requirements for carriers. The questions raised are based on the problems identified in the Jan. 10 FCC report on the storm (http://bit.ly/ZTzB3M).

SILICON VALLEY -- TV executives promoting new and old shows can’t ignore the power of social media and search, executives at the OTTCON show said Wednesday during a panel on TV program discovery tools. It’s driving TV networks to think about metadata they provide to companies like Rovi and Tribune Media Services in new ways, they said. “One of the things we've had to do is make sure our shows are titled in a way that’s going to attract attention,” said Rob Demillo, chief technology officer at Revision3, a unit of Discovery Communications. And show descriptions need to be search-engine optimized to make sure they come up when people are looking for them, he said.

There has been little movement in the debate over the Marketplace Fairness Act (HR-684, S-336) since it failed to pass the Senate in December, eBay Senior Director of Global Public Policy Brian Bieron told us. The Senate had rejected including the bill’s provisions as an amendment to the 2013 Defense Authorization Act. The bill would allow state governments to collect sales taxes when an in-state resident makes an online purchase from an out-of-state retailer. “It seems like the same people who were for [the bill] before are for it now, the same people who had objections to it before have objections to it now,” Bieron said. “It seems to be pretty much the same debate it’s been for some time now, only louder.” The bill effectively gives states a “new power” to tax people outside their own borders, he said during an Information Technology & Innovation Foundation event Tuesday. EBay has been an active opponent of the Marketplace Fairness Act -- the company organized a gathering of small business owners on Capitol Hill earlier this month to voice their concerns about the bill.

The FCC recognizes that satellite industry innovation will continue to play a role in driving efficient use of spectrum in the satellite industry and everywhere else, said Chairman Julius Genachowski. “No one dealing with spectrum had to deal with efficiency earlier and faster than the satellite industry did,” he said Tuesday at the Satellite 2013 Conference in Washington. After focusing on wireless, auctions for terrestrial use and providing unlicensed spectrum for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other services, the commission has been working to further expand spectrum use and availability, he said.

The FCC responded to attacks on several fronts, arguing in four briefs filed with the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that it had authority to adopt the reforms in its landmark 2011 USF/intercarrier compensation (ICC) order. The commission defended Monday its new Access Recovery Charge for ILECs to recoup lost access fees, a rule governing ICC for CLEC-VoIP partnerships and a rule banning call blocking by VoIP providers. The reforms it adopted will let the commission meet its congressionally directed mandate to make broadband service available throughout the U.S., it said.

Republican members of the House Communications Subcommittee Tuesday sharply criticized a Food and Drug Administration proposal to regulate thousands of medical apps and warned of a 2.3 percent Obamacare excise tax that could soon apply to mobile devices. Democrats said heightened scrutiny of medical apps is justified.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy, D-Vt., and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, introduced a bill Tuesday aimed at modernizing the 27-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). The ECPA Amendments Act seeks to update privacy laws to improve protections for electronic communications stored or maintained by third party service providers, according to a review of the legislation (http://1.usa.gov/WBxwf7). The bill drops a provision in Leahy’s 2011 ECPA Amendments bill (S-1011) that would have required the government to obtain a warrant or a court order to access or use an individual’s geolocation information from smartphones or other electronic communications devices, Leahy’s spokesman confirmed. Privacy advocates generally supported the aims of the bill, but some House lawmakers acknowledged it may be difficult to increase online privacy protections without hampering law enforcement investigations.

The chief judge of the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals questioned whether the rationale supporting regulation of broadcasters’ speech rights from the landmark Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC case in 1969 still stands up. During oral argument with an en banc panel of 9th Circuit judges, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski and his colleagues on the bench had tough questions for both parties in the case Minority TV Project v. FCC on Tuesday. Kozinski indicated one possible outcome of the case would be a complete ban on all ads on noncommercial stations. But he seemed to grow the most animated when discussing the Red Lion case.