A commissioner from each party offered a divergent view on whether the agency can act on the net neutrality order set for a Dec. 21 vote. Speaking at a Practising Law Institute conference in Washington Thursday, Democratic Commissioner Mignon Clyburn said FCC action on net neutrality offers the speed and flexibility that a legislative solution simply can’t offer. GOP Commissioner Meredith Baker said the agency is “not empowered to regulate the Internet.” Baker’s views against the net neutrality draft that Chairman Julius Genachowski circulated last week have been well known, while Clyburn has been thought to be generally supportive of it (CD Dec 8 p1) but hadn’t said very much publicly in recent days on the issue.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Pandora will push to sell more local ads next year, working with partners in various markets who already have local sales teams, Brian Mikalis, vice president of performance sales for the online music streamer, told a BIA/Kelsey conference Wednesday. “We're aggressively talking to companies that do have feet on the street to allow them to include Pandora as part of their” local ad network, he said. “It’s a new strategy and we've done some testing in the last three to four months, but in 2011 you'll see a lot more.”

SAN FRANCISCO -- The pioneering slog by companies such as Comcast to promote IPv6 deployment is painful, not least because many content providers lag in the transition, executives of the companies said. John Brzozowski, Comcast’s chief IPv6 architect, acknowledged in a presentation late Wednesday to the Internet Society’s Internet On conference the “very painful learnings we've had here in the western division.” He told us afterward that he was referring to the kinds of “deployment bugs” and “challenges” encountered with any new technology. IPv6 would make available a vast number of new Internet addresses and it’s widely considered crucial as addresses in the current IPv4 quickly run out. Cameron Byrne, a principal engineer at T-Mobile, who heads its IP strategy work, credited Comcast, Google, Netflix and CNN as being among the leaders in IPv6 adoption.

Several high-profile FCC rulemakings likely will be forthcoming in 2011, many in the first quarter, from the Media Bureau as staff work advances on retransmission consent, media ownership and AllVid rules, Chief Bill Lake said Wednesday. A rulemaking notice on deals between TV stations and subscription-video providers took up most of his prepared remarks at a luncheon of industry executives sponsored by the Media Institute. The bureau is preparing “a notice that will take a broad look at what more we might do to advance the statutory objectives of allowing retrans fees to be set by market forces, while protecting the interests of consumers,” he said.

The FCC has ancillary authority to adopt and enforce net neutrality rules because VoIP, online broadcasting and video streaming are all competing with regulated services, Chairman Julius Genachowski’s proposed net neutrality order states, said an industry official and two high-ranking agency officials. The draft order also says that the commission has the direct authority to enforce net neutrality because it has already found that broadband Internet is not being deployed in a “reasonably and timely fashion,” they noted (CD Dec 3 p1).

Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., was formally picked by the Republican caucus to be House Commerce Committee chairman in the next Congress, his office confirmed Wednesday afternoon. About 24 hours earlier, he beat other challengers, including ex-Chairman Joe Barton of Texas, in a vote by the House Republican Steering Committee. Since contenders including Barton and Rep. John Shimkus of Illinois had agreed to support him in the caucus vote and not seek individual votes on their elections, Upton’s ascension was no surprise (CD Dec 8 p1) .

The FCC is an “example of regulatory collapse” on cybersecurity, said author and former White House security advisor Richard Clarke on a cybersecurity panel Wednesday at Georgetown University. He, former CIA Director Michael Hayden and author Jeffrey Carr agreed that cybersecurity shortcomings are more a result of policy shortcomings than of technology.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Downplaying traditional brand elements of their call letters and channel numbers online, broadcasters have found success with websites that play up other features of the station’s local news coverage, executives said at a BIA/Kelsey conference Tuesday. In New York, CBS consolidated the websites of its WINS-AM, WCBS-AM, WCBS-TV and WFAN-AM into a single online news hub and has seen a significant increase in revenue, said president of CBS Local Digital Media Ezra Kucharz. “We are able to get more money out of the market” by integrating the websites and the advertising on them, he said. The consolidated site plan will be rolled out to 15 CBS markets by the end of the year and another nine in January, he said.

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps is seen as holding the key vote on net neutrality rules to be decided on at the Dec. 21 meeting, said agency and industry officials closely watching the order. Democrat Copps is widely seen as the commissioner whose vote Chairman Julius Genachowski must work hardest to win, by making changes to the order whose first draft circulated Nov. 30. Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, the third FCC Democrat, is seen as more supportive of the draft, though she’s continuing to review it and doesn’t appear to have made up her mind whether to support it, said agency officials.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- TV will remain a large part of the local ad market, but other traditional local outlets will lose share of local ad budgets to new digital marketing competitors, said Neal Polacheck, president of BIA/Kelsey, at the consulting group’s Interactive Local Media conference Tuesday. “Increasingly, we think the two dominant drivers of this will be television on the one hand, and everything else digital on the other,” he said. Local advertisers will use TV for brand advertising while digital marketing tools like Groupon, Yelp and Google Places will increasingly be focused on transactional activity, he said.