While New York City was largely spared — though Staten Island and Queens were whacked fairly hard — surrounding states, especially Connecticut and New Jersey, got a good thumping. As many as 700,000 people in Connecticut and 600,000 in New Jersey are without power in the wake of Irene, and many will go without for as long as a week.

Power outages in others states, in no particular order: Vermont is reporting another 50,000 residents without power, and at one point or another, every single road in that state, except for Interstates 89 and 91, were closed due to flooding.

Another 700,000 are without power in Massachusetts; 160,000 are without power in New Hampshire; power is out for 171,000 in Maine; and power is out for 284,000 in Rhode Island.

Power outages were still being addressed this morning in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina; another 20,000 or so are without power in the District of Columbia. Delaware has 39,000 without power, and a tornado touched down there; Pennsylvania, including the Philadelphia area, has about 400,000 without power. The total number of homes and businesses without power up and down the East Coast was in the neighborhood of six million.

An estimate of the cost of damage to insurers, conducted by Kinetic Analysis, a firm that predicts storm damage, is about $3 billion, down from an earlier estimate of $14 billion. The death toll so far is 25.

Flooding is by far the biggest threat. The city of Troy, New York, is threatened by a swelling Hudson River and a fragile dam holding it back.

Overall, communications infrastructure held up pretty well — except in those places where it didn’t. In a conference call on Sunday, the Federal Communications Commission said that 130,000 wireline subscribers lost phone service, while nearly 1,400 cellular telephone sites were out of service. Another 1,093 cell sites were running on backup power, and 500,000 cable TV subscribers lost service. The agency warned the tally could get worse, as power outages remain and battery backup systems fail.

All the stock exchanges in New York will open normally, though lots of traders who typically come into the city on Metro North may have trouble getting to work.

Did I say New York was largely spared? By the storm, mainly, but not by slightly panicked officials. The Metro Transit Authority is scrambling to get the subway system back up and running normally. Having for the first time shut the entire system down, it was limping back to life as of 6 am Eastern time. While the Long Island Railroad is running a nearly normal schedule, Metro North is not expected to operate at all.

New York area airports are re-opening as of 7 am Eastern time. Traffic at Logan International Airport in Boston is still snarled, as is Amtrak’s Acela service. Flights into and out of Baltimore and Washington, D.C., were slowly getting under way.

Another casualty: Local public radio station WNYC suffered damage to its AM transmitter because of flooding in New Jersey, and directed listeners to its Web stream, though its FM transmitter was fine.

For all the trouble Irene caused humankind, a more fragile creature emerged unscathed from the storm’s path. USA Today has an interesting story about a rare whimbrel, a type of shorebird, nicknamed Chinquapin by wildlife scientists in Georgia, who tagged it with a radio tracking device and spotted its signal on the Caribbean island of Eleuthera. The bird had flown through the most dangerous northeast section of Irene when it was still a Category 3 hurricane. Whimbrels typically spend their summers in Canada and then fly south to Brazil to breed. That’s one tough bird.

The official release below:

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT REQUIRES SIX HIGH TECH COMPANIES TO STOP ENTERING INTO ANTICOMPETITIVE EMPLOYEE SOLICITATION AGREEMENTS

Settlement Preserves Competition for High Tech Employees

WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice announced today that it has reached a settlement with six high technology companies–Adobe Systems Inc., Apple Inc., Google Inc., Intel Corp., Intuit Inc. and Pixar–that prevents them from entering into no solicitation agreements for employees. The department said that the agreements eliminated a significant form of competition to attract highly skilled employees, and overall diminished competition to the detriment of affected employees who were likely deprived of competitively important information and access to better job opportunities.

The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division filed a civil antitrust complaint today in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, along with a proposed settlement that, if approved by the court, would resolve the lawsuit.

According to the complaint, the six companies entered into agreements that restrained competition between them for highly skilled employees. The agreements between Apple and Google, Apple and Adobe, Apple and Pixar and Google and Intel prevented the companies from directly soliciting each other’s employees. An agreement between Google and Intuit prevented Google from directly soliciting Intuit employees.

“The agreements challenged here restrained competition for affected employees without any procompetitive justification and distorted the competitive process,” said Molly S. Boast, Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. “The proposed settlement resolves the department’s antitrust concerns with regard to these no solicitation agreements.”

In the high technology sector, there is a strong demand for employees with advanced or specialized skills, the department said. One of the principal means by which high tech companies recruit these types of employees is to solicit them directly from other companies in a process referred to as, “cold calling.” This form of competition, when unrestrained, results in better career opportunities, the department said.

According to the complaint, the companies engaged in a practice of agreeing not to cold call any employee at the other company. The complaint indicates that the agreements were formed and actively managed by senior executives of these companies.

The complaint alleges that the companies’ actions reduced their ability to compete for high tech workers and interfered with the proper functioning of the price-setting mechanism that otherwise would have prevailed in competition for employees. None of the agreements was limited by geography, job function, product group or time period. Thus, they were broader than reasonably necessary for any collaboration between the companies, the department said.

The department said in its complaint:

Beginning no later than 2006, Apple and Google executives agreed not to cold call each other’s employees. Apple placed Google on its internal “Do Not Call List,” which instructed employees not to directly solicit employees from the listed companies. Similarly, Google listed Apple among the companies that had special agreements with Google and were part of the “Do Not Cold Call” list;

Beginning no later than May 2005, senior Apple and Adobe executives agreed not to cold call each other’s employees. Apple placed Adobe on its internal “Do Not Call List” and similarly, Adobe included Apple in its internal list of “Companies that are off limits”;

Beginning no later than April 2007, Apple and Pixar executives agreed not to cold call each other’s employees. Apple placed Pixar on its internal “Do Not Call List” and senior executives at Pixar instructed human resources personnel to adhere to the agreement and maintain a paper trail;

Beginning no later than September 2007, Google and Intel executives agreed not to cold call each other’s employees. In its hiring policies and protocol manual, Google listed Intel among the companies that have special agreements with Google and are part of the “Do Not Cold Call” list. Similarly, Intel instructed its human resources staff about the existence of the agreement; and

In June 2007, Google and Intuit executives agreed that Google would not cold call any Intuit employee. In its hiring policies and protocol manual, Google also listed Intuit among the companies that have special agreements with Google and are part of the “Do Not Cold Call” list.

The proposed settlement, which if accepted by the court will be in effect for five years, prohibits the companies from engaging in anticompetitive no solicitation agreements. Although the complaint alleges only that the companies agreed to ban cold calling, the proposed settlement more broadly prohibits the companies from entering, maintaining or enforcing any agreement that in any way prevents any person from soliciting, cold calling, recruiting, or otherwise competing for employees. The companies will also implement compliance measures tailored to these practices.

Today’s complaint arose out of a larger investigation by the Antitrust Division into employment practices by high tech firms. The division continues to investigate other similar no solicitation agreements.

Adobe Systems Inc. is a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in San Jose, Calif., and 2009 revenues of nearly $3 billion. Apple Inc. is a California corporation with its principal place of business in Cupertino, Calif., and 2009 revenues of more than $42 billion. Google Inc. is a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in Mountain View, Calif., and 2009 revenues of more than $23 billion. Intel Inc. is a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in Santa Clara, Calif., and 2009 revenues of more than $35 billion. Intuit Inc. is a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in Mountain View, Calif., and 2009 revenues more than $3 billion. Pixar is a California corporation with its principal place of business in Emeryville, Calif.

The proposed settlement, along with the department’s competitive impact statement, will be published in The Federal Register, as required by the Antitrust Procedures and Penalties Act. Any person may submit written comments concerning the proposed settlement within 60 days of its publication to James J. Tierney, Chief, Networks & Technology Enforcement Section, Antitrust Division, U.S. Department of Justice, 450 Fifth Street N.W., Suite 7100, Washington D.C. 20530. At the conclusion of the 60-day comment period, the court may enter the final judgment upon a finding that it serves the public interest.

“It is true that ‘Congress gave the [Commission] broad and adaptable jurisdiction so that it can keep pace with rapidly evolving communications technologies,’” the three-judge panel wrote in its order (full text below). “It is also true that ‘[t]he Internet is such a technology,’ indeed, ‘arguably the most important innovation in communications in a generation.’

“Yet notwithstanding the ‘difficult regulatory problem of rapid technological change’ posed by the communications industry, ‘the allowance of wide latitude in the exercise of delegated powers is not the equivalent of untrammeled freedom to regulate activities over which the statute fails to confer…Commission authority.’ …The Commission has failed to tie its assertion of ancillary authority over Comcast’s Internet service to any ‘statutorily mandated responsibility.’”

In other words, as much as the FCC would like to tell Comcast (CMCSA) how to manage its network, it cannot do so without an explicit mandate from Congress.

This is a nasty blow to the FCC’s effort to establish a formal set of Net neutrality rules and to its National Broadband Plan. The FCC can’t really regulate broadband without clear authority over the companies that provide it.

That said, the FCC does have a few options going forward, as Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett explained in a research note to clients this morning.

“Broadly speaking, the FCC has three options. First, the FCC can go to Congress and request the necessary authority. Second, it can go to Congress and request net neutrality legislation. Or third, the FCC can reclassify broadband to bring it under FCC jurisdiction. This third option has been called by some ‘the nuclear option.’”

According to Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior vice president and policy director for The Media Access Project, the nuclear option may be the best bet.

“While we are, to put it mildly, unhappy about this decision, the FCC’s choices are not quite as bleak as you suggest,” Schwartzman told me. “It has the option of classifying broadband as a Title II service, which was what it did until 2005. While this, too, will be subjected to the inevitable court appeals, many of us think that this will be sustained, and we’ve asked the FCC to do this. This is especially important as legislation would take a very long time to be enacted.”

Full Text Comcast vs FCC Federal Court Ruling