The FCC should reject calls to regulate the “thriving” online video distribution marketplace and leave online video distributors (OVDs) free from rules, Comcast said. The marketplace is working fine but its existence doesn’t give “the Commission any authority to apply, or indeed any factual support for applying, outdated regulations to either OVDs themselves or to MVPDs that interact with OVDs” it said. Public Knowledge and DirecTV have both raised the issue in comments with the agency.

The FCC should enact narrower rules on keeping a lid on the volume of TV ads than what it proposed, all types of multichannel video programming distributors and TV stations said. They said the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act is more limited in scope than an FCC rulemaking notice on last year’s legislation. The notice said “we also interpret the statutory language ’the transmission of commercial advertisements’ to apply to all such transmissions by stations/MVPDs.” Instead, the act is meant to apply only to ads originated by broadcasters and providers of cable, DBS and telco-TV, those entities said in comments posted Monday in docket 11-93. Even before the rulemaking was released in May, the commission was lobbied by industry to adopt that interpretation (CD May 26 p7).

Wireless carriers have plenty of incentives to protect their own networks, without additional government rules, CTIA said in a filing at the commission in docket 11-60 (CD July 11 p7). Industry comments due last week, but posted by the FCC Monday, largely agreed that the FCC need not step in and should not impose overly prescriptive rules for making networks more robust and able to survive disaster.

The FCC Enforcement Bureau sided with an independent cable programmer and went against Comcast in the first program carriage case to be heard by an administrative law judge under Chairman Julius Genachowski. Chief FCC ALJ Richard Sippel should recommend that commissioners fine Comcast $375,000 and require it to carry the network as extensively as sports channels the cable operator owns, the bureau said. Sippel should find Comcast discriminated on the basis of affiliation, hurting the indie channel’s ability to compete, said the recommended decision. It was distributed privately by the bureau late Friday, unavailable Monday in docket 10-204 but sent to us by an agency official.

The FCC and the Administration should press forward on their “diligent efforts” to evaluate all commercial and federal government spectrum that could be reallocated for wireless broadband, CEA said in a filing responding to an FCC public notice asking for technical input on the best approaches to encourage the growth of terrestrial mobile broadband services in the 2 GHz range. But wireless carriers said in individual filings that the FCC must proceed with care as it determines how to get 2 GHz spectrum into play for wireless broadband.

SAN FRANCISCO -- A Sprint executive laid into AT&T as seeking to dominate spectrum holdings and thereby the wireless market, rousing an otherwise staid three-round California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) debate about the T-Mobile deal (CD July 11 p5). Administrative Law Judge Jessica Hecht repeatedly scolded Sprint’s director of spectrum proceedings, Trey Hanbury, on behalf of executives from the deal parties that he appeared with late Friday.

The latest and one of the FCC few video news release fines on a 2006 complaint purporting to show widespread use of VNRs on broadcast TV again demonstrates stations must disclose who provides the material even if it is aired during news programs and no money changes hands. A News Corp. unit was fined $4,000 Friday by the Enforcement Bureau for not telling viewers of KMSP Minneapolis that the station didn’t get on its own 12 different shots of General Motors convertibles used in a segment on that type of car that didn’t mention autos from any other carmaker. The bureau disagreed with Fox TV Stations that it’s entitled to use such material without identification because KMSP wasn’t paid for running the VNR and because the outlet paid another unit of News Corp. to use the material through participation in a news service.

XO Communications will file comments opposing Level 3’s proposed $3 billion acquisition of Global Crossing, XO Vice President Heather Gold told us Friday. “Everybody’s caught up in the AT&T/T-Mobile merger,” Gold said. “The way we see the Level 3-Global Crossing merger, in a very, very short period of time this will have a much bigger impact.” If the FCC and Justice Department approve Level 3’s acquisition, it will create a company with 55 percent of the Tier 1 Internet backbone market, she said. That'll be three times the size of the next largest Tier 1 company, NTT Communications, Gold said.

SAN FRANCISCO -- California regulators could act substantively on the T-Mobile sale, members of the Public Utilities Commission told us at a workshop where representatives of would-be buyer AT&T and lead challenger Sprint faced off directly over the deal for the first time in a government forum. State law requires the commission to decide whether action can be taken to reduce any harms to the public interest, communities served or employees from a deal such as this, and it allows the body to approve or disapprove the transaction, said Catherine Sandoval, the lead commissioner on a PUC inquiry into the deal on Friday.

New York regulators urged the FCC to adopt and enforce geographic redundancy requirements and contingency power standards for “critical” wireless and broadband facilities being studied in docket 11-60. But USTelecom, ATIS and the Telecommunications Industry Association said the commission ought to use a light touch in ensuring the safety of wireless and broadband emergency networks.