Paetec doesn’t pay interstate rates for its VoIP traffic, but the company is sometimes duped by third-party carriers that disguise long-distance calls as Internet Protocol traffic, company executives said Tuesday. It wants to stop the third-party carriers in their arbitrage, but stands by its decision to pay only local rates for VoIP. “That’s based on our understanding of current FCC rules on how the number is treated,” said Paetec Director of Carrier Access Tami Spocogee at an FCC panel on how to address lost calls in the rural U.S. She spoke after Toledo Telephone Chief Operating Officer Dale Merten showed a slide demonstrating that a call from Washington, D.C., and connected in rural Washington state was reclassified as a local call.

Dish’s proposed waiver that would clear the way for the company to launch wireless broadband service in the 2 GHz band is meeting resistance from wireless carriers, led by CTIA. In a further demonstration of how difficult it will be to bring any new band online for wireless broadband, CTIA said in light of questions that have arisen over LightSquared’s network, the FCC should look closely at interference issues before granting a waiver.

Monterey Licenses said it has no issue with a new commercial station coming to the Fargo-Morehead N.D., radio market, but does have serious concerns about the prospect of that station acting “in concert with the largest incumbent operator” in the market. Monterey replied to Mediactive’s opposition to Monterey’s request for an FCC investigation into or petition to deny the proposed sale of KFNL(FM) Kindred (CD Sept 19 p13). Monterey sought to block the sale after learning that the transaction would assign KFNL’s license to nephew of the owner of the largest station group in the market. Monterey failed to meet burden of proof for raising such a petition, Mediactive said in its reply. The only declaration supporting the petition states that one person has read the petition and believes “that there are good grounds to support” it, Mediactive said. “In other words, no one has attested that they have personal knowledge of anything!” At a minimum, the FCC should seek assurances from Mediactive that it won’t coordinate operation of the station with the larger station group in the market, Monterey said.

The Senate Commerce Committee recommended the Spectrum Act (S-911) for inclusion in legislation by the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. Congressional committee recommendations to the super committee were due Friday. Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Ranking Member Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, said that S-911 “provides significant short-term and long-term benefits to our Nation’s fiscal health, economic and job growth, and public safety.” The bill, which would authorize voluntary incentive auctions and reallocate the 700 MHz D-block to public safety, was estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to raise $6.5 billion for deficit reduction. But Rockefeller and Hutchison said in their letter that they would work with the super committee “on possible ways to amend S. 911 to provide $10 billion in deficit reduction, without compromising rural build out for public safety officials.” House Commerce Committee Ranking Member Henry Waxman, D-Calif., on Thursday similarly urged the super committee to authorize spectrum auctions and reallocate the D-block (CD Oct 14 p12). That committee’s chairman, Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., is a member of the super committee and has said he doesn’t plan to submit Commerce Committee recommendations. House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King, R-N.Y., also urged D-block reallocation and a national public safety network in his committee’s recommendations. King said his HR-607 “represents the type of balanced approach that the Joint Select Committee should actively pursue, one that combines an immediate public safety initiative with good governance cost savings."

Sprint Nextel and C Spire haven’t built a sound legal case for having their challenge of the AT&T/T-Mobile deal joined to the government’s case, AT&T said in a filing with the U.S. District Court in Washington. The court is hearing the Justice Department’s challenge to the deal. Case law is “well-established as to what must be pled … to warrant competitor standing under Section 16 of the Clayton Act,” AT&T said. “A competitor may not simply claim that increased concentration from a horizontal merger will lead to higher prices in the market in which it competes with the merging parties. That alleged impact would benefit, not harm, direct competitors such as Plaintiffs.” Sprint and C Spire (formerly Cellular South) base their arguments that they should be allowed to join the government’s lawsuit on a single case from the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Community Publishers, Inc. v. Donrey Corp., AT&T said. “But that case depended on alleged facts about a particular market for newspaper advertising that have no counterpart in the complaints here,” the carrier argued. Sprint and C Spire try to get around this problem “by raising the costs of certain inputs -- wireless devices, roaming, and dedicated fixed transport or ‘backhaul'” as a result of the merger, AT&T said. “That theory of competitor harm is at least cognizable under the antitrust laws. But those aspects of Plaintiffs’ complaints must still be dismissed because Plaintiffs fail plausibly to allege that the merger threatens a substantial effect on a properly defined input market.” Judge Ellen Huvelle is expected to rule on whether she will allow the two competitors to join the Department of Justice’s case following oral arguments later this month.

Cablevision discriminated against the Game Show Network by moving it off a basic tier of the cable operator in February, GSN said in a program carriage complaint filed with the FCC Wednesday night. It alleged the cable operator gave wider carriage to its own networks, which weren’t moved to the sports programming package like GSN was. The complaint portrayed those networks that were owned at the time by Cablevision -- We TV and Wedding Central -- as similar to GSN. Cablevision rejected that comparison.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has posted to its Web site a fact sheet on the steps that must be taken after each of the recently passed free trade agreements is enacted in order for them to enter into force.

The FTC has not adequately considered the costs that its proposed Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) revisions would impose on online companies, panelists said at an event hosted by TechFreedom Wednesday. On Sept. 15, the FTC announced more than two dozen changes to the 11-year-old rule that seeks to shield children from sexual predators, invasive marketing, and other online threats. A gaming industry representative derided the commission’s offer to eliminate the current “sliding scale” or “email plus” approach to parental consent. Adopted in 1999, the sliding scale approach requires operators who are collecting personal information for internal use to obtain parental consent through an email and one additional step that verifies the individual is actually the child’s parent. But doing away with the approach would force existing COPPA-compliant companies to incur expensive costs and raises serious questions about how to implement an alternative approach, panelists said. “Realistically it would cost us $12 million per year to do away with the email plus system,” said Rebecca Newton, chief community and safety officer of Mind Candy, an online gaming company that caters to children. “For any of the large businesses we get 70,000 registrations per day and 100,000 per day on weekends. Twenty-five percent of the 70,000 will drop off because they don’t want to submit their Social Security number,” Newton said. But the sliding scale approach is something that “has long been recognized as an unreliable method,” said Phyllis Marcus, a staff attorney in the enforcement division at the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection. “The time has come to let this method go.” Newton disagreed, saying that it would be better to improve the email plus approach “rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

The FTC has not adequately considered the costs that its proposed Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) revisions would impose on online companies, panelists said at an event hosted by TechFreedom Wednesday. On Sept. 15, the FTC announced more than two dozen changes to the 11-year-old rule that seeks to shield children from sexual predators, invasive marketing, and other online threats (WID Sept 16 p1). A gaming industry representative derided the commission’s offer to eliminate the current “sliding scale” or “email plus” approach to parental consent. Adopted in 1999, the sliding scale approach requires operators who are collecting personal information for internal use to obtain parental consent through an email and one additional step that verifies the individual is actually the child’s parent. But doing away with the approach would force existing COPPA-compliant companies to incur expensive costs and raises serious questions about how to implement an alternative approach, panelists said. “Realistically it would cost us $12 million per year to do away with the email plus system,” said Rebecca Newton, chief community and safety officer of Mind Candy, an online gaming company that caters to children. “For any of the large businesses we get 70,000 registrations per day and 100,000 per day on weekends. Twenty-five percent of the 70,000 will drop off because they don’t want to submit their Social Security number,” Newton said. But the sliding scale approach is something that “has long been recognized as an unreliable method,” said Phyllis Marcus, a staff attorney in the enforcement division at the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection. “The time has come to let this method go.” Newton disagreed, saying that it would be better to improve the email plus approach “rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

Some groups representing technology companies urged members of the House Judiciary Committee to address concerns they raised about the PROTECT IP Act (S-968). In a letter, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, NetChoice and Consumer Electronics Association asked Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, Ranking Member John Conyers, D-Mich., and others to convene stakeholder negotiations to address concerns raised about the bill’s potential impact on jobs, innovation, technology and freedom of speech. Such negotiations “have worked well in the past and have resulted in intellectual property bills supported by both tech and content, which have stood the test of time,” they said. They noted opposition from other groups, including technology start-ups and human rights advocates, who are concerned that the legislation “will provide comfort to totalitarian regimes that seek ever more control over Internet users in their own countries.” The letter also went to leaders of the House IP Subcommittee, Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and Ranking Member Mel Watt, D-N.C.