The Food and Drug Administration’s recently released health information technology (IT) framework draft is a good starting point, but doesn’t address the interconnectedness of health IT devices and the imminent rise of data science, said panelists during the first day of a three-day FDA workshop to discuss the framework. The FCC and Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology also helped organize the event.

Congressional dynamics may have shifted and opened the door to reclassifying broadband as a Title II telecom service, net neutrality proponents working on Capitol Hill told us. As the FCC looks to rewrite and reinstate net neutrality rules, Democrats in both chambers have drummed up support for Title II reclassification rather than relying on Communications Act Section 706, just as one House Democrat and Republicans in both chambers have ripped into the notion. The FCC is expected to vote on a net neutrality NPRM at its Thursday meeting.

In the continued fallout from Superstorm Sandy (CD Nov 16/12 p1), a bill moving through New Jersey’s Assembly would restrict companies’ ability to retire copper phone lines. The measure represents continued fears that companies, particularly Verizon, plan to do away with copper lines statewide and replace that service with Voice Link, as the company did in the seaside borough of Mantoloking, said Democratic Assemblyman Daniel Benson, sponsor of AB-2459 (http://bit.ly/1oLtQU3). The measure is bringing such strong protests from Verizon that Assemblyman Upendra Chivukula, Democratic chairman of the Assembly Telecommunications and Utilities Committee, called a 15-minute speech by a Verizon lobbyist against the proposal among the most impassioned the committee had ever heard.

The FCC violated the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Administrative Procedure Act when it created rules last year meant to curb misuse of the Internet Protocol Captioned Telephone Service (IP CTS), Sorenson and subsidiary CaptionCall said, urging a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Tuesday to strike down the rules. The agency contends it acted within the bounds of ADA and APA, though at least two of the three judges said they had concerns.

No voluntary agreement is taking shape on standards for location accuracy for 911 calls made indoors, and it may be time for the FCC to step in and regulate, commented the National Emergency Number Association. In February, amid concerns raised by commissioners Ajit Pai and Mike O'Rielly, the FCC proposed revised rules for all 911 calls, including standards for indoor calls (CD Feb 21 p1). Pai said proposed deadlines were “aspirational” rather than based on what carriers can realistically be expected to achieve. The FCC posted comments this week in docket 07-114.

A debate within the conservative movement over the nature of intellectual property protections, particularly on how the Founding Fathers viewed IP, is coming to the fore, said IP experts in interviews. An educational group of conservative organizations, led by the Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) project Digital Liberty, have been meeting for “months” to discuss IP issues, including patents, trademarks and copyright, said ATR Executive Director-Digital Liberty Katie McAuliffe. The debate among conservatives boils down to whether copyright is a property right.

The ability for consumers to discover content on streaming devices is a “real and pressing problem,” Scott Rosenberg, Roku vice president-business development, content and services, told the Streaming Media East conference in New York Tuesday. Roku has more than 1,200 apps on its devices now and his team’s “whole job is helping partners get discovered,” he said.

The NAB challenged the FCC Media Bureau March 12 public notice announcing increased scrutiny of deals involving TV station sharing arrangements and contingent financial interests, in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, said a petition for review filed Monday (http://bit.ly/1le9sr7). The processing guidelines (CD March 14 p9), issued by the bureau weeks before the commission voted to make joint sales agreements attributable, violate at the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), exceed the bureau’s delegated authority and “constitutes final agency action subject to judicial review,” NAB told the D.C. Circuit. The bureau declined to comment.

A third draft net neutrality rulemaking notice contains a much more substantial Title II section, FCC and industry officials told us Monday. The draft was set for circulation to commissioners as early as Monday, an agency official said. Each version of the NPRM has devoted more attention to Title II as a possibility, encouraging public interest groups that have been rallying their base for weeks. A protest at the FCC is gathering steam, with several tents set up outside agency headquarters, and a rally planned for Thursday morning when commissioners are to vote on the NPRM, after Chairman Tom Wheeler declined to delay a vote as his colleagues sought (CD May 12 p1). “It’s working,” Free Press said in an email to supporters, urging them to bring “pots, pans or whatever else you can bang on."

High-altitude drones for broadband connectivity are a “major area” of focus for Facebook and its partners in Internet.org, which says it wants to make “affordable basic Internet services available to everyone in the world.” The plan is to operate drones at 65,000 feet to transmit a signal that covers a city-sized area with a medium population density, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a March 28 paper (bit.ly/1gucfL7). It leaves unanswered the origin of the spectrum for Internet connectivity and how the drones will avoid interfering with other spectrum users. Internet.org declined to comment. Other founding partners are Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung.