The presidential campaigns of President Barack Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney have begun efforts to select candidates for their administrations’ top communications positions, whichever candidate wins Nov. 6. Such efforts include preliminary plans for who might replace any outgoing administration officials, if Obama is reelected, and if Romney becomes president, determine who would be nominated for high-level telecom positions in the new administration. We recently interviewed former and current Democratic and Republican government officials to understand who will likely help each candidate make the necessary agency appointments if his campaign wins next Tuesday. The campaigns declined to comment, as did those said to be directly involved in the early-on planning efforts.

Although fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) is capable of meeting the EU’s ambitious digital agenda targets, it has had limited rollout so far because of its challenging business case, DotEcon analysts said Monday on an FTTH Council Europe regulatory policy webinar. The EU wants 50 percent of households to have broadband speeds of over 100 Mbps by 2020, but, with only 2 percent having access to such speeds now, meeting that goal is a long way off, said DotEcon economist Christian Koboldt. Europe also lags in FTTH deployment compared to other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, he said. The question is: with the public policy case for fiber so strong, why is the business case so difficult? The webinar discussion centered on an August DotEcon report (http://xrl.us/bnwm4x).

The TV band repacking that is to take place after the FCC completes the incentive spectrum auction might not affect most broadcasters that remain on the air, Julius Knapp, chief of the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology said at the commission’s first workshop on the auction Friday. “The repacking does not mean that all of the stations will move,” he said. “In fact, probably a majority will stay right where they are.”

Two women are fighting for presidency of the Alabama Public Service Commission, but telecom isn’t playing a big role in the campaigns and coverage -- reflective of the state’s changes in PSC oversight, a candidate said, and similar to other state commission campaigns this year. Telecommunications is “all but deregulated” in Alabama and the commission handles “very few” such issues, Republican Commissioner Twinkle Cavanaugh told us. She’s running statewide against PSC President Lucy Baxley, the only Democrat to hold statewide office. The PSC telecom division has dropped from 30 employees in 2005, before deregulation, to 14 now and will be 12 by January, Cavanaugh said. “That’s been our goal -- to trim that division down.” Telecom “has not been an issue in the campaign cycle at all,” she said, describing similar low interest in such issues during her PSC runs in 2008 and 2010.

RICHMOND, Va. -- Judges asked whether court orders issued under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) should be made public, during oral argument at the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on U.S. v. Jacob Appelbaum et al. Should ECPA -- a law designed to protect privacy -- be used to justify publicizing information about individuals’ online communications, asked Judge Samuel Wilson. Because the ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are arguing that the public should have access to the court orders, not just the subjects of the investigation, it’s possible they're trying to use ECPA in a way that narrows privacy protections, he said. If that’s the result of the argument presented by the ACLU and EFF, he said “then they might as well not have called this a privacy act.” The threat to privacy is serious, he said, because there are often “very, very private things” in these documents, which can be “embarrassing [and] humiliating” to the people involved.

The telecom industry needs a forward-looking regulatory framework that incentivizes investment and puts telecom providers on an equal footing, professors and former government officials said Friday on a webinar sponsored by the Digital Policy Institute at Ball State University. Panelists questioned recent FCC actions that they said are ungrounded in existing law, and what they see as regulatory uncertainty they say discourages investment.

LAS VEGAS -- Three telcos are embracing over-the-top video and/or TV apps to lure new subscribers and keep existing video customers from cutting the subscription cord. In three separate keynotes at the TelcoTV show last week, executives of AT&T, Verizon and Windstream spelled out their strategies to use streaming video services and on-screen apps to sustain their video subscription growth. They stressed the need to offer consumers more customized, easy-to-use services to keep them glued to the home TV set and satisfied. “Driving the customer engagement is what this is all about,” said Maria Dillard, AT&T vice president of U-verse and video products.

Comcast’s cable business lost fewer video subscribers during Q3 than stock analysts expected. The company, in a quarterly report Friday, cited a net loss of 117,000 video subscribers, and net gains of 287,000 broadband subscribers and 123,000 phone customers. Comcast executives attributed the better-than-expected video results to its strategy rather than any macroeconomic trends. “I think we've got a really nice balance between rate and volume,” said Neil Smit, president of Comcast’s cable division, during a teleconference Friday. The company raised video rates, but only slightly, while adding new services and beginning to deploy its cloud-based set-top box, the X1. Already in four markets, the X1 will be introduced in two new “major markets” within weeks, Smit said.

Three state commissioners from largely rural states questioned whether the U.S. can ever provide universal access to broadband service. It’s like the notion of energy independence, Idaho Public Utilities Commissioner Paul Kjellander said Thursday during a National Regulatory Research Institute panel on state USF funds (http://xrl.us/bnv2ow). “But we're never going to get it,” he said. “It’s too expensive. ... Some divides just can’t be bridged.”

The imminent FCC special access data request (CD Oct 23 p3) is neither imminent nor a request. The order that’s been circulating on the eighth floor doesn’t explicitly ask telecom providers for data on the state of competition in the special access marketplace, FCC officials told us Thursday. Rather, they said it gives delegated authority to the Wireline Bureau staff, providing guidance on what the data collection should say. It’s up to the bureau to actually pose the data questions, commission officials said. A bureau spokesman declined comment.