Free Press questioned many of the fundamental arguments made by Verizon Wireless in favor of its proposed buy of AWS licenses from SpectrumCo and Cox. The Free Press letter to the FCC comes as the FCC’s consideration of whether to approve the transactions enters what is likely to be the homestretch, based on recent interviews with FCC officials. One big question mark is that two of the officials active in the review, Wireless Bureau Chief Rick Kaplan and General Counsel Austin Schlick are leaving the agency.

Wednesday’s World IPv6 Launch will have about 3,000 participating website operators, six network operators and five home router vendors, said the Internet Society, spearheading the event. That’s a “large representation of IPv6 stakeholders” who will show others how to make transition to the technology happen, said IPv6 Forum President Latif Ladid. “It would have been good to get more ISPs, mobile operators, and customer-premises equipment vendors, but it’s a good start,” he told us. Rollout of a revised U.S. federal IPv6 roadmap has been held up for more edits, we're told, and one European Commission staff member urged public authorities to make the change as soon as possible or risk an untenable situation.

The Rural Cellular Association said it’s “difficult to overstate” the importance of a 700 MHz interoperability mandate to “the future health of the wireless industry,” in comments to the FCC. RCA has made an interoperability requirement one of its top priorities. The main resistance has come from Verizon Wireless and AT&T. But CEA and TIA weighed in against a mandate, giving the two major carriers critical support. Where the newly reconstituted FCC will come down remains to be seen, agency and industry officials agreed Monday.

A draft FCC order on special access would introduce mandatory data collection, agency officials said. It comes seven years after the commission opened a proceeding to reform its 1999 special access pricing flexibility rules. There will be far more kinds of data sought than the simple collocation metric used in the 1999 proceeding, FCC officials said. The agency intends to suspend consideration of pricing flexibility petitions pending development of a new framework, the officials said. Special access circuits are dedicated data connections often used by businesses, and as backhaul for wireless sites.

Recent FCC changes to USF subsidies for rate-of-return ILECs are “modest and overdue,” CTIA and NCTA argued Friday in oppositions to several requests for commission-level review of new rules designed to limit reimbursable capital and operating costs. They said a stay would harm competing providers if the ILECs were “allowed to continue receiving excessive and inefficient amounts” of high-cost loop support (HCLS) in areas where the support is unwarranted. The NTCA, OPASTCO and others petitioned for review of the Wireline Bureau’s HCLS Order in late May, arguing the quantile regression methodology imposes unreasonable burdens on rural LECs, applies support limits randomly and will fail to provide incentives for efficient operations (CD May 29 p7).

Executives from TV broadcasters benefiting from must-carry rules pushed FCC officials to prevent the so-called DTV viewability rules from expiring this month, an ex parte notice said (http://xrl.us/bnacdx). Ion Media CEO Brandon Burgess and Liberman Broadcasting Vice President John Heffron met with aides to several commissioners last week as they argued for extending a requirement that cable operators deliver must-carry programming to analog cable subscribers in analog format. The requirement is set to expire June 12, and a draft order that circulated last month would largely allow the mandate to sunset (CD Jun 4 p4).

Some provisions of the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2013, passed on May 18, “could cripple and certainly would delay substantially the overall Export Control Reform initiative,” said Undersecretary of the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) Eric Hirschhorn at a meeting of the President’s Export Council Subcommittee on Export Administration on Monday. Hirschhorn said he hopes the first ECR rules will be finalized this summer or fall.

The FCC got additional replies in its rulemaking on terrestrial use of mobile satellite services spectrum in the 2 GHz band, frequencies for which Dish Network is seeking to build a terrestrial network. Larger wireless carriers opposed strict conditions affecting their spectrum acquisition plans, while some satellite operators butted heads over expansion of terrestrial use in the Big low earth orbit (LEO) band. Replies were due last week in docket 12-70 (CD June 4 p16).

The FCC continues to have a relatively low backlog of cable requests for deregulation of video rates in local franchise areas, as few LFAs oppose them and the Media Bureau approves most within several months. The number of pending requests has about doubled from last summer (CD July 21 p4), the time of the previous Communications Daily review of effective competition petitions. Lawyers for cities and cable operators said the bureau is taking more time to review some requests, though it usually grants them when cities don’t protest. Honolulu is the only LFA now believed to be opposing any petition, this one by Time Warner Cable, said the lawyers. Boston and Comcast meanwhile have been trading filings over whether the bureau ought to stick with this year’s order revoking the company’s deregulation there.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack thinks the new FCC rules on high-cost loop support make the USF less predictable, and that the Wireline Bureau’s waiver process uses the wrong standard, he told FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski last week. The commission has received several petitions for review of the Wireline Bureau’s HCLS Benchmarks Order setting out a regression methodology for determining reimbursable support on capital expenditures. Six companies have filed waiver requests of the various rules adopted in last fall’s USF/intercarrier compensation order, an FCC spokesman said.