A large amount of money and the future of spectrum policy “hang on the outcome of a brave and untested idea dreamed up by economists and enabled by engineers,” said NAB General Counsel Rick Kaplan of the start of the incentive auction, in a blog post Tuesday. Kaplan credited FCC staff for the auction's construction, along with former FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and current FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. “Broadcasters will continue to work with the Commission” to minimize damage to low-power TV and translator services, Kaplan said. “What happens next is anyone’s guess, but the FCC staff can certainly be proud that they worked incredibly hard under tight timelines to bring us to the doorstep of this exciting auction," he said.

An independent compliance officer (ICO) gave AT&T high marks for its efforts to satisfy FCC conditions on its 2015 takeover of DirecTV (see 1507280043). Donald Stern, a managing director of Affiliated Monitors who was named ICO under an agency monitoring process, said AT&T met its reporting obligations for the transaction, including submitting a report Jan. 27 on its compliance with conditions. "The staff and leadership of AT&T has been cooperative and supportive of the ICO," he said in his report to the commission, which was posted Monday in docket 14-90. Stern noted compliance and evaluation complexities for AT&T and himself, and said he hadn't been able to independently verify substantive information provided by the company. But he said he had been able to review AT&T's descriptions of its compliance systems and processes, and had begun testing to validate company data. Stern said AT&T met its reporting duties for complying with four conditions he reviewed: (1) to deploy fiber to the premises (FTTP) to 12.5 million new mass-market customer locations (only 1.5 million of which can be in new, "greenfield" housing developments) within four years; (2) to offer 1 Gbps service to schools and libraries eligible for E-rate discounts in, or contiguous with, areas where AT&T has FTTP service; (3) not to favor affiliated programming over unaffiliated programming, including through an exemption of affiliated services from usage-based allowances; and (4) to devise a program to boost broadband adoption by low-income households in the company's wireline footprint. He said initial verification testing "tends to confirm the reliability of reported FTTP information, but more testing is needed." AT&T data were generally redacted. Stern didn't report on an Internet interconnection disclosure condition, which is the subject of a separate review process.

FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said the FCC should take a closer look at whether Netflix violated commission rules in a number of areas, after allegations it throttled its own transmission to AT&T and Verizon devices for five years (see 1603250050). O’Rielly said emphatically he opposes calls to subject edge providers like Netflix to the 2015 net neutrality rules. “A company cannot knowingly make misrepresentations and inaccurate statements before the Commission,” O’Rielly said in a speech to the American Action Forum. “In fact, doing so violates Commission rules intended to protect the integrity of the Commission and our decisions. We need to closely examine filings that were made for potential violations in light of this new information. It appears that Netflix made accusations of wrongdoing by ISPs, all the while knowing that its own practices were one of the causes of consumer video downgrading.” The FCC also should acknowledge Netflix wasn't “some passive participant when it came to the formation [o]f the Commission’s Title II mandates for net neutrality,” he said. “It was a key representative of the supposed marketplace the rules were designed to protect: the over-the-top video distribution business. Many rules were based on the representations made by Netflix and other similarly situated entities, including Google.” The FCC posted O’Rielly’s remarks.

Participants will discuss two drafts at Tuesday's NTIA meeting on developing best practice privacy guidelines for facial recognition technology used by commercial entities (see 1603180012). John Verdi, NTIA director-privacy initiatives, said in a message sent Friday that the goal is to try to get consensus on one of the documents, which were circulated with comments from a working group. One of the drafts said the best practices, based on the Fair Information Practice Principles, are designed to provide a "flexible and evolving approach" to using the technology and keeping up with advancements. The FIPPs are a set of eight principles that are rooted in the tenets of the Privacy Act of 1974. The draft said it provides a "general roadmap" to help companies "recognize differing objectives, risks and individual expectations" for the different technological applications. Some issues covered include transparency, data minimization, use limitation and security safeguards. The guidelines won't apply to data aggregation uses nor for non-identifying analysis, and they also won't apply to law enforcement, government, intelligence and military entities.

Several low-power TV broadcasters filed another appeal of aspects of the incentive auction in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, according to court documents. Free Access & Broadcast Telemedia and Word of God Fellowship were recently denied an emergency stay of the auction in their ongoing case challenging an FCC rejection of their appeal of the auction (see 1603170054). In a petition for review filed Monday, the two LPTV broadcasters were joined by Signal Above, Grace Worship Center and Excellence in Christian Broadcasting in a challenge of different aspects of the auction. The petition asks the court to vacate the FCC orders that included rules designed to mitigate the auction's effects on LPTV and an order on when LPTV broadcasters have to vacate their spectrum to make way for wireless users. The rules should be overturned because they violate the Administrative Procedure Act and violate the Spectrum Act provision preventing the FCC from altering LPTV spectrum rights, the petition said.

North American Portability Management said completion of key transition agreements is taking longer than expected in the FCC's planned shift of local number portability administrator (LNPA) duties from Neustar to iconectiv (Telcordia). The "Transition Oversight Manager," PwC, continues to track transition risks, with dates for major milestones dependent on completion of the iconectiv master services agreement (MSA) and the Neustar transition services contract, said an NAPM status report posted in docket 95-116 Friday. "Completion of these agreements is extending beyond previously expected timeframes. Agreement on key transition requirements is necessary in order to complete the iconectiv master services agreement and the Neustar transition services contract," the report said. The MSA was "substantially completed" on Oct. 26, and NAPM voted to approve it on Nov. 6, conditioned on its submission to the FCC and subsequent commission approval without substantive changes, it said. PwC has hosted three "well attended" LNPA transition outreach webcasts since December (materials available here), NAPM noted.

Parties to the FCC's special access review continued to disagree about market data analysis and possible further FCC regulation of incumbent telco business broadband services. AT&T and CenturyLink submitted a filing posted Friday in docket 05-25 that included a declaration from various professors that "responds to and rebuts" the declaration from Jonathan Baker filed March 2 on behalf of Level 3 and Windstream. AT&T and CenturyLink said their declaration showed the Baker declaration was flawed and shouldn't be used by the FCC to find that special access competition requires the presence of at least three CLECs with their own connections to a building. TDS Metrocom filings disagreed with AT&T and CenturyLink arguments against FCC regulation of ethernet services. "The Commission does not have to reverse its forbearance orders to affirm that the [Bells] must sell wholesale Ethernet at an avoided cost discount," TDS said. A Sprint filing said the incumbent telcos were asking the FCC "to ignore the dearth of special access competition on the promise that cable providers have upended the special access marketplace and will soon emerge as fierce competitors" to ILECs. A Comcast filing posted Monday summarized a discussion with FCC staffers in which the company's officials provided overviews of their business service offerings, including of ethernet services. A Windstream filing summarized a meeting with FCC General Counsel Jonathan Sallet in which it said "the preservation of DS1 and DS3 capacity UNEs after the transition to IP-based or fiber networks is an important component to remedies for ILEC market power in special access markets." DS1s (1.5 Mbps) and DS3 (45 Mbps) are digital special access circuits and UNEs are unbundled network elements, such as circuits, sold at wholesale discounts.

A broad collection of public interest groups, led by New America’s Open Technology Institute, urged the FCC to clamp down on zero rating, saying the net neutrality rules are now more than a year old but ISPs “like Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile are using new ‘zero-rating’ plans to undermine the spirit and the text of the rules,” the group said in a letter Monday. “Zero-rating allows ISPs to exempt certain content from customers’ data caps. As currently offered, these plans enable ISPs to pick winners and losers online or create new tolls for websites and applications.” Zero rating plans are “a serious threat to the Open Internet,” the groups said. “They distort competition, thwart innovation, threaten free speech, and restrict consumer choice -- all harms the rules were meant to prevent.” The plans come in various flavors, the groups said. "Comcast’s plan directly favors its own content over competitors’," the letter said. "Plans from AT&T and Verizon charge application providers a fee in order to be zero-rated. T-Mobile zero-rates select video providers but only those that meet its substantial and sometimes burdensome technical requirements." Consumers Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Press, Greenpeace, the Greenlining Institute, the Media Alliance, Moveon.org, The Utility Reform Network and the United Church of Christ were among the signers of the letter. The FCC has sought information from the various companies with zero-rated offerings (see 1512170030). “To claim that zero rating is anything other than good for consumers makes zero sense,” said Jonathan Spalter, chairman of Mobile Future. “New service options that make it easier for consumers to afford access to more content is a good thing. Free mobile data offerings give consumers more than they pay for, which is particularly important for price-sensitive consumers. If the FCC is trying to encourage competition and consumer choice, it will reject efforts to thwart carriers from vying for customers with differentiated new service offerings.” Matthew Berry, chief of staff to FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, tweeted about Netflix (see 1603250050) and the zero-rating letter Monday. “Days after revelation Netflix was secretly engaged in discriminatory throttling, so-called ‘public interest’ groups target ... zero-rating,” he said. “Last few days prove that many self-proclaimed ‘public interest’ organizations are really ‘Netflix interest’ organizations.”

The FBI has found a way to bypass an iPhone security feature and gain access to the data on a device used by one of the shooters in the San Bernadino, Calif., terror attacks. The Justice Department prosecutors said in a court filing that investigators had “accessed the data stored on” the shooter’s Apple iPhone and no longer needed the help of the manufacturer. They asked a court to vacate an earlier ruling forcing Apple to provide assistance. The development averts a legal battle between Apple and DOJ that had starkly divided national security and data privacy interests. The bypassed feature erases all data on an iPhone after 10 unsuccessful attempts to enter a user's passcode.

Microsoft received 537 requests from July to December "to remove links to revenge porn photos or videos from Bing search results, or to remove access to the content itself when shared on OneDrive or Xbox Live," the company said in a blog post Friday. Citing its latest content removal request report, Steve Lippman, corporate responsibility director, said the company took action on 338 requests that met the criteria for removal. In the other cases, Microsoft needed more information or the content didn't contain nudity or didn't generally meet the accepted definitions of revenge porn, he said. It's the first time the report contained information on requests for removing nude or sexually explicit photos or videos of people published online without their permission. Citing its latest law enforcement requests and U.S. national security orders reports, Lippman said Microsoft received 39,083 legal requests for customer information from law enforcement agencies in the second half of 2015 -- 3,855 more than in the first half. Just over 2 percent of the requests resulted in the disclosure of content that customers created, shared or stored, based on court orders or warrants. On the latest Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requests, Microsoft received 0 to 499 FISA orders, seeking disclosure of content in 15,500 to 15,999 accounts. In the previous period, it received 0 to 999 orders for content affecting 18,000 to 18,999 accounts, Lippman said. Microsoft also got 0 to 499 national security letters in the latest period, compared with 0 to 999 in the prior period. "Requests from law enforcement agencies in five countries -- United States, United Kingdom, Turkey, France and Germany -- represent 76.8 percent of total requests in the second half of 2015," he wrote.