Public Knowledge filed a motion with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Wednesday for permission to intervene in Verizon’s challenge there of the FCC’s net neutrality rules. Meanwhile, officials said the Judicial Conference of the United States is expected to hold a lottery in the next few days to decide which judicial circuit will handle various petitions for review of the December 2010 order.

AT&T’s buy of T-Mobile will “usher in more intense competition” in “an already vibrantly competitive market,” the companies and Deutsche Telekom said in a filing with the U.S. District Court in Washington handling the Department of Justice’s lawsuit to block the deal. The case is set to be tried before Judge Ellen Huvelle in February unless DOJ and the carriers reach a settlement. AT&T on Wednesday filed a 26-page response to the government’s complaint.

There’s not much of a push yet within the FCC for an AllVid rulemaking that consumer electronics makers have sought to move the industry closer to a requirement that all pay-TV companies connect to CE devices without CableCARDs, agency officials said Wednesday. They said few at the commission seem to be trying to ratchet up the pressure on Chairman Julius Genachowski to issue a rulemaking notice. That could change after a closed-door stakeholder meeting organized by the Media Bureau was held in the commission meeting room last Wednesday, agency officials watching the AllVid proceeding said.

Transition to a Next Generation 911 system, technical solutions like call prioritization and rerouting, procedure and policy changes are answers to 911 overloading issues, speakers said during the 911 Industry Alliance’s 911 workshop Wednesday. But many solutions have issues like funding that need to be addressed, they said.

The FCC is poised to rescind several hundred waivers given in 2006 to mostly small TV programmers in a process that officials inside and outside the commission believed wasn’t done in a transparent way (CD Sept 21/06 p2). Agency officials said the draft Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau order would undo about 300 waivers that the bureau gave to mostly religious programmers, many of which are nonprofits, exempting them from having to caption video they produced. The order circulated Aug. 30 and should be voted on and released soon, perhaps late this week, commission officials said.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Verizon’s deal with Microsoft to stream some live TV programming from its FiOS service to the Xbox Live service is the first step toward what the partnership could ultimately yield, Eric Bruno, Verizon Telecom vice president of product management, told us. Features such as PVR functionality and eventually allowing the device to function as a full-fledged set-top box could come in the future, he said. “That’s certainly part of the plan,” Bruno said. “You've got to get critical mass from a channel capacity standpoint and you've got to get to a point where you've got different content providers signed up,” he said. But the device itself has “plenty of capacity” to handle the functions associated with a traditional set-top box, he said. “If you look long term, eventually the set-top box fades away."

CTIA will ask a federal judge Oct. 20 to block enforcement of a San Francisco law requiring cellphone retailers to make disclosures provided by the city about health questions concerning radiation (CD Oct 4 p18). A hearing is scheduled then before U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco on a motion for preliminary injunction that the association filed late Tuesday. It accompanied a complaint amending one that had been lodged against a previous version of the ordinance and then put on hold.

The Department of Energy should “defer” pursuit of “conventional regulation” of set-top boxes and instead “participate in and support” the Energy Star program for the devices, the CEA said in comments. Besides being difficult to “properly define,” the boxes are “evolving in numerous ways that affect total power consumption of the household configuration … making single-product regulation possibly improperly focused and even counterproductive to overall energy efficiency,” the group said.

The FCC confirmed that Chairman Julius Genachowski will circulate a proposed order that he hopes will lead to reform the universal service and intercarrier compensation regimes. The FCC called a briefing with reporters where agency officials spoke on the condition they not be named and said Genachowski will deliver a speech Thursday laying out some of his proposals. FCC officials declined to discuss specifics in Tuesday’s briefing, set for Thursday at 10:30 a.m. at FCC headquarters, instead reiterating their talking points about why reform was necessary.

Public Knowledge asked the FCC to clarify how it and other organizations can challenge whether redacted information in the AT&T/T-Mobile and other proceedings should be made part of the public record. Too much of the time, AT&T and T-Mobile have stamped as confidential information they want to keep out of the public view, which is not the kind of “competitively-sensitive information” the FCC ought to protect in protective orders, Public Knowledge said in a letter signed by Legal Director Harold Feld (http://xrl.us/bmfba3).