A draft version of long-awaited privacy legislation by House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher, D-Va., would require more notification of consumers before collection of personal information. The bill would also expand FTC authority over online advertising practices. Boucher and Ranking Member Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., worked together on the draft and unveiled it Tuesday. Industry groups may raise concerns about the burden to comply, said Kristen Mathews, a privacy attorney with Proskauer.
A paucity of comments on an FCC radio rulemaking asking whether it should extend preferences for assigning stations to tribes without lands (CD Feb 4 p12) seems to underline the relative lack of controversy, several broadcast lawyers said. Three groups and a non-profit representing Native Americans and Alaska natives filed comments that were released Tuesday afternoon in docket 09-52. Other groups said they sat out the filing round. Commission action on tribal issues seems like it won’t take long, but acting on a more controversial matter raised by a 2009 rulemaking notice of whether to make it harder for stations to move into larger towns may take a while if it occurs at all, said three industry lawyers.
The time has come for the FCC to formally seek comment on whether it should “reclassify” broadband as a Title II service, subject to common carrier regulation, Public Knowledge Legal Director Harold Feld said Tuesday in a debate sponsored by the New America Foundation. Hank Hultquist, vice president of federal regulatory affairs at AT&T, countered that the FCC has plenty of authority regardless of the recent Comcast decision, and reclassification would be a mistake.
A draft version of long-awaited privacy legislation by House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher, D-Va., would require more notification of consumers before collection of personal information. The bill would also expand FTC authority over online advertising practices. Boucher and Ranking Member Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., worked together on the draft and unveiled it Tuesday. Industry groups may raise concerns about the burden to comply, said Kristen Mathews, a privacy attorney with Proskauer.
The time has come for the FCC to formally seek comment on whether it should “reclassify” broadband as a Title II service, subject to common carrier regulation, Public Knowledge Legal Director Harold Feld said Tuesday in a debate sponsored by the New America Foundation. Hank Hultquist, vice president of federal regulatory affairs at AT&T, countered that the FCC has plenty of authority regardless of the recent Comcast decision, and reclassification would be a mistake.
A federal appeals court threw out a preliminary injunction and sent a predatory pricing case back to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Budget Prepay and other competitive local exchange carriers had alleged that AT&T and its subsidiaries engaged in an unlawful scheme regarding a promotional offer, Judge Edith Clement wrote in the decision of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. The defendants offered a promotion to retail customers, including customers served by the plaintiffs. The promotion waived connection fees and issued $50 rebates to customers who switched to AT&T for telecom service, Clement said. The telco then offered “all such promotions to Budget Prepay, applying a wholesale discount pursuant to the [Telecom] Act.” In July, AT&T told Budget Prepay that it would stop passing along the full rebate to the CLECs. “Rather, AT&T planned to apply a complicated pricing model to determine the economic value” of the promotion, the ruling said. After applying the wholesale discount rate set by state commissions, “this model sets the economic value of the promotion passed on to Budget Prepay as low as $3.74 in some states.” The district court granted the CLECs a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction enjoining AT&T from implementing the plan, the judge said. AT&T filed a motion to dismiss for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, which the court denied. The parties “agreed to adopt the specific FCC regulations concerning resale as binding provisions” and the district court was asked to determine whether the AT&T model was unreasonable. The agreement raises an issue of state law contract interpretation, Clement said. In denying AT&T’s motion to dismiss, the district court relied on a 2002 case in which an ILEC “sued the state commission over the commission’s interpretation of an FCC ruling.” The court said “the district court had federal question jurisdiction over that suit.” Although there are many overlapping substantive issues in each case, “a suit for enforcement of an interconnection agreement (ICA) arises from and is governed by a body of law different from that governing a suit challenging a commission’s interpretation of federal regulations,” the opinion said. “We hold that the appellees’ claim does not arise from a question of federal law."
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has released its 2010 “Special 301” annual report on the adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection by U.S. trading partners.
If Congress doesn’t want to go through another decade-long losing court battle over protecting children online, it should be wary about expanding the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, a researcher told the Senate Consumer Protection Subcommittee at a hearing Thursday. COPPA could end up in the same position as the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), struck down twice by the Supreme Court as an unconstitutional abridgment of adults’ rights to browse online (WID Jan 22/09 p6), said Berin Szoka, director of the Progress & Freedom Foundation’s Center for Internet Freedom. Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said he didn’t like Szoka’s “unhelpful” advice.
Cloud computing raises concerns for users, businesses and law enforcement agencies that only better international cooperation can address, speakers said at a Thursday workshop in Madrid on cross-border jurisdiction in cloud computing at the European Dialogue on Internet Governance. Cybercriminals freely engage in cross-border acts, but police tracking them are often stymied in their attempts to gather evidence, said Ioana Bogdana Albani, chief prosecutor in the terrorism and organized crime division of the Romanian Prosecutor General’s Office. ISPs and cloud service providers lack legal certainty about how to protect user privacy while complying with law enforcement demands, speakers said. ISPs are also facing increased demands to counter illegal content, they said.
The FCC must act quickly to promote broadband deployment “by allowing broadband providers to attach to poles at rates, terms and conditions that are as low and close to uniform as possible,” NCTA said in an ex parte filing. The commission has authority “to forbear from application of the telecommunications rate formula and apply the cable rate formula instead,” it said. The association also urged the commission to deny a petition from utility companies proposing to raise attachment rates for any cable operator providing VoIP service. The petition’s request is “fundamentally inconsistent with the recommendations in the [broadband] plan,” NCTA said.