Several industries lined up to support the draft Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act going into a House subcommittee hearing Wednesday. The draft legislation, released last week by House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., has now attracted the backing of the cable, satellite and broadcast industries, despite initial outrage and opposition from broadcasters (CD Feb 28 p1) over a controversial provision dropped from the draft. The subcommittee hearing Web page now sports endorsements from NAB, NCTA, DirecTV and Dish, support also reflected in written testimony.

The satellite industry will need to highlight its global impact and role in advancing communications and efficient use of spectrum at the World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-15) next year, said WRC officials and satellite executives Tuesday at the Satellite 2014 conference in Washington. Participants are firming up their positions as they prepare to compete with terrestrial interests for spectrum, they said.

The European Parliament appears likely to back broad data protection changes as well as a nonbinding report on NSA spying in a plenary vote Wednesday. In a debate Tuesday, Parliament members (MEPs) generally supported the proposal for a regulation on processing of personal data, although several voiced misgivings with some provisions. The own-initiative report by the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) Committee, on the impact of mass surveillance on EU citizens’ fundamental rights and trans-Atlantic cooperation, prompted impassioned debate. One center-right political group said it will oppose the report because it jeopardizes vital EU-U.S. trade and other agreements. Lawmakers slammed EU governments for their failure to reach speedy consensus on the data protection proposal and for not taking any action in the face of U.S. and other nations’ spying.

Increased competition in the video industry may have undermined the basis for must-carry rules, argued Latham Watkins cable attorney Matthew Brill at a Federal Communications Bar Association continuing legal education event Monday evening. Recent federal court opinions in cable program carriage cases Comcast v. FCC (CD May 29 p1) and Time Warner, NCTA v. FCC (CD Sept 5 p4) have said that cable’s decreasing market power is eroding the legal basis for many of the provisions from the 1992 Cable Act designed to protect broadcasters, Brill said. Along with recent program carriage cases, the FCBA event touched on Aereo’s case before the Supreme Court.

Unwilling to wait for the FCC to act, Minnesota officials are asking state lawmakers to impose new requirements on telcos to try to improve call completions in rural areas. Under the bill proposed by the Minnesota Department of Commerce, carriers would have to inform callers that they're still trying to connect if a call to rural Minnesota rings for more than 10 seconds. If the call doesn’t go through at all, both the carrier making the call on one end and the one trying to connect it at the other end would have new requirements under SF-2218 (http://bit.ly/NBv4nT). They'd be required to determine why the call failed, notify the caller and the recipient that the call did not go through, and say how they're going to resolve the problem.

The satellite operating community can create more revenue by providing capacity in emerging markets, satellite executives said Tuesday at the Satellite 2014 conference in Washington. New capacity and continuing to find ways of bringing down costs will make the industry more efficient and effective, they said.

Future FCC broadband progress reports are likely to continue to find it’s not being deployed on a reasonable or timely basis, regardless of actual levels of deployment of advanced telecom services, said industry observers in interviews this week. Most legal scholars we spoke to agree Verizon v. FCC (CD Jan 16 p1) gave the agency authority over broadband under Communications Act Section 706(a). That’s a big change from a common earlier read that a negative deployment finding under 706(b) was required to trigger the agency’s broadband authority. But the newfound independent 706(a) authority is unlikely to free the agency to find in 706(b) reports that broadband is being timely deployed, observers say.

The FTC believes continued international stakeholder work in the cyber realm is critical to the agency’s priorities on data privacy and security, said Commissioner Julie Brill Monday at a joint Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development-U.S. Council for International Business event. The FTC has been emphasizing data privacy and security as one of its policy priorities, instituting the “Reclaim Your Name” program and urging Congress to pass legislation addressing data broker oversight, baseline privacy protection and data security regulation. The FTC is emphasizing a need for data deidentification through the development of best practices meant to encourage companies to do everything “ethically possible” to strip personally identifiable information from their data, Brill said. She said she supports companies embedding ethical standards within data algorithms and proposals to create consumer subject review boards.

A coalition of companies and consumer interest groups slammed the latest draft of the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act that House Republicans unveiled last week ahead of Wednesday’s hearing on the bill. A letter was signed by Public Knowledge, the National Consumers League, Free Press, Consumer Action, Writers Guild of America-West, and the AllVid Tech Company Alliance, consisting of Google, TiVo, Best Buy, Mitsubishi, Nagravision, SageTV and Sony. They urged the House Communications Subcommittee to protect Communications Act Section 629. The latest STELA draft incorporates language from legislation that would end the integration ban, which demands cable operators use CableCARDs instead of built-in security in set-top boxes.

The House is expected to take up and easily pass the FCC Process Reform Act Tuesday, with its top sponsor promising broad support on the floor. The chamber is considering HR-3675 (http://1.usa.gov/1nBJst7) under suspension of the rules, which requires a two-thirds majority to pass and is typically used on noncontroversial legislation. The House Commerce Committee cleared the bill unanimously in a bipartisan compromise in December (CD Dec 12 p2) and hailed it as a major sign of cooperation. Previous versions of the bill had foundered amid partisan disagreements.