SAN FRANCISCO -- An official of the U.S. government’s international-media agency explained Wednesday to a high-tech policy audience facts of Washington life and the frustrations they can produce. “It takes … a year to get 10,000 bucks out the door” for proxy-server technology to get around foreign blocking of the government’s news and views sites, said Michael Meehan, a public relations executive, member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors and chairman of its Global Internet Freedom Committee.

The New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission is working with the state legislature on appropriate retail regulations for phone companies, said Katherine Bailey, telecom director with the agency. Among the issues under consideration is regulatory treatment for ILECs like FairPoint, which had service quality issues after it took over Verizon’s northern New England landlines in 2009, she told us. The company, which claimed it had made progress improving service quality, is asking regulators and legislators in New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont to relax ILEC regulation, officials said.

AT&T is clinging “to an outdated and unworkable conception of intercarrier compensation” when it lobbies against cable operators’ request to allow CLECs to charge the same access rates as ILECs even when the CLECs don’t terminate calls, Comcast, Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable said in a letter filed Monday (CD Oct 24 p6). The dispute between the two companies flared up late last week, as the sunshine rules took effect and closed lobbying on the pending Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation system order. AT&T was trying “to maintain ILEC-centric rules,” but is striving “mightily to obscure a simple, fundamental point,” the cable companies said.

State and consumer advocates pushed the FCC to adopt tough anti-cramming rules, but industry said that even if problems exist they can be fixed without regulations. Comments came pouring into docket 11-116 Monday and Tuesday.

SAN FRANCISCO -- A State Department official denounced an Internet code of conduct proposed in the U.N. General Assembly by China, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan last month. Michael Posner, the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, said Tuesday the system would replace the historical “multi-stakeholder governance” of the Internet with a “system dominated by centralized government control.” At the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference, he defended the U.S. government’s emphasis on intellectual property protection, “sometimes seen as in conflict with Internet freedom.”

A district judge appeared skeptical that Sprint Nextel had made a plausible argument that an AT&T/T-Mobile combination would harm competition, in oral argument Monday at the U.S. District Court in Washington. Sprint Nextel and C Spire had asked the court to deny an AT&T motion to exclude the two competitors from the lawsuit filed by the U.S. Justice Department against the AT&T/T-Mobile deal. Sprint and C Spire each filed antitrust complaints against the deal. Sprint and C Spire also argued for their separate motion that would give the competitors access to information learned in discovery in the government’s case against AT&T.

TV stations in markets where local stations have agreed to share resources often air the same news programming, a study of local news in eight markets found. “The obvious and unambiguous result was a reduction in the number of separate news voices in the market,” said the study by University of Delaware Professor Danilo Yanich. The stations shared resources including anchors, scripts, video, graphics and reporters, said the study filed with the FCC Monday (http://xrl.us/bmgxdy).

SAN DIEGO -- Spectrum constraints, connectivity beyond traditional consumer electronics devices, the cloud, emerging input interfaces and battery life were among the topics in the Five Technologies to Watch session that opened the CEA Industry Forum Monday. Jason Oxman, CEA senior vice president-industry affairs, spoke of the “looming spectrum crisis” due to consumer demand for wireless broadcast services and reiterated CEA’s position that there needs to be more spectrum allocated for wireless consumer devices. “We're not quite at a crisis point,” said Roger Cheng, senior writer for CNET, “but we're heading toward a spectrum crunch,” he said, citing consumers’ increased usage as they use wireless devices for listening to music, watching movies and playing games.

The FCC seems likely to stick with a notice of inquiry, rather than a rulemaking, in the draft item on TV station programming, political advertising and other disclosure (CD Oct 14 p7) that’s set for a vote at Thursday’s meeting, agency and industry officials told us. They said it seems unlikely for now that the commission will change course before the gathering and make the draft Media Bureau notice of inquiry on programming into a notice of proposed rulemaking. Some nonprofit groups had sought an NPRM, contending an NOI isn’t necessary because the enhanced disclosure proceeding began 11 years ago, while broadcasters have said an NOI is the right way to go (CD Oct 21 p13). And some at the commission still want an NPRM, agency officials said.

A subpoena to force LightSquared and the FCC to turn over communications about the company isn’t preferable for Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, though there are several ways to do so, his spokeswoman said. Grassley is unlikely to get help from the committee’s chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., in accessing the communications, said a former aide to that committee. Grassley could partner with House Republicans to force the FCC’s or LightSquared’s hands in providing the information, said the ex-aide.