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.

A coalition of advocacy and consumer groups for deaf and blind persons opposed multiple provisions of the FCC’s June order that would institute changes to the Video Relay Service (VRS) program, saying in comments released Tuesday that the order “may cause harm to the quality of VRS” (http://bit.ly/12mKIrd). The VRS order would reduce compensation rates to various-sized providers and created interoperability provisions to give users power to more easily choose providers and equipment (CD June 11 p1). The groups said they believe there has been “no effort on the part of the Commission to compensate or reward providers for improving functional equivalency in VRS calls. The Commission needs to reward such competition-driven innovation even during any efforts to improve the efficiency of the VRS system.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., asked the telecom industry for advice on how to crack down on fraudulent robocalls. In a letter to CTIA and USTelecom late Friday (http://1.usa.gov/13MyVjD) she asked for comment on implementing technology that would filter out unwanted calls. She asked for further comment on eliminating the FTC Act’s common carrier exemption, on changes to FCC enforcement authorities regarding robocalls, and on revisions to the 2010 Truth in Caller ID Act. She set a deadline of Oct. 15 for responses. Both groups participated in a July 10 hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, which McCaskill chairs, on the subject of fraudulent robocalls. The Justice Department has estimated consumers lose $40 billion per year to fraudulent telemarketers, she said.

Carriers that filed supported for the most part some form of additional identification requirements as proposed in June by the Lifeline Reform 2.0 Coalition, but raised some questions with other proposals from the group. USTelecom questioned whether the proposals made by the coalition would do any good. Comments were due Wednesday on a Wireline Bureau public notice (http://bit.ly/18h9p9K) as the FCC continues its examination of curbing Lifeline fraud.

The FCC took the “first step” toward comprehensive overhaul of its full-time employee (FTE) fee system, said an order released Monday (http://bit.ly/16GB8PD). In a series of “interim measures,” the commission revised its calculation of the number of FTEs working on the regulation of interstate telecommunications service providers (ITSPs), and the number of direct FTEs in the International Bureau. Fees won’t go up more than 7.5 percent as a result of the agency’s FTE reallocations, it said. The agency is also changing how certain broadcast licensees that simulcast in analog and digital pay their regulatory fees. The agency declined to act on some big proposals, including combining the ITSP and wireless categories.

Copyright Office promotes Jacqueline Charlesworth to general counsel and associate register of copyrights … German Foreign Ministry hires Dirk Brengelmann, ex-NATO, as cyberpolicy officer … AVG Technologies, provider of Internet, mobile security and privacy products, hires Gary Kovacs, ex-Mozilla, as CEO and managing director … Entravision hires Angelica Balderas, ex-Adelante Media Group, as senior vice president-integrated marketing solutions for Sacramento, Calif., market.

Response to Verizon’s petition to discontinue copper service on Fire Island, N.Y., highlighted a longstanding divide between incumbents and competitive providers. ILECs unanimously supported the request, which they said was a reasonable and cost-effective way to replace an obsolete technology damaged by Superstorm Sandy. CLECs worried that if the FCC grants the request, it could prejudge issues involved in the overall IP transition and put the competitive providers at a disadvantage. State public utility commissions and consumer advocates raised questions about the suitability of Verizon’s planned Voice Link fixed wireless service as a replacement for its traditional copper landline.