House Commerce Committee members committed Thursday to advancing the Improving Rural Call Quality and Reliability Act (S-827/HR-2566) with haste. The subcommittee will mark up HR-2566 and the Anti-Spoofing Act (HR-2669) next week in sessions Monday and Tuesday, with voting set for 10 a.m. Tuesday in 2322 Rayburn. The House's substitute amendment for HR-2566 matches the text cleared by the Senate Commerce Committee in June. But some members of the Communications Subcommittee during Thursday’s hearing on the bill questioned whether the proposal should be changed.

A draft order that would require pay-TV carriers to provide content via apps to third-party devices was circulated to the FCC eighth floor Thursday, as expected (see 1609060080). It's intended for the agenda of the Sept. 29 FCC meeting, said Chairman Tom Wheeler in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, and said an FCC fact sheet. As expected, the draft item replaces the set-top box plan proposed in the NPRM with a plan based on free apps that don't require a specific platform or technology and uses a licensing regime overseen by the commission. Larger multichannel video programming distributors will have two years to comply with the new rules, while midsize MVPDs will have longer. The smallest MVPDs -- under 400,000 subscribers -- would be exempt, the fact sheet said.

The chairmen of the House and Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees jointly urged the departments of Commerce and Justice Thursday to reconsider proceeding with the planned Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition Oct. 1, saying they have serious concerns about ICANN's existing transition-related plans. The letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker follows increased interest from Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune, R-S.D., and other Senate leaders in including an extension of a rider in the Department of Commerce's FY 2016 budget that bars NTIA from using federal funds on the transition via the planned short-term resolution to fund the government once FY 2016 expires Sept. 30 (see 1609070053). An extension of the transition funding ban rider would delay NTIA's plan to allow its existing contract with ICANN to administer the IANA functions to expire as planned just before midnight Sept. 30.

A draft order that would require pay-TV carriers to provide content via apps to third-party devices was circulated to the FCC eighth floor Thursday, as expected (see 1609060080). It's intended for the agenda of the Sept. 29 FCC meeting, said Chairman Tom Wheeler in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, and said an FCC fact sheet. As expected, the draft item replaces the set-top box plan proposed in the NPRM with a plan based on free apps that don't require a specific platform or technology and uses a licensing regime overseen by the commission. Larger multichannel video programming distributors will have two years to comply with the new rules, while midsize MVPDs will have longer. The smallest MVPDs -- under 400,000 subscribers -- would be exempt, the fact sheet said.

A draft order that would require pay-TV carriers to provide content via apps to third-party devices was circulated to the FCC eighth floor Thursday, as expected (see 1609060080). It's intended for the agenda of the Sept. 29 FCC meeting, said Chairman Tom Wheeler in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, and said an FCC fact sheet. As expected, the draft item replaces the set-top box plan proposed in the NPRM with a plan based on free apps that don't require a specific platform or technology and uses a licensing regime overseen by the commission. Larger multichannel video programming distributors will have two years to comply with the new rules, while midsize MVPDs will have longer. The smallest MVPDs -- under 400,000 subscribers -- would be exempt, the fact sheet said.

Parties disagreed on the adequacy of the scope and pace of broadband deployment under a Telecom Act Section 706 mandate, and on the metrics the FCC should use. Major wireline and wireless telco groups said advanced telecom capability (ATC) is being rolled out to all Americans in a reasonable and timely way, and urged the commission to keep or soften its current ATC criteria. Smaller wireless carriers and consumer advocates said broadband isn't being deployed widely and quickly enough, and urged the commission to raise and expand ATC benchmarks. Comments were posted Tuesday and Wednesday in docket 16-245 in response to a notice of inquiry, which cited ATC and broadband similarities but said not all broadband services provide ATC.

Parties disagreed on the adequacy of the scope and pace of broadband deployment under a Telecom Act Section 706 mandate, and on the metrics the FCC should use. Major wireline and wireless telco groups said advanced telecom capability (ATC) is being rolled out to all Americans in a reasonable and timely way, and urged the commission to keep or soften its current ATC criteria. Smaller wireless carriers and consumer advocates said broadband isn't being deployed widely and quickly enough, and urged the commission to raise and expand ATC benchmarks. Comments were posted Tuesday and Wednesday in docket 16-245 in response to a notice of inquiry, which cited ATC and broadband similarities but said not all broadband services provide ATC.

With Charter Communications having satisfied all the requirements of the Antitrust Procedures and Penalties Act, DOJ asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to enter final judgment in its civil antitrust proceeding against Charter. As part of its Aug. 31 motion (in Pacer) with the court asking for final judgment, DOJ included a notice of compliance (in Pacer) saying Charter, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks complied with the act's requirements. DOJ sued Charter/TWC/BHN in April, while simultaneously proposing a settlement that would limit Charter's use of most-favored-nation provisions and ban it from retaliating against programmers for licensing to online video distributors (see 1604250039). The case received one comment in the 60-day period, and DOJ said that dissatisfied customer's concerns fall outside the antitrust issues raised in the settlement (see 1608170016).

Patent and Trademark Office Director Michelle Lee is to testify before the House IP Subcommittee Sept. 13 on PTO operations, the House Judiciary Committee said Tuesday. The hearing will focus primarily on the Department of Commerce inspector general’s report last week that said PTO employees fraudulently billed the office for almost 290,000 hours of work in late 2014 and 2015 they didn’t perform and collected $18.3 million in salary for those hours. The Commerce IG concluded in the report that the full amount of time that PTO employees falsely billed may be double what the office was able to conclusively estimate was fraudulent. Had PTO employees worked all of the hours they claimed, they would have been able to reduce the office’s backlog of patent applications by almost 16,000 cases, the IG said. PTO's application backlog currently stands at more than 549,000 cases. “I am extremely concerned about the recent Inspector General’s report that indicates time and attendance fraud is still a serious problem” at PTO, said House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., in a news release. “The amount of wasted man-hours that could have been spent reducing the patent backlog is astounding, not to mention the millions of taxpayer dollars that were wasted paying USPTO employees for work they were not doing.” The Commerce IG report “raises serious questions about the integrity of our patent system,” said House IP Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif. “If the PTO can’t even guarantee sufficient oversight of its employees’ timecards, how can we be assured patent examiners aren’t just rubberstamping ideas without oversight as well?” House Judiciary said House IP also will examine PTO’s progress in implementing the 2011 America Invents Act, and other issues on patent law revamp efforts. Goodlatte noted a July GAO study that recommended PTO act to more consistently define patent quality and better communicate its patent quality standards in agency-produced documents (see 1607200080). House IP’s hearing is to begin at 1 p.m. in Rayburn 2237.

With Charter Communications having satisfied all the requirements of the Antitrust Procedures and Penalties Act, DOJ asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to enter final judgment in its civil antitrust proceeding against Charter. As part of its Aug. 31 motion (in Pacer) with the court asking for final judgment, DOJ included a notice of compliance (in Pacer) saying Charter, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks complied with the act's requirements. DOJ sued Charter/TWC/BHN in April, while simultaneously proposing a settlement that would limit Charter's use of most-favored-nation provisions and ban it from retaliating against programmers for licensing to online video distributors (see 1604250039). The case received one comment in the 60-day period, and DOJ said that dissatisfied customer's concerns fall outside the antitrust issues raised in the settlement (see 1608170016).