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Federal Communications Commissioners voted in favor of the strongest privacy rules a federal regulator has ever adopted Thursday, putting internet service providers at the mercy of their customers if they want to collect valuable data on internet browsing habits for things like targeted advertising.

Democratic Commissioners Mignon Clyburn, Jessica Rosenworcel and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler passed the rules along a 3-2 party line vote, with Republicans Ajit Pai and Michael O’Rielly voting against.

The new rules detailed by the agency earlier this month mean internet service providers (ISPs) like AT&T and Comcast will have to get express, advance permission from subscribers before collecting any of their data beyond names and addresses, making data on browsing habits and app usage off-limits until customers opt-in.

Those fall under the rules’ definition of sensitive data, a tier worthy of higher scrutiny that also includes medical, financial, geolocation and student data, Social Security numbers and the content of communications.

“It is the consumer’s information; it is not the information of the network the consumer hires to deliver that information,” Wheeler said before calling for the vote. “What this item does is to say that the consumer has the right to make a decision about how her or his information is used.”

Wheeler cited a Pew Research study recalled by Clyburn “that 91 percent of Americans feel they have lost control over their personal information and how it is used by faceless companies,” and a comment by Rosenworcel lamenting the difficulty of controlling privacy now that “everything is connected.”

“As everything becomes connected, the companies that provide those connections know everything,” the chairman said, recalling a demonstration he saw last week of a smart refrigerator capable of tracking what’s inside in real time. “Even when that data only goes to a refrigerator owner’s mobile device, it is known by AT&T or Comcast or whoever.”

“So the ISP knows what goes in and out of a refrigerator,” he added. “Internet providers shouldn’t be able to sell something that’s yours without your permission.”

As critics of the rules have pointed out since the FCC first pitched the proposal, the rules will not apply to edge providers like Google and Facebook, which are subject to Federal Trade Commission rules allowing the collection of most data, including browsing habits and app usage, and only require users be given the ability to opt-out for all but the most sensitive information collection.

Opponents say the lack of parity will give a market advantage to edge providers, and prompted Rosenworcel to call for an inter-agency privacy council to strive for a single privacy standard across government, and Pai to suggest the only course forward was for the FTC to come up to the FCC’s level.

“So if the FCC truly believes that these new rules are necessary to protect consumer privacy, then the government now must move forward to ensure uniform regulation of all companies in the internet ecosystem at the new baseline the FCC has set,” Pai said.

“That means the ball is now squarely in the FTC’s court. The FTC could return us to a level playing field by changing its sensitivity-based approach to privacy to mirror the FCC’s. No congressional action would be needed in order for the FTC to establish regulatory consistency and prevent consumer confusion”

Privacy advocates including the pro-net neutrality group Public Knowledge and Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey, who together lobbied heavily for the rules last week, applauded Thursday’s vote.

“While much remains to be done to protect consumers online writ large, the commission’s rules establish a baseline level of protection for all.” Public Knowledge policy fellow Dallas Harris said after the vote. “Yet, consumer protection rules are only as strong as their ability to be enforced, so it is imperative that the commission follow these strong rules with strict enforcement.”

Markey described the rules as “the next logical step since enshrining net neutrality,” the rulemaking from last year that made the rules necessary by reclassifying ISPs as common carrier public utilities, which the FTC is legally barred from regulating.

“These rules will ensure that as technology changes, our core values do not — that consumers, not corporations, have control over their personal information,” Markey said. “Consumers should be able to know at any given time what kind of information is being collected about them by their internet service provider and how that information is being used.”

Opponents including the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech policy think tank, and Sam Cullari, Comcast’s former deputy general counsel, said the negative effects will spread throughout the online ecosystem.

“The privacy framework established today sets a terrible precedent likely to reverberate throughout the Internet ecosystem for years to come,” said Doug Brake, a telecom policy analyst for ITIF. “Counting browsing and app history as sensitive data are a particularly disappointing departure from the flexible oversight regime that has helped make the U.S. data-fueled economy the envy of the world.”

Cullari said when edge providers like Google agree with huge corporations with competing interests like Comcast, it should be a “red flag that the FCC is charging in the wrong direction.”

“Most consumers connect to the Internet through multiple providers, and internet browsers like Google Chrome and social networks like Facebook are privy to a broader universe of customer information than any single ISP,” Cullari said. “Given that reality, it is impossible to square the commission’s professed devotion to consumer privacy with its uneven approach, as Chairman Wheeler’s proposal would impose strict opt-in consent restrictions on ISPs for the use of geo-location and web browsing data while giving edge providers a pass on utilizing the exact same data.”

Opponents believe limiting data monetization from subscriber data will eventually raise the cost of internet access.

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The Federal Communications Commission expanded the wireless alerts that automatically go out to mobile phones during natural disasters, terror attacks, kidnappings and other emergency situations during its open meeting Thursday, where it dropped at the last minute a proposal to let cable subscribers get rid of their set-top boxes.

All three Democratic commissioners and one Republican voted to update to the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system, compelling wireless carriers to expand the character limit of alerts from 90 to 360, support additional multimedia like embedded phone numbers, photos of victims in AMBER alerts and web links to more information on all 4G LTE and newer networks.

“A picture could save a thousand lives if the right person sees it,” Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said.

The update comes two weeks after alerts over bombings in New York City and New Jersey went out to New Yorkers outside of affected areas in the neighborhood of Chelsea, alerting residents beyond to shelter in place. Residents also complained the brief, ambiguous wording of the short message heightened panic in the search Ahmad Khan Rahami, who was later apprehended in connection with the bombing.

One commissioner said the recent flooding in Louisiana that led to the rescue of more than 30,000 people exposed the necessity of updating the geographic targeting of alerts.

“The alerts went un-heeded by tens of thousands of people,” Commissioner Ajit Pai said. “Residents ignored the messages because they had previously received flood alerts that only applied to homes located within a traditional flood zone. According to CSRIC [Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council], this time around people ‘assumed the alert was not for them since their home had never flooded before.'”

The problem of “over alerting” has led wireless subscribers and whole cities like Seattle to opt-out of using the system.

Carriers have one year to enact the changes, which include Spanish language support, narrower geographic targeting of alerts and greater ease for authorities to test the system.

Republican Commissioner Michael O’Rielly was the lone dissenting vote, citing concerns raised by smartphone manufacturers like Apple and wireless lobbying groups including CTIA, who say the update calls for capabilities networks don’t have, and could congest when too many users click on an emergency link, for example.

The agency advanced a proposal seeking comment on future updates including alert geo-fencing based on smartphone location data, additional language support, earthquake alerts in fewer than three seconds and improvements future network upgrades to 5G could potentially offer.

Thursday’s highest-profile open meeting vote on rules to compel cable and satellite providers to offer content on apps instead of making consumers rent set-top boxes was dropped shortly before commissioners convened.

“It’s time for consumers to say goodbye to costly set-top boxes. It’s time for more ways to watch and more lower-cost options. That’s why we have been working to update our policies under Section 629 of the Communications Act in order to foster a competitive market for these devices,” Democratic Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel, Mignon Clyburn and Chairman Tom Wheeler said in a Thursday statement.

“We have made tremendous progress – and we share the goal of creating a more innovative and inexpensive market for these consumer devices,” they continued. “We are still working to resolve the remaining technical and legal issues and we are committed to unlocking the set-top box for consumers across this country.”

Rosenworcel during a congressional hearing two weeks ago expressed doubt about a provision in the proposal to give the FCC authority over licensing agreements between pay-TV providers and the third-party devices they would have to make their apps available on.

At the time, she doubted the FCC had the authority to oversee copyright, leading to the assumption by many Thursday she couldn’t be convinced to support the plan. With both Republicans having expressed their disapproval, Wheeler needs Rosenworcel’s vote to enact the order.

“The FCC made the right decision this morning to delay its vote on the set-top box item,” Comcast said in a statement Thursday. “Based on the limited information available from the chairman’s fact sheet and op-ed, a broad range of content creators, civil rights organizations, labor unions, and others have concluded that the chairman’s new approach does not solve the copyright, privacy, innovation and other significant concerns that were implicated in his discredited original proposal – and suffers from the same legal infirmities.”

During a press conference following the meeting, Wheeler said the decision to drop the plan from Thursday’s agenda was “simply a matter of running out of time.”

“We’re going back and forth on edits and content,” Wheeler said.

He said the agency is continuing to deliberate the rules, which remain in circulation.

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With less than a week to go before the Federal Communications Commission votes to make cable providers offer apps in place of set-top boxes, pressure from the industry and Congress to delay the plan is building on commissioners, with one in particular seen as the crucial swing vote that could make or break the proposal.

The FCC is scheduled to vote on Chairman Tom Wheeler’s plan during its open meeting on Sept. 29, which if adopted, would compel cable and satellite TV providers to offer their content on apps instead of forcing subscribers to rent set-top boxes for a monthly fee the FCC claims costs consumers $231 every year (opponents debate that amount).

Though the industry itself pitched the app proposal in place of Wheeler’s original plan, they still have problems with the latest version — chiefly a provision that would give the FCC authority over licensing contracts between pay-TV providers and third party devices capable of downloading their apps.

Opponents say the FCC has no authority to oversee copyright and licensing, a position Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel — one of the two Democrats on the commission Wheeler needs to pass to plan — indicated she may agree with. With the commission’s two Republicans already indicating they won’t support the plan, Wheeler’s plan is sunk without Rosenworcel, who faces mounting pressure from lobbyists like the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) to vote against it.

“Commission involvement in writing the substantive terms of any license under this proposal would exceed the commission’s authority and fatally undermine the commission’s stated goal of protecting content and respecting copyright and contracts,” NAB President Gordon Smith told Rosenworcel in a phone call this week, according to trade publication Broadcasting & Cable.

Last week, Rosenworcel told Congress she had “some problems with licensing and the FCC getting a little bit too involved with the licensing scheme here.”

“Because when I look at the Communications Act and Section 629, I just don’t think we have the authority,” she said.

Republicans in the Senate who expressed their discontent  with the plan during an FCC oversight hearing last week were joined by their colleagues across the aisle and the Capitol on Thursday, when 63 House Democrats led by California Rep. Tony Cárdenas sent a letter to the commission urging Wheeler to hold another round of comments on the plan before moving forward.

“It is difficult to analyze the full scope of the standard license and the FCC’s role in developing and enforcing this license without knowing the full details of the proposal,” they said in a letter reported by The Hill. “Commissioners should have the opportunity to place their vote knowing how the industry will be impacted and it is imperative that any new rules be adopted through a transparent and inclusive process.”

The last-minute opposition isn’t limited to copyright. In a Wednesday filing caught by Fierce Cable, Verizon said it may not be technically unfeasible to require pay-TV providers, known as multichannel video program distributors (MVPDs) to the FCC, to build apps across the range of devices the agency stipulates in its plan, but it requires extensive resources to make content compatible with every platform.

“We understand that MVPDs will be required to provide apps to ‘widely deployed’ platforms,” Verizon said in a letter to the agency. “Developing customized apps for device platforms can be costly and resource intensive, requiring expert personnel to work closely with device makers to ensure a high quality customer experience. We have every incentive to make our content accessible on popular devices that our customers want to use, but MVPDs cannot be expected to build apps for an indeterminate number of platforms or devices.”

The plans calls for MVPDs to make apps for any third-party device with an operating system that’s sold at least 5 million units, including devices like Chromecast, Amazon Fire, Apple TV, Roku, video game consoles, tablets and smartphones. Devices like the latter two could carry an additional burden, Verizon explained, because of a requirement for quality and technical parity across devices, some of which lack the capability to download, store and playback programming — capabilities required under the plan.

During last week’s hearing Wheeler said “the door isn’t closed” on the plan, and urged his colleagues to use the time before the vote to make changes and compromise. A spokesperson for the chairman’s office confirmed in a statement Thursday the vote will proceed as scheduled.

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The Federal Communications Commission is relying on faulty data to justify its plan to get rid of set-top box rentals, according to one economist, who says the amount cable and satellite customers pay is “almost half” of what the agency claims.

Later this month the FCC will vote on a plan to make pay-TV providers offer their content on apps instead of forcing consumers to rent set-top boxes — fees the agency claims cost the average U.S. household $231 every year, totaling an almost $20 billion annual profit for the cable and satellite industries.

According to economist George Ford of the Phoenix Center, a non-profit D.C.-based policy think-tank, that amount — calculated by neither an FCC or Obama administration study, but by a year-old congressional informal survey — is “grossly” overstated by as much as 60 percent.

The survey of the 10 leading pay-TV providers, conducted last July by the offices of Democratic Sens. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut “provides no details as to how their figures are calculated” according to Ford, and didn’t take into account different options like DVR, promotions or the range of prices providers offer.

AT&T and DISH provide customers with one free box, for example, with the former charging $8 for the second, down from the survey’s purported $7.43 per box every month to $4.92 for the survey claimed average of 2.6 boxes per home. DISH prices are even less at $4.20 — an overestimation of more than 60 percent. Comcast, the largest cable provider in the U.S. with 22.4 million subscribers, charges $2.20 to 2.50 per box, while Cox — serving 2.9 million — charges $8.50. The average price of the two comes to $5.43, and the subscriber-weighted average between the two, $3.05.

Ford said the 2.6 average itself is problematic, since the survey assumes the number is the same across all providers. Data from providers themselves says otherwise, with Bright House Networks, for example, reporting 3.8 million boxes divided across 2.4 million subscribers, averaging 1.6 boxes per subscriber. By applying the 2.6 figure, Markey and Blumenthal exaggerated the number of boxes Bright House customers rent by 60 percent.

Neither DISH nor Verizon included the average number of boxes per household, while DirecTV — a rival satellite provider — reported 2.5. The average of Verizon’s terrestrial competitors was 2.2. By using the midpoints of the various price ranges offered by providers like Comcast and Time Warner Cable and plugging in data not offered by providers with numbers from similar competitors, Ford used subscriber-weighted averages to find a wide range of subscriber fees, with Comcast customers paying an average of $76.14 every year for 2.7 boxes on the low end, and Cablevision subscribers paying $237.37 for 2.8 boxes on the high end.

“Most importantly, across all 10 providers in the survey, the average annual fees paid for all boxes in the subscriber’s home is $145,” Ford wrote. “The average monthly cost per box is $5.15. These averages are well below those reported by Blumenthal and Markey ($7.43 per box and $231 per year). Blumenthal and Markey, grossly overstate — by 60 percent — the fees related to set-top boxes.”

Based on Ford’s figures, “the annual expenditures of the U.S. consumer on set-top boxes equals about $12 billion, almost half of the $20 billion claimed by Blumenthal and Markey.”

The number was thrown around repeatedly in the Senate Thursday during an FCC oversight hearing. Republican lawmakers grilled FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler on the latest version of his plan to unlock the box, which includes a provision to give the FCC authority over licensing agreements between pay-TV providers and the third-party devices that will download their apps.

Providers and Republicans in the Senate and on the commission aren’t happy with the provision, and one of Wheeler’s two fellow Democratic commissioners — the two he counts on to pass his proposals when the FCC’s two Republican commissioners are opposed — appears ready to defect.

Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, who has had her renomination hearing stalled in the Senate over Wheeler’s partisan voting record and unwillingness to definitively say he’ll leave office with Obama in January — said she isn’t sure the FCC has the authority to oversee copyright.

“I’m going to be very candid with you that I have some problems with licensing and the FCC getting a little bit too involved with the licensing scheme here,” Rosenworcel said. “Because when I look at the Communications Act and Section 629, I just don’t think we have the authority.”

Section 629 instructs the FCC to promote competition in the TV navigation device marketplace, and has been cited by Wheeler as his primary justification for the rules change. Without Rosenworcel, it’s unlikely Wheeler will get the votes needed to pass the proposal during the commission’s open meeting on Sept. 29.

Wheeler said “the door isn’t closed” on the proposal, and said commissioners still have two weeks to compromise.

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Republican Sen. John Thune blasted Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler Thursday for presiding over a more politically partisan regime at the regulatory agency than the last five chairman combined.

During an FCC oversight hearing in the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee — chaired by Thune — the South Dakota senator gave a self-described “hard hitting” opening statement, complete with a chart, counting off more partisan 3-2 votes at the five-commissioner agency during Wheeler’s tenure than the sum total of the last two decades.

“Chairman Wheeler has forced 3-2 votes on party-line items a total of 25 times,” Thune said. “To put that in perspective, in three years under Chairman Wheeler the FCC has seen nearly twice as many partisan votes than in the previous 20 years combined.”

While acknowledging bipartisan consensus isn’t always achievable, Thune accused Wheeler of using “the distribution of information about commission proceedings as a political weapon,” withholding information from the FCC’s two-Republican minority while timing leaks and disclosures to the media and advocates of the chairman’s position “to benefit the partisan agenda.”

“By relying on unnecessarily partisan tactics, Chairman Wheeler has, I believe, missed opportunities for bipartisan accomplishments,” Thune said. “Treating all commissioners fairly and not using the disclosure of nonpublic information as a sword would lead to a better process at the agency, which in turn could only improve the commission’s work product.”

Partisan votes advanced some of the biggest items the commission has seen, both under Wheeler and in the last decade as a whole, with varying degrees of success. While net neutrality — undoubtedly Wheeler’s landmark accomplishment and the agency’s biggest regulatory expansion since the internet age — survived a court challenge, other moves Republicans have decried as overreaches haven’t fared as well.

Earlier this year, federal courts struck down the FCC’s attempt to let municipal-run broadband networks expand outside of their territories to compete with private providers and lower inmate calling rates in prisons. Both outcomes were predicted by Republicans, who Thune warned could follow Wheeler’s example under a Republican administration and undo his legacy, setting the stage for a partisan regulatory back-and-forth that could stall the agency over the next several administrations.

“I haven’t done a box score — I presume that you did — but about 90 percent of the decisions that we make are unanimous,” Wheeler responded. “Some of those 3-2 votes were me voting against one or both of my Democratic colleagues.”

The chairman said 3-2 votes on issues like effective competition for cable and a plan to subsidize carriers to expand in rural Alaska were a mix of Republicans and Democrats voting with his position.

“This is a collegial body, this is a body where the deliberative process is important, and I too hope that we can find ways to resolve issues in a concomitant manner,” Wheeler said, adding there’s still time for Republicans and Democrats to work together on major proceedings the FCC will tackle before the end of the year, including privacy rules for internet providers and rewriting rules to lower the cost of high-capacity broadband for mobile carriers, ATMs, small businesses and other services.

Wheeler said commissioners still have two weeks left to compromise on a provision granting the agency power over copyright license sharing agreements in it’s proposal to make cable and satellite providers use apps instead of set-top boxes. During Thursday’s meeting both Republican commissioners and Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel said work still needs to be done on the licensing part of plan, scheduled for a vote during the commission’s Sept. 29 open meeting.

“The door isn’t closed, lets get at it,” the chairman said.

Thune pointed out Wheeler’s examples of compromise weren’t open meeting votes, where the commission votes on high-profile issues, and clarified he was referring strictly to open meeting votes — almost a third of which were 3-2 decisions during Wheeler’s tenure.

“[That’s] unheard of, at least relative to modern history,” Thune remarked.

Republican Commissioners Ajit Pai and Michael O’Rielly have repeatedly expressed their dismay with being “shut out” of the deliberative process under Wheeler virtually since the chairman took the reigns of the agency in 2013. During Thursday’s hearing O’Rielly recalled how Democrat Mignon Clyburn was pressured at the last minute to back out of a compromise with Republicans to expand the Lifeline program earlier this year, delaying the commission’s open meeting until Clyburn eventually got back in line with Wheeler’s bloc of Democrats.

Pai recounted how in a strange rule reversal, Wheeler required all of the commissioners to unanimously agree to change decades-old rules barring broadcasters from owning newspapers in the same market, despite a majority of commissioners supporting a change.

“It was a rather odd situation, since we seemed to have an overwhelming bipartisan majority…that the rule in question…had long since outlived its usefulness,” Pai said. “The process is very strange to require unanimity on an issue when, as you pointed out in your chart, there are a number of high-profile issues where Commissioner O’Rielly and I in particular have suggested changes or made objections, and those are either ignored or dismissed out of hand.”

Republican lawmakers got at least one concession out of Wheeler without even having to ask, as they had during numerous hearings before, whether Wheeler intended to follow precedent and leave office in January with the exit of the Obama administration.

“As a certain November event approaches and a new administration is on the horizon, this may be my last appearance before this committee,” Wheeler said. “I will cooperate fully with the new administration to assure a smooth transition at the FCC.”

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The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to approve the first allocation of 5G airwaves for auction to wireless providers like AT&T and Verizon, already conducting tests to deploy wireless speeds 10 to 100 times faster than 4G LTE by 2020.

“I do believe this is one of, if not the, most important decision this agency will make this year,” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler repeated of his Spectrum Frontiers Order approved in a rare unanimous vote by all five commissioners during the FCC’s July open meeting.

The plan sets aside nearly 11 Gigahertz of high-band spectrum, including 3.85 GHz of licensed and 7 GHz of unlicensed airwaves for 5G, making the U.S. the first globally to begin taking advantage of such high-band spectrum previously unusable due to the limits of antenna technology.

The higher bands, though tougher to access, boast wider bandwidth that could eventually increase wireless speeds up to 100 times what they are today, and enable mobile downloads of high definition 4K video, virtual reality and technology unimagined in city infrastructure and the internet of things.

“5G will enable killer applications yet to be imagined,” Wheeler said, adding he expects the first commercial deployments of 5G to take place as soon as 2020.

In addition to the spectrum approved in the 28 GHz, 37 GHz, and 39 GHz licensed bands, and new unlicensed band at 64-71 GHz, the FCC adopted a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to approve another 18 GHz of high-band spectrum and seeks comment on making more spectrum available for sharing.

Democratic Commissioner Mignon Clyburn summed up the feelings of most Americans during the meeting when she jokingly asked Wheeler “just what is 5G?” (see our explanation here), and added she was “willing to bet that your answer to the question … will be different from the person sitting next to you.”

“What we can agree is that the next wireless revolution promises to change the way we live, interact, and engage with our communities,” Clyburn said.

Though all acknowledged the importance of the commission’s action Thursday, the FCC’s third Democrat, Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, pointed out the hard work of building the infrastructure to harness the weak and easily fragmented signals in the upper bands is only starting.

“Though spectrum gets all the glory, the ground matters as much as the skies,” Rosenworcel said. “We need policies to promote small cells — they’re a big thing.”

Small cell networks will feature many more and smaller cell sites for bouncing and capturing the high-frequency millimeter waves harnessed in the upper bands, which have a difficult time moving through objects like the walls of a building.

Rosenworcel exhorted the commission to put incentives in place for encouraging state and local governments to build out 5G infrastructure, and during a press conference with reporters after the meeting Wheeler said the commission will do more to speed up cell tower site construction approval.

He added the FCC’s divisive pending business broadband rules will help by ensuring larger carriers like AT&T and Verizon charge affordable rates to smaller carriers like Sprint and T-Mobile for backhaul — the term used for internet data transmissions to cell towers, which facilitate bandwidth-heavy services like mobile video streaming.

In a less agreeable though still unanimous vote, the commission voted to approve standards voice providers must meet as they transition from traditional copper-based networks to an Internet Protocol (IP) framework — an effort aimed at ensuring the millions of consumers still receiving service on copper networks don’t suffer any loss in service.

Under the standards providers must offer the same network performance, coverage and services including access to 911, cybersecurity, people with disabilities, home security systems, medical monitoring devices, credit card readers and fax machines.

“While the test sets clear, achievable benchmarks, it also provides flexibility by recognizing that a shift from traditional networks to new technologies will never be a purely apples-to-apples comparison,” the FCC said in a statement after the meeting. “The test is voluntary for carriers. Requests for discontinuance can also be reviewed through the FCC’s normal adjudicatory channels.”

Republican Commissioners Michael O’Rielly and Ajit Pai said as more Americans embrace new technology, there’s little need for the commission to encourage hesitation among providers in transitioning to IP networks.

“Much like the final season of Lost, that recent James Patterson novel, and every Super Bowl halftime show since Janet Jackson, there’s just not that much new being revealed,” Pai said of the order, adding that like recent iterations of famed franchises like Terminator and and Rocky, “this film doesn’t live up to the trailer.”

Harold Feld, senior vice president of leading pro-net neutrality group Public Knowledge, said the federal government has an important role to play ensuring no Americans are left behind as the U.S. embraces what’s come to be called the “tech transition.”

“We all agree that the next administration will have a huge role to play in facilitating this transition,” Feld said. “As the largest single user of telecommunications services, the federal government must be a leader, not a laggard, in embracing our communications infrastructure upgrade.”

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One of the Federal Communications Commission’s three Democratic commissioners broke ranks from the majority Tuesday to side with its two Republican commissioners on possibly the hottest issue pending before the agency — set-top boxes.

During a congressional oversight hearing Tuesday FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel agreed there are flaws in Chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposal to mandate pay-TV providers make their content available on third-party set-top boxes.

“I’ll make it easy — yes,” Rosenworcel said in response to a yes or no question from Tennessee Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn about whether the commissioners thought the initial proposal was flawed.

Though such bipartisan consensus has become increasingly rare at the FCC, Rosenworcel wasn’t the only Democrat to imply there are flaws with the pitch. Commissioner Mignon Clyburn declined to answer the question, while Wheeler said “everything is designed to seek improvement.”

“That’s what we’re trying to do right now,” Wheeler said when asked about taking a different approach from the original Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. “We’re working with the industry.”

All four fellow commissioners agreed on the need for another approach, and that the one recently pitched by Comcast, DirecTV, and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association to offer their content on apps shows promise.

“One page. It’s not a proposal, it’s a press release,” Wheeler said. “The great thing is that it lowered the temperature and we can talk together.”

While Wheeler and Clyburn disagreed the original plan rendered copyright worthless, Rosenworcel again diverged from her colleagues, and said after a meeting with the copyright office she agreed the original plan puts the content that pay-TV providers pay for at risk of manipulation or theft on third-party devices.

“I think that more work is necessary on our part,” Rosenworcel said.

Since the proposal was announced earlier this year content, providers have expressed concern the plan will make their property vulnerable to pirating both nationally and internationally.

“I think that you’ve got a long way to go on set-top boxes,” Blackburn said.

The bipartisan atmosphere didn’t last long. Questions aimed at Pai concerning his ongoing investigation into Lifeline fraud led to bickering between Republicans and Democrats on the Communications and Technology Subcommittee and at the witness table.

While Pai said he believes he’s “uncovered potential fraud,” California Democrat Rep. Anna Eshoo pressed Pai on whether he had any evidence, and warned the commissioner to “be very careful” in making such allegations.

“Just answer me yes or no, have you uncovered any fraud so far?” Eshoo asked.

“To date, I have not reached that conclusion,” Pai conceded.

Pai’s investigation into Lifeline has focused on providers overriding a database meant to flag and prevent multiple enrollments, a practice the agency has fined numerous providers over including the largest in history recently levied against Total Call Mobile.

As was the case with Total Call Mobile, Pai suspects the overrides — which presently account for 48 percent of enrollments — represent the latest trend in provider fraud, while Democrats allege the majority are legitimate overrides for independent subscribers sharing an address like a homeless shelter.

Wheeler said there are 2.2 million Lifeline subscribers today that live in 890,000 multiple resident addresses, and according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 20 to 50 percent of American households are “doubled up” households, putting the 16 percent of Lifeline subscribers on the low end.

“So you’re going to say there is no fraud then? Yes or no?” subcommittee chairman and Oregon Republican Rep. Greg Walden asked, coming to Pai’s defense.

“I’m going to say to you sir that we are vigilantly working, and the reason that we know this is because we have been out making these kinds of investigations,” Wheeler said. “As is the case with most of Commissioner Pai’s so-called statistics, he’s reading from yesterday’s newspaper. These things were shut down in 2015.”

Eshoo said the Lifeline fraud the FCC has taken action on was perpetrated by providers, not subscribers. Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Michael Doyle said that while the program is assuredly not free of fraud, it’s likely “committed by companies, not the poor.”

Wheeler added his FCC inherited the problem of “the fox guarding the henhouse” from the Bush administration’s FCC, and the National Eligibility Verifier system included in his recent Lifeline expansion adding broadband internet will correct the issue when it goes live in 2019.

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The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to advance rules mandating pay-TV providers open up their networks to third party set-top boxes, and give subscribers the choice of purchasing third-party boxes instead of renting them monthly from providers themselves.

Commissioners voted 3-2 along partisan lines to adopt Chairman Tom Wheeler’s notice of proposed rulemaking to “unlock the box,” and allow third-party developers like Google to manufacture and sell set-top boxes to subscribers of pay-TV providers like Comcast, Time Warner Cable and others, whose customers typically rent such devices for a monthly fee.

Democratic Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel sided with Wheeler on the vote during the FCC’s open meeting Thursday, while Republican Commissioners Ajit Pai and Michael O’Rielly dissented.

O’Rielly repeated the concerns of the biggest names in the television industry, chiefly the potential for third-party devices to open providers’ video content to copyright violation via video recording. He also raised questions over advertising manipulation by letting third-party devices add or remove commercials and infringe on subscribers’ privacy through data collection.

The Republican commissioner said the proposed rules come at a time when the industry is “moving away from set-top boxes” via video streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and even channels including HBO, and that a proposal focusing on hardware could slow the app-based direction of the industry.

“Our goal should not be to unlock the box; it should be to eliminate the box,” Pai agreed. “If you are a cable customer and you don’t want to have a set-top box, you shouldn’t be required to have one. This goal is technically feasible, and it reflects most consumers’ preferences — including my own.”

Pai said previous FCC regulation in the set-top box market shaped the current system, which costs Americans $20 billion a year in rental fees and $500 million in kilowatt hours in energy consumption, “enough to power all the homes in Washington, D.C. for three months.”

In his proposal announcement last month, Wheeler said 99 percent of pay-TV subscribers lease their set-top boxes, paying on average $231 annually to do so. The cost of those devices has risen 185 percent, while the cost of computers, TVs and mobile phones has dropped 90 percent.

Pai, the Republican commissioner, pointed out the rules wouldn’t take affect for two years after their adoption, making it likely technology will have outpaced the rules by then, and he added multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) and electronics manufacturers are unlikely to agree on formats, specifications and standards that would make third-party boxes workable.

“The odds are probably better that Mark Zuckerberg will agree to Kanye West’s request for $1 billion,” Pai joked.

Pay-TV providers told Pai’s office the rules could interfere with current network architectures, and require a second set-top box in the home to work with a third-party box. Minority programmers added it could give third-party developers more opportunity to make it harder to access foreign-language programming by burying it in search results.

Wheeler dismissed those concerns, pointing to the FCC’s congressional mandate to facilitate competition in the market according to Section 629 of the Communications Act, adding the rules will mirror existing set-top box rules in copyright, privacy, etc. with the exception of opening up the market to third-party devices, which will be forced to adhere to the same rules.

During a press conference after the meeting Wheeler said the rules will prohibit third-party boxes and apps from interfering with advertising content, and clarified MVPDs are not barred from offering their information streams without a box if they choose, so long as they make those same streams available to third parties.

“Existing copyrights and programming agreements are unaffected,” Wheeler said. “Nothing in this proposal slows down or stops cable innovation.”

“But it sure does create opportunities for minority programmers to reach consumers through the Internet,” he said.

Wheeler pointed to the FCC’s past action in the mobile phone market ensuring providers offer a range of devices from third-party manufacturers, which he argued bred significant innovation and competition in the smartphone market.

“Consumers can now choose video content from a multitude of pay-TV providers, numerous online subscription services, watch on their smartphones and a host of other options,” president of USTelecom Walter McCormick said after the meeting. “The FCC’s thumb on the scales will inevitably straightjacket innovation and harm competition, neither of which will serve the public interest.”

Gene Kimmelman, CEO of the digital consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, accused companies of being more concerned with losing their set-top box market monopoly than the pace of innovation during a Wednesday conference call with reporters.

“You can do a lot of things with a cable company once you pay a $100, $125, $150 for their service, their set-top box and their broadband offering. And then you can sometimes get Roku and others,” Kimmelman said. “We’re trying to change that model. We want consumers to be able to buy broadband or a skinny package and then go to third parties for add-on services.”

“They have so much of their monopoly profits on the line, they have all the incentive to distort this,” he added.

Under the notice passed Thursday, the FCC will hear 30 days of comment on the rules, followed by 30 days of replies.

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As the need for wireless spectrum continues to expand with the growing number of Internet connected Americans and their devices, appliances homes and even cars, the Federal Communications Commission — the federal agency charged with managing and allocating the finite airwaves — is still grappling to find the best way to distribute connectivity from the government, which holds the majority of the airwaves, to the commercial sector.

Federal Communications Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Michael O’Rielly came together from across their Democratic and Republican respective divides at a tech conference in Washington this week to give their opinions on how the agency should go about satisfying companies’ and consumers’ need for greater and more competitive wireless access.

“We are cramming more uses into our airwaves than ever before,” Rosenworcel told the crowd at the FTC’s Techonomy Policy 2015 conference Tuesday. “And because the laws of physics aren’t going to change, we are going to have to find new ways to be more efficient with how we zone those airwaves.”

So far the FCC is tackling the issue through multiple avenues, including freeing up spectrum from government entities and auctioning it to wireless and broadband providers in January, buying back spectrum from television networks for an auction scheduled next year, and establishing bandwidth to be shared in tiers for wireless broadband access in April.

“With all of this new use of the airwaves, we’re going to have to think about them differently, come up with new ways to be more efficient, to cram more uses into this finite space,” Rosenworcel continued. “And I think the [President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology] report really gave a jolt to that conversation by encouraging government to rethink its existing uses, by encouraging government to think how to take more of its spectrum and help repurpose it for commercial use, and how with that repurposing, we would think about models that were not only about exclusive use, but about shared use.”

President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) made recommendations to the FCC in 2012 on how to increase the availability of wireless spectrum for data use, which doubled from 2012 to 2013, and is projected to grow some 650 percent by 2018, according to Cisco. One of those recommendations was the recent April order, which reallocated waves in the 3.5 Gigahertz range previously used by the U.S. military for radar, and opened it up to wireless providers in small geographic areas across the U.S.

“The PCAST report was done before I got to the commission, so I’ve used it as a helpful tool,” O’Rielly said. “I’ve had some concerns on the 3.5. I support the item in it’s concepts, [but] I think there was some concerns that I had going forward.”

O’Rielly said the commission had thrown a lot of ideas into the 3.5 GHz plan, some of which will be difficult to determine success. The commissioner added he thought the agency rushed the part of the plan dealing with licensed and unlicensed use of the spectrum, which could potentially lead to frequency interference and troubled connectivity for some users.

“There isn’t a person in this room that hasn’t benefitted from unlicensed spectrum today,” Rosenworcel said. “It contributes about $140 billion in economic activity to the U.S. every year.”

Another issue with unlicensed spectrum — the frequencies used for WiFi, Bluetooth and other short-range broadcasts — is convincing Congress, which approves the spectrum auctions, to green-light setting aside spectrum that doesn’t generate immediate revenue, despite their long-term economic benefits.

“One of the things that I think is a big challenge for spectrum policy going forward is figuring out how we rationalize that division of holdings between commercial and government use,” Rosenworcel said. “Because much of the spectrum that the government controls for government critical missions was allocated decades ago when our spectrum technologies were not as efficient.”

To free up more space, Roseworcel said, the government needs to figure out how to be more efficient with the spectrum it retains, which is presently roughly 60 percent of all available bandwidth, and entice government entities with means to be more efficient with less.

“The challenge is, we don’t have a really good system for doing that,” Rosenworcel said. “So we knock on the door of federal users like the Department of Defense or the Federal Aviation Administration, and we beg folks and cajole them to give up a few more scraps for commercial use.”

O’Rielly added the FCC needs to use a carrot-and-stick incentive mentality to get more federal entities to give up more of their spectrum.

“I’ve worked in the political process, and I wouldn’t say that we were cajoling or asking them or knocking on the door and begging them — we were telling them, ‘You will give up spectrum.” And so I think going forward we’ll still have a forceful Congress seeking to reallocate spectrum.”

O’Rielly said one of those sticks could be tacking a price onto spectrum and enforcing a budgetary consequence for holding onto it. Rosenworcel added that establishing a system to value spectrum would also help.

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