Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., believes it’s time for Congress to update telecom laws to account for technological convergence, he told us Wednesday. The House Communications Subcommittee chairman said he intends to work on comprehensive reform in the next Congress starting in January that would address some of the concerns raised by Verizon Executive Vice President Tom Tauke in a New Democrat Network keynote Wednesday. The company is “very much on target” when it says the time has come to overhaul the Telecommunications Act, Boucher said. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said in another interview that her bills on broadband information and early termination fees (ETFs) would answer Tauke’s call to better inform and empower consumers.
Members of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China cited China’s Internet censorship as a violation of trade policies. Witnesses from Google, Go Daddy and the Computer & Communications Industry Association urged changes in foreign and trade policies at the hearing.
A commission once so unpopular in Congress that it lost half its funding is well aware of having overreached and can be trusted now with broader rulemaking authority, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz told the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) conference Thursday in Washington. He sought to dispel advertisers’ fears that expanded commission authority, provided for in a bill passed by the House to create a financial regulatory agency, would produce an agency “on steroids,” in the words of former Chairman Jim Miller, that goes after a broad range of online practices. One of the industry’s biggest fears is apparently off the table: regulation of behavioral advertising.
GameStop is “still being challenged” by PS3 and Wii hardware shortages, acting Chief Financial Officer Robert Lloyd said on a Q4 earnings call Thursday. The retailer is “working with” the console manufacturers “to accelerate through our supply chain any inventory that becomes available,” said Chief Operating Officer Paul Raines.
A commission once so unpopular in Congress that it lost half its funding is well aware of having overreached and can be trusted now with broader rulemaking authority, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz told the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) conference Thursday in Washington. He sought to dispel advertisers’ fears that expanded commission authority, provided for in a bill passed by the House to create a financial regulatory agency, would produce an agency “on steroids,” in the words of former Chairman Jim Miller, that goes after a broad range of online practices. One of the industry’s biggest fears is apparently off the table: regulation of behavioral advertising.
"Daily Update on Capitol Hill Trade Actions" is a daily International Trade Today compilation of the most relevant legislation, hearings, and actions by Congress involving international trade. The following are brief summaries of recent Capitol Hill actions:
The prevalence of sharing intimate details of one’s life on Facebook and Twitter, and several ways that data can be used after initial collection, raise problems for the government in defining what’s “sensitive” and deserves more protection under the law, experts told the FTC’s last privacy workshop Wednesday. Though some groups have called for equal and more protective treatment of all information because of the potential it could become sensitive down the line, commission lawyers were told that a lack of distinctions inevitably would lead to worse treatment for private or embarrassing data. One potential solution is to designate as sensitive certain groups of users, rather than a particular type of data.
The many ways that Web services can track and collect information about behavior online may require intermediaries to decide how much user data to pass along, experts said Wednesday at the last of three FTC workshops about privacy. Although many blocking and management tools such as browser controls, plugins and simple username-password schemes are available to consumers, they aren’t in a good position to judge the policies of websites and services or to manage their online identities, speakers said. A new “trust framework provider,” the Open Identity Exchange, which includes Google, PayPal, Equifax, VeriSign, Verizon and CA (WID March 4 p8), was called a good first step.
China's Ministry of Commerce reports that China's Premier Wen Jiabao recently said China would keep the yuan exchange rate "basically stable" at an "appropriate and balanced level" this year, and that Commerce Minister Chen has said that China's exchange rate should not be politicized. (Notice, dated 03/11/10, available at http://english.mofcom.gov.cn/aarticle/counselorsreport/asiareport/201003/20100306815949.html)
Disparate reactions greeted an order proposed Monday by an administrative law judge with the Illinois Commerce Commission opposing the proposed acquisition by Frontier Communications of Verizon landlines in that state. The companies questioned the order’s logic. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Communications Workers of America, foes of the deal in Illinois and elsewhere, lauded the proposed order.