USTelecom promotes Anne Veigle, ex-Warren Communications News, to senior vice president-communications … Nielsen Vice Chairwoman Susan Whiting retiring at year’s end … Microsoft promotes Janet Kennedy to president, Microsoft Canada … Global Telecom & Technology hires Corey Eng, ex-Comcast Business Services, as chief marketing officer of Internet Protocol network company … Local TV promotes Jim Himes to president and general manager, WGHP High Point, N.C. … Entercom hires Phil Zachary, ex-Curtis Media Group, as vice president and market manager, Boston … Comcast promotes David Tashjian to vice president-sales and marketing, Mile High Region.

A cybersecurity framework will work only if “we all understand the costs and benefits of adoption,” USTelecom Vice President-Industry and State Affairs Robert Mayer planned to tell a group of security officials and professionals Thursday, at a Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Protection summit in Washington. Officials leading the implementation of the administration’s executive order “are making good-faith efforts to listen and to engage industry in a constructive dialogue,” he said, according to a copy of prepared remarks he provided us. “This is not to say that we don’t have challenging conversations or that we see eye-to-eye on every issue. But we seem to be listening to each other and working together to define a relationship that will only become more critical over time.” Mayer said the nature of the threats and the country’s growing reliance on infrastructure would make it difficult to claim victory in the cybersecurity area. “It is one thing to have a document that is well-written and well-organized, and quite another thing to have a framework that can be effectively implemented and evaluated across multiple enterprises in 16 critical infrastructure sectors,” he said.

Many corporations unfamiliar with the process at Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers/ICANN weighed in on proposed risk mitigation for name collision issues, during the public comment period which closed Tuesday. USTelecom, General Electric and several electric utilities, as well as regular ICANN participants like Microsoft, Yahoo and Verisign, asked the organization to delay its new generic top-level domains program to allow additional study of the name collision issue. New gTLD applicants issued similarly broad comments taking issue with the risk mitigation proposal and urging ICANN to move forward more quickly with the delegation process.

The FCC’s rural call completion order has been circulated, agency officials said Tuesday. The order will “enhance the FCC’s ability to investigate and crack down” on the problem of calls that don’t reach their rural destinations, said Acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn in a written statement (http://bit.ly/17HI1li). A safe harbor would exempt carriers from reporting requirements if they use no more than two intermediate providers, an agency official told us.

The FCC’s tribal engagement rules raise Administrative Procedure Act, First Amendment, and Paperwork Reduction Act concerns, officials from USTelecom, CTIA and NTCA-The Rural Broadband Association told agency officials Wednesday, an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/15ViyaV). The groups repeated their 2012 request that the commission clarify its “further guidance” rules on tribal engagement are “intended to provide a best practices guide.” They also said there’s a need for written guidance clarifying that Form 481 reports need not address compliance with the rules.

Auction budgets for Phase II of the Connect America Fund should generally be set at the state level based on support amounts determined by the FCC Connect America Model, officials from USTelecom and its member ILECs told Wireline Bureau officials Thursday, an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/189CqHg). The appropriate geographic unit for bidding should be counties, the groups said. They also discussed the transition from legacy funding to CAF Phase II funding in an auction context, and incentives that telcos would likely balance in assessing the state-level commitment and potential auction proceedings.

USTelecom and several member companies met with an aide to acting FCC Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn Wednesday to discus adoption of a certification requirement relating to critical 911 reliability practices, an ex parte filing said. The groups asked that any requirements be “directly related” to ensuring 911 reliability, “reasonably achievable,” “not unnecessarily burdensome,” and voluntary. Practices for circuit auditing should provide flexibility and let providers establish appropriate practices and permit the use of sampling, they said. Backup power requirements should not exceed 24 hours, the ILECs said, especially in light of the commission’s recognition that 24-48 hours is usually sufficient to restore commercial power. And any new certification requirement must give providers enough time for evaluation and preparation, they said. The ILECs also “expressed concern” that the proceeding involved “highly technical issues” that call for a “full record” to support any new requirements.

USTelecom submitted a proposal for a state- and county-based approach to reverse auctions for Connect America Fund Phase II support (http://bit.ly/14eAx5N). Reverse auctions will come into play where ILECs decline FCC funding in exchange for a five-year state-level commitment. The concept is “complicated” here by the commission’s need to support affordable broadband for as many consumers as possible, while staying with fixed budgetary constraints, USTelecom said. A dearth of bidders in some areas, “combined with the potential for strategic behavior,” could lead to bids that are far above the forward-looking costs of service in those areas, the association said. The commission should set an overall cap on funding for some geographic regions, and use an “optimization algorithm” to decide which combination of bids would produce the greatest number of locations served within the budget established, USTelecom said. The association suggested the commission use state-boundaries to define the geographic areas. Another set of issues is how bids within each state should be structured, USTelecom said, encouraging a system to place bids for all eligible census blocks within specific counties. “Counties are large enough to enable a winning county-wide bidder to realize many of the scale economies that bidders could otherwise capture only through package bidding if census tracts were the geographic bidding unit,” it said. Each bidder would specify the support amount it requires for each county, along with the number of eligible locations it commits to serve within the county. A “statewide algorithm” would select a combination of bids that would lead to the largest number of new served locations within the state’s budget, USTelecom said. “This approach will simultaneously maximize bidding competition within a state, reduce the exposure problem for bidders, and do so without creating the computational challenges of user defined package bidding,” it said.

Recently promised disclosures by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper about U.S. government surveillance programs don’t go far enough, said technology companies and privacy advocates on Friday. DNI’s push for transparency followed another leak from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden Thursday, which included apparent classified intelligence agency budget information. The documents, posted by The Washington Post (http://wapo.st/15cy7Vn), disclose a Corporate Partner Access Project, expected to cost $278 million in FY 2013 and reimbursing telecom companies for surveillance activities.

If the FCC Wireline Bureau chooses to use a 5-kilofoot design to estimate the number of supported locations that should receive 6/1.5 Mbps service under state-level commitments, “it will require carriers to expend significant extra cost without sufficient corresponding gains,” USTelecom told the bureau in a letter Tuesday (http://bit.ly/153slFN). It recommended the bureau use a 12-kilofoot design, which would be “most closely aligned with the types of networks carriers will actually deploy” to fulfill the requirements of Connect America Fund Phase II.