The GOP Steering Committee soon will begin considering candidates to lead the House Commerce Committee, voting as soon as Tuesday, said industry lobbyists, lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides watching the vigorous competition to chair the committee. It’s likely to amount to a contest between Fred Upton of Michigan; Ranking Member Joe Barton of Texas, a former Commerce chairman; and John Shimkus of Illinois, several communications industry lobbyists said. Upton is the senior-most committee member in contention for the top spot. Barton may need a waiver Republican caucus rules to again head the committee.

Some fundamental challenges in wireless come from the FCC’s decisions on matters other than spectrum that can hurt spectrum-specific steps and send the wrong signal to the commission’s foreign counterparts, said Commissioner Meredith Baker. They include the net neutrality proposal, the Harbinger restriction and findings on mobile market competitiveness, she said on a panel held Monday by the Georgetown Center for Business & Public Policy.

The FCC won’t have an order ready on reverse auctions for the proposed mobility fund until mid-February at the earliest, Chief Margaret Wiener of the Wireless Bureau’s Auctions & Spectrum Access Division said Monday at a Federal Communications Bar Association lunch. In October, the commission opened a rulemaking on whether it should use between $100 million and $300 million left over in the high-cost Universal Service Fund to create a reverse auction in which wireless companies in underserved areas have a chance to win subsidies to build out 3G networks. The comment period for the current rulemaking closes Dec. 16, and replies are due Jan. 17, Wiener said, making it unlikely that an order will be ready to go out before mid-February.

Cable operators will need to get bigger to remain competitive against large foes such as the phone companies, Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt said at a UBS conference Monday. He said Time Warner Cable has the scale it needs now, but predicted a wave of consolidation in 10-15 years. The prospect of getting discounts on TV programming contracts had motivated past consolidation, he said. Now, companies need large engineering, product development and marketing departments to remain competitive, Britt said. “It’s about engineering and sophisticated marketing in a world where we're competing with larger enemies,” he said. “I think scale becomes more important."

Despite interest from distributors in the U.S. and around the world, 3D’s future “is hard to tell,” David Zaslav, CEO of Discovery Communications, said at the UBS conference in New York Monday. “It’s very expensive,” he said, adding that Discovery chose to work with Sony and Imax to minimize the costs of developing a 3D channel and to share information along the learning curve.

Other funding options for Clearwire, including spectrum sales and equity financing, are still on the table in addition to the $1.3 billion debt the company is trying to raise, Chief Financial Officer Erik Prusch said Friday. Sprint Nextel, which owns 54 percent of Clearwire, has about a month to decide if it plans to buy into $760 million of convertible debt Clearwire gave it rights to buy. Sprint declined to comment on whether it will participate.

The FCC faces a risky day in court if it adopts net neutrality rules without reclassifying broadband as a telecom service, as Chairman Julius Genachowski proposes, the commission’s senior member and communications law professors watching the order’s development but not privy to internal deliberations told us. Copps and some professors said Genachowski’s plan, made public Wednesday, to keep broadband under Title I of the Communications Act appears to pose more risk than does reclassification of being thrown out in an appeal that many industry and commission officials believe is inevitable. While not relying solely on ancillary authority (CD Dec 3 p1) may help the regulator’s prospects in any case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, it’s unclear whether that will be enough for the FCC to win any lawsuit, said law professors we asked. Commission officials have said reliance on both ancillary and direct authority may make for a stronger order.

Commissioner Michael Copps is hopeful broadcasters and the FCC itself will engage with him in a dialogue on the types of requirements radio and TV stations should meet to renew their licenses, he told us after proposing a seven-point public value test. The senior commissioner on the FCC acknowledged he hasn’t yet gotten the momentum to move forward that he'd like from his agency or from the industry in his quest to shorten license terms and make broadcasters do more to get them. “I think we have the potential vote to do something,” Copps said Friday. He’s long sought beefed-up licensing procedures for broadcasters, and when he was interim chairman he wanted to reduce license terms to three years from eight (CD May 15/09 p1).

The American Public Communications Council will ask the FCC for an emergency subsidy from Universal Service Fund cash to help keep its pay phone company members from collapsing, the group told us. The emergency petition will be accompanied by a petition for rulemaking asking the commission to consider using its Lifeline program to subsidize pay phones. The petitions could come as early as Monday afternoon, APCC President Willard Nichols said.

What was initially filed at the FCC International Bureau as a routine license modification request by LightSquared has drawn significant attention and complaint from major wireless companies and associations. Carrier interests including CTIA, Verizon Wireless and AT&T said LightSquared’s request for mobile satellite service/ancillary terrestrial component authority modification seeks what amounts to a major policy change for MSS/ATC and should be handled through a rulemaking. The filings are at http://xrl.us/bh969f.