Senate Communications Subcommittee members agreed the government needs to work to free up more spectrum for wireless consumers and asked wireless executives about the best ways to accomplish that goal. Carriers, as expected, at the subcommittee hearing (CD June 4 p10) said lawmakers should press federal agencies to reallocate or share their spectrum holdings and urged the FCC to quickly advance the commission’s planned broadcast incentive auction.

A sugar program that came out of the 2008 Farm Bill continues to hurt sugar producers, according to a new report from food and agriculture consultant Agralytica. The report details a number of negative economic effects from the program, which may soon end if legislation reforming the program comes to pass.

CTIA raised questions about a declaratory ruling on how carriers safeguard Customer Proprietary Network Information stored on wireless devices, which was circulated by then-FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski May 17, just before he left office. None of the members of the FCC have voted for the ruling since it was circulated by Genachowski, agency officials said Monday. The ruling holds in part that if data on a mobile device meets the statutory definition of CPNI, it must be considered CPNI, officials said. The ruling grew out of a public notice the commission released last year on privacy practices and Carrier IQ (http://bit.ly/LAIH1m). The FCC should not impose rules on wireless carriers to protect privacy and security of CPNI on mobile devices, carriers and CTIA said in response (CD Aug 1 p10). Seven public interest groups said without rules the FCC has to rely on “opacity and blind faith in voluntary behavior to protect privacy.” CTIA Assistant Vice President Krista Witanowski met with Louis Peraertz, aide to acting Chairman Mignon Clyburn, and spoke with Jennifer Tatel of the Office of General Counsel, said an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/11zQjp5). “The FCC did acknowledge the value of using diagnostic applications such as Carrier IQ and collecting such information to improve network performance and that the FCC had no intention of restricting carriers from continuing to do so.”

CTIA raised questions about a declaratory ruling on how carriers safeguard Customer Proprietary Network Information stored on wireless devices, which was circulated by then-FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski May 17, just before he left office. None of the members of the FCC have voted for the ruling since it was circulated by Genachowski, agency officials said Monday. The ruling holds in part that if data on a mobile device meets the statutory definition of CPNI, it must be considered CPNI, officials said. The ruling grew out of a public notice the commission released last year on privacy practices and Carrier IQ (http://bit.ly/LAIH1m). The FCC should not impose rules on wireless carriers to protect privacy and security of CPNI on mobile devices, carriers and CTIA said in response (WID Aug 1 p3). Seven public interest groups had said that without rules the FCC has to rely on “opacity and blind faith in voluntary behavior to protect privacy.” CTIA Assistant Vice President Krista Witanowski met with Louis Peraertz, aide to acting Chairman Mignon Clyburn, and spoke with Jennifer Tatel of the Office of General Counsel, said an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/11zQjp5). “The FCC did acknowledge the value of using diagnostic applications such as Carrier IQ and collecting such information to improve network performance and that the FCC had no intention of restricting carriers from continuing to do so.”

Broadcasters may be dissuaded from participating in the incentive auction unless they get answers to their widely held questions (CD April 10 p9) from the FCC, said many industry executives. Among questions most frequently discussed by respondents to our informal survey is in what markets the agency seeks to reallocate some frequencies now used by TV stations for wireless broadband. Even some economists unaligned with any industry, who think the commission has done almost all it can to provide clarity to stations, agree such IDs would help. Without such details, some stations that might otherwise sell the right to some or all of their 6 MHz allotments may sit out the first-of-its-kind auction the agency hopes to hold next year (CD May 22 p1), said broadcasters who don’t expect to participate.

Broadcasters may be dissuaded from participating in the incentive auction unless they get answers to their widely held questions from the FCC, said many industry executives.

Antoinette Cook Bush, lawyer for Sprint Nextel, urged the FCC to move promptly on the SoftBank/Sprint/Clearwire transaction, in a call last week with Louis Peraertz, aide to acting FCC Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn. “I noted that the comment cycle in this proceeding had closed on February 25, 2013,” said an ex parte filing on the call (http://bit.ly/17ECSgH). “I also noted that the national security agencies’ review of the ... proceeding being undertaken by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States was complete.” Cook said the FCC should ignore objections raised by the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council (CD May 29 p4) as “untimely and therefore a violation of the Commission’s rules insofar as it raises issues that should have been brought to the Commission’s attention at the time of the initial pleadings, months ago.” “Diversity is a vital and necessary part of the Commission’s consideration of every transaction -- especially this transaction, which is the second largest wireless acquisition in history,” MMTC President David Honig said in response. “The transaction is profoundly important to minorities, for whom wireless is the first technology in which they are the lead adopters. Nearly 40 percent of wireless consumers are minorities. Shortly, MMTC will respond by letter to Sprint’s poorly taken ad hominem and nonsubstantive attack. Unfortunately, the only document in the record that normally would be expected to address diversity is the Softbank application’s Public Interest Statement. That document is unusual in that it is silent on diversity."

Former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell warned that rules on the repacking of stations tied to the incentive auction of broadcast-TV spectrum raises the risk that the auction could be overturned in federal court. McDowell spoke Friday, less than a month after he left the agency, as a new Hudson Institute visiting fellow. He was interviewed by former Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth, also associated with the institute. McDowell said it could take many months for the Senate to confirm Tom Wheeler as next FCC chairman, which could mean further delays in the auction if the agency doesn’t approve auction rules under acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn. McDowell also remains concerned about international attempts to regulate the Internet, as exemplified by December’s World Conference on International Telecommunications. The U.S. declined there to sign on to revised International Telecommunication Regulations (WID Dec 14 p1). “Overall, the thrust thus far is in the wrong direction,” said McDowell. “For decades, the consensus was internationally that governments should keep their hands off this space, the markets that became known as the Internet net sector. But over the years there were a lot of countries … who have been quietly and persistently trying to change that for a variety of motivations.” Using an “incremental approach” to gain more control, “they're winning as we saw in Dubai” at the WCIT, McDowell said. The U.S. was assured prior to the WCIT treaty that negotiations “would not touch the Internet” and “there would be unanimous consensus … none of which turned out to be true,” he said. Forty percent of nations that attended WCIT haven’t signed the treaty, he noted. “It was a debacle and it has created a tremendous amount of uncertainty.” The next big international conference to watch is the ITU Plenipotentiary meeting, scheduled for October of 2014 in Busan, South Korea, McDowell said. “There will be essentially a constitutional convention convened of the ITU, where they will literally rewrite their constitution and they will elect a new secretary general.” The leading candidate now is Deputy General Secretary Houlin Zhao from China, said McDowell. Zhao is “very charismatic, but China is one of the countries pushing the hardest for some of these regulations,” McDowell said. “One of the Holy Grails for China in terms of Internet governance is to have an international registry, and I'm not making this up, of all IP addresses, so that’s every device you've got with you right now and ultimately your refrigerator and car will have IP addresses.”

Ex-FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski thinks the FCC will hit the administration’s 2015 target for freeing up 300 MHz of spectrum for wireless broadband, but hitting a second 500 MHz target by 2020 will take “a lot of work,” he told C-SPAN’s The Communicators (http://cs.pn/19u1Td8). He and ex-Commissioner Robert McDowell sat for a joint exit interview of sorts, which touched on the spectrum auctions, the legality of the Open Internet order, and their proudest achievements on the FCC. The program is to air this weekend.

Former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell warned that rules on the repacking of stations tied to the incentive auction of broadcast-TV spectrum raises the risk that the auction could be overturned in federal court. McDowell spoke Friday, less than a month after he left the agency, as a new Hudson Institute visiting fellow. He was interviewed by former Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth, also associated with the institute. McDowell said it could take many months for the Senate to confirm Tom Wheeler as next FCC chairman, which could mean further delays in the auction if the agency doesn’t approve auction rules under acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn.