Many FCC staffers worked from home Tuesday, at the request of FCC security, to avoid the general disruption from the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit at the nearby Mandarin Oriental Hotel, agency officials told us. But the FCC was largely back to normal Wednesday, officials said. Tuesday was the peak day of the summit, featuring remarks by President Barack Obama and meetings at the Mandarin.

Emmis Communications has encountered a diversity of resistance among wireless carriers in getting them to adopt the NextRadio FM reception app in smartphones (CD Aug 5 p7), Chief Technology Officer Paul Brenner told us Monday by email. “It seems that the varying carrier strategies have an equally varying effect on acceptance.” Among the benefits of the app that Emmis extols is that NextRadio saves smartphone owners on data usage and battery life, compared with streaming audio. But “one carrier is all about making money from data usage so an offload of streaming to FM tuners is a negative impact to ARPU,” he said, referring to the average revenue per user metric that carriers use to measure financial performance. “Another carrier focuses attention on their own marketing analysis of their own consumer expectations and the third is the un-carrier that refuses to require handset modifications.” Brenner said he’s not certain whether the growing NextRadio adoption among the carriers can be attributed to the FreeRadioOnMyPhone.org campaign in which consumers were urged to contact their carriers to support NextRadio. “The HTC multi-carrier penetration is not something we can necessarily equate to the freeradioonmyphone.org launch because those phones were probably in the pipeline long before we launched that site,” he said. “HTC was our launch phone in 2013 mostly because they have always provided embedded support for FM radio, which probably makes it harder for non-Sprint carriers to actually disable the functionality. That is an educated guess on my part.” At the same time, “what we do see is our daily registered user count is increasing, so it appears our work with NPR, American Public Media and K-Love/Air-1 is making some difference there,” he said. The Emmis team “does not stop reaching out to the other carriers and showing them that NextRadio can benefit them and more importantly the American consumer,” Brenner said. “Hopefully at some point they recognize the benefits that Sprint did more than a year ago and their customers are now enjoying. Strangely enough, international adoption of FM in smartphones is prominent and we are getting direct inquiries for NextRadio outside of the US.” None of the major carriers commented on NextRadio adoption.

The White House big data reports “can serve a very useful purpose if they refocus privacy discussions where they should be focused -- on actual harms to individuals,” said Technology Policy Institute (TPI) President Thomas Lenard in comments filed Tuesday to NTIA (http://bit.ly/1v7HFTO). Tuesday evening was the deadline for stakeholders to submit comments to NTIA following the White House’s big data report release (CD May 2 p3), but as of our deadline, almost all major organizations told us they were still finalizing their comments. TPI’s comments said the White House report added to government and academic research that has “not found evidence of harms from the use of data for commercial and other non-surveillance purposes.” The White House report recommended restarting discussions over a broad consumer privacy legislative proposal, but asked NTIA to first seek comments on what such a proposal should entail. “If evidence of harm is found, the next question for policy makers would be whether there is a remedy available that reasonably can be expected to yield benefits greater than costs,” Lenard said. Other organizations -- including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Action, the Direct Marketing Association, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, the New America Foundation, Public Knowledge and TechFreedom -- told us they planned to either submit or sign on to comments by Tuesday evening’s deadline.

The FCC is making more than 1.1 million net neutrality comments available as a series of six XML files, containing 1.4 GB of data, said Gigi Sohn, special counsel to Chairman Tom Wheeler, Tuesday in a blog post (http://fcc.us/1qSmGh3). Releasing the comments as open data in a machine-readable format “will allow researchers, journalists and others to analyze and create visualizations of the data so that the public and the FCC can discuss and learn from the comments we've received,” Sohn said. The files are big, she noted, containing 2.5 times the amount of plain-text data in the Encyclopedia Britannica. “We recognize that not everyone may have the requisite technical skills to build visualizations and analyze raw XML data,” Sohn said. “However, we're hoping that those who do have the technical know-how will develop and share these tools for the public to use.” Sohn stressed “every” comment submitted to the FCC will be reviewed as part of the record of the proceeding.

Comcast’s plan to buy Time Warner Cable should be denied, Dish Network executives told FCC General Counsel Jonathan Sallet, Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake, several members of the FCC’s Comcast/TWC review team and staff from multiple FCC bureaus in a meeting Wednesday, said an ex parte filing posted Monday in docket 14-57 (http://bit.ly/1APiG84). “There do not appear to be any conditions that would remedy the harms that would result from the merger.” Those harms would mainly affect over-the-top video services that might compete with Comcast/Time Warner Cable, the filing said. Choke points are the Internet channel to the consumer; the interconnection point; and any specialized service channels acting as high-speed lanes and restricting the bandwidth available for “the public Internet portion of the pipe,” Dish said. “Each choke point provides the ability for the combined company to foreclose the online video offerings of its competitors.” Comcast/Time Warner Cable would also be able “to exercise its enormous size to leverage programming content in anti-competitive ways,” said Dish. The low prices the new company would require from programmers would force them to make up the difference from companies like Dish, it said. “A combined Comcast/TWC will have the incentive and ability to restrict programmers’ ability to grant digital rights to competing pay-TV and OTT video providers.” Meanwhile, members of Congress sought FCC conditions on deals like Comcast/Time Warner Cable. (See separate report above in this issue.)

Open Internet rules should prohibit ISPs from charging access fees to terminate traffic, Netflix officials told an aide to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and several FCC officials on July 30, said an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/1nlFcLw) posted in docket 14-28 Monday. The company met with officials from the Engineering and Technology, Strategic Planning & Policy Analysis and General Counsel’s offices, the Wireline Bureau and the agency’s chief technology officer, said the filing. Netflix officials involved in the meeting were Ken Florance, vice president-content delivery, Chris Libertelli, vice president-global public policy, and Corie Wright, director-global public policy, along with counsel Markham Erickson, Steptoe & Johnson partner. It’s a myth that Netflix deliberately chose to deliver traffic over congested routes, the company said in the filing. “In the case of Comcast, Netflix purchased all available transit to reach Comcast’s network. Every single one of those transit links to Comcast was congested (even though the transit providers requested extra capacity). The only other available routes into Comcast’s network were those where Comcast required an access fee,” the filing said. However, Comcast thinks “Netflix’s definition of ‘available transit’ is an ideological one,” Comcast told us in a statement. There were many routes available “that would not have required any payment from Netflix to Comcast, which is how Netflix got its content to us, without issue, until it changed its practices,” Comcast said . “Netflix can choose to avoid congestion or inflict it. How Netflix routes its own traffic is all about improving their business model. Independent commenters have pointed out that Netflix commercial transit decisions created these issues,” the statement said.

The FCC Enforcement Bureau proposed a $100,000 fine against a small Oklahoma phone company for allegedly routing 911 calls from the state’s Caddo County to an automated AT&T operator message, which instructed callers to “hang up and dial 911” if the call is an emergency. The Hinton Telephone Company allegedly allowed calls to be routed to the automated message even after company officials discovered what was happening, the bureau said Monday (http://bit.ly/1p5flg5). Hinton made changes only after contacted by an FCC investigator, the bureau said. The FCC charged Hinton with “repeatedly violating our rules, and created a significant threat to the life and property of the residents of Caddo County.” The order calls the company’s actions “unconscionable” and said they warrant “a substantial penalty.” The bureau noted the importance of 911 to all callers: “911 is the single most critical tool for citizen emergency communications. The American public universally relies upon 911 in a time of crisis."

Between 1,000 and 1,999 counterterrorism or counterintelligence subpoenas were issued by the FBI to AT&T during the first six months of the year, involving between 2,000 and 2,999 customer accounts, AT&T said in its transparency report (http://soc.att.com/1j8il6O) issued Friday. In addition, the company received up to 999 court orders under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act affecting between 33,000 and 33,999 customer accounts in the last six months of last year. The company is allowed to release the statistics only as a range under the guidance issued by the Department of Justice, the report said. In addition to those National Security Demands (NSD), AT&T also received 115,925 criminal and civil federal, state and local government subpoenas, court orders and search warrants during the first six months of 2014, the report said. The company rejected, challenged or gave no or partial information in 31,097, or about a quarter of those non-NSD cases, the report said. The report did not say how many of the NSD cases it challenged or provided partial information.

Microsoft must provide U.S. law enforcement with emails stored overseas, the U.S. District Court in New York ruled Thursday after hearing oral argument, according to multiple reports. Microsoft in early June challenged a federal judge’s order to turn over a European customer’s data because it was stored in Dublin (http://wapo.st/UFFjLs). Technology companies and tech industry groups immediately denounced the decision, as many had supported Microsoft during its challenge. Verizon, which filed an amicus brief in the case (http://vz.to/1nXqjVz), released a statement: “These matters are very fact-sensitive, and while we have not received a request like this one before, if we were to receive a warrant from the United States Government compelling us to produce data stored by an overseas customer in our overseas data centers, we would challenge the warrant in court.” The Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) said the ruling will hurt the mobile app industry. “The court is out of step with global privacy concerns,” said ACT President Jonathan Zuck. “This has the potential to undermine the mobile app industry for which the cloud is critical. ... American companies now face an international backlash as a result of the court’s decision.” Microsoft said in a statement it will appeal the decision.

AT&T again told the FCC the interconnection ecosystem developed “without any regulation to handle all of the traffic exchanged on the global Internet,” it said Thursday in an ex parte filing in dockets 10-90, 14-28 and 01-92 (http://bit.ly/1s7zWjL). AT&T pointed to cost implications of the exchange and carriage of Internet traffic “that has become significantly out-of-balance,” it said. Interconnection imposes substantial costs on network providers that involve far more than the meet point between networks, and “that are unrelated to ‘last mile’ Internet access costs, and that are not end user specific,” AT&T said in an attached presentation (http://bit.ly/1uLKXvA). Netflix said Open Internet rules should prohibit ISPs from charging access fees to terminate traffic. Some ISPs confused the issue “by conflating upstream degradation at the ISP’s terminating access point with larger interconnection or peering issues,” it said in an ex parte filing posted Thursday in docket 14-28 (http://bit.ly/1o8ZYCt). The allegation that Netflix causes congestion by deliberately choosing to deliver traffic over congested routes is false, it said. Reaching the subscriber via the subscriber’s last mile broadband ISP is the only means of reaching a subscriber, it said. AT&T and Netflix reached an interconnection agreement in May, the companies said in statements. The companies “have been working together to provision additional interconnect capacity to improve the viewing experience of our mutual subscribers,” they said. Netflix is paying AT&T to directly connect, “which should ease congestion and allow our mutual subscribers to have a much improved viewing experience,” a Netflix spokeswoman said.