The Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee will refocus, at least in part, on enforcement issues, now that its initial work on spectrum sharing is largely complete. Members approved a new enforcement committee during a meeting at NTIA headquarters (see separate report in this issue). NTIA released a document (http://1.usa.gov/14I65pg) on suggestions for future issues that deserve CSMAC attention. CSMAC member Dale Hatfield, a former FCC and NTIA official, suggested the launch of the enforcement committee. “The way I envision it, it goes beyond just the sort of normal co-channel, adjacent interference, but also goes to issues like ... jamming, incidental radiation, all kinds of interference as well,” he said. Hatfield said enforcement will have to be built into future spectrum rules “right from the beginning.” “There are people who are actively out there today ... the renegade FM stations in New York City,” said Dennis Roberson, CSMAC member from the Illinois Institute of Technology. “They're absolutely illegal and they're out there in large numbers today and we are not able to enforce existing rules for well-known systems.” “In order to accommodate the explosive growth in wireless networks of all types, wireless communications devices and systems must increasingly operate in closer proximity in frequency, space and time and, accordingly, the risk of disruptive and harmful interference is inevitably increased,” Hatfield suggested in written comments incorporated into the NTIA document. “In addition, increased sharing of spectrum between federal government and non-federal devices and systems creates new challenges in terms of institutional relationships and interagency processes for detecting, identifying, locating, mitigating and reporting interference sources.” The purpose of the group would be to “help the NTIA develop new or revised strategies for responding more efficiently and effectively to the fundamental technological, operational and other trends that continue to create an increasingly complex interference and enforcement environment,” the document said. NTIA also asked CSMAC to look at how to provide the government with greater flexibility and options through access to non-federal bands and a committee was formed on that topic as well. “Federal agencies and particularly the Department of Defense need significant amounts of spectrum for large training exercises, however, the United States cannot afford to obligate so much spectrum all the time for such exercises,” NTIA said. “What approaches to authorization, coordination would facilitate access to spectrum for training? Should DOD expect to pay license holders for that access? Should DOD expect to pay for access even where the license holder does not provide coverage?” Other working groups are to examine transitional sharing, spectrum management via databases and quantification of federal spectrum use.

Public Knowledge released a white paper (http://bit.ly/12jFoXT) expanding on its “five fundamentals” for policymakers to consider as the telephone industry transitions from copper to fiber and IP-based systems. “We are starting to have things already go wrong as part of this transition,” said PK Senior Vice President Harold Feld on a conference call with reporters. Rural call completion is the “most obvious” example, he said, along with Fire Island residents being “forcibly transitioned” from one technology to another. Meanwhile, infrastructure is “rotting in the ground” and outages are becoming “increasingly routine,” said Feld, who co-authored the paper. State legislatures frequently take bills written by the American Legislative Exchange Council, pushed by lobbyists from the biggest telecom firms, and “deregulate everything even before the conversation begins,” Feld said. PK’s “hope” in releasing the white paper is that state and federal lawmakers will “take the time” to understand the real implications, Feld said: “This has been a debate about regulation rather than a debate about values.” Senior Staff Attorney Jodie Griffin, the other co-author, said it gives a “deeper and more historical case” for the five principles: service to all Americans; competition and interconnection; consumer protection; network reliability; and public safety. “The U.S. can’t be the first industrialized nation to step back from the goal of 100 percent penetration of basic voice service,” she said.

Dish Puerto Rico and Puerto Rico-based telco Claro partnered to offer customers bundled services, including Dish’s pay-TV service and Claro’s Internet, wireless and phone services. The bundled services will be sold at Claro and Dish retail locations beginning next month, Dish said in a Wednesday news release (http://bit.ly/143GQ1A). The partnership “will expand the choices available to customers in Puerto Rico,” it said. The companies will release more information and consumer offerings when the services are available next month, Dish said.

The Competitive Carriers Association and Intrado will partner to give CCA members the opportunity to provide text-to-911 services to their subscribers through Intrado’s TXT29-1-1 service, said a CCA news release Wednesday. The TXT29-1-1 is a “proven, production-deployed service with the flexibility to operate in multiple public safety environments,” said the association. It said the partnership will help competitive carriers meet the FCC’s requirement that all carriers provide a “bounce back” message in areas where text-to-911 is not in place by September (http://bit.ly/1dVzxHU).

The Digital Advertising Alliance released self-regulatory privacy guidelines for mobile platforms Wednesday (http://bit.ly/13b7Dlp). The guidelines include many of the same principles in DAA’s self-regulatory principles for online behavioral ads, and similarly emphasize that ad networks should notify consumers about online behavioral ads, or cross-app advertising in the mobile space, and should allow consumers to opt out. The guidelines also require ad networks and app developers not only to notify users, but to also obtain “affirmative authorization” from users before collecting their geolocation information and address-book data. The DAA promised the new guidelines last month (CD June 6 p6). NTIA, which has been working with mobile privacy stakeholders to develop its own code of conduct for apps’ short-form privacy policies, is scheduled to hold its final meeting on that code Thursday (CD July 22 p14).

Pushing content from a mobile device to a TV screen -- a content-sharing feature that Samsung debuted in its AllShare technology at the Galaxy 4 launch last spring -- pushed further into the technology mainstream this week. Verizon and Motorola bowed a new family of Droid phones, including the Mini, Ultra and Maxx, with Wi-Fi Direct-based Miracast under the hood. And Google’s new Asus-built 7-inch Nexus 7 tablet -- announced Wednesday -- can be paired with a $35 device called Chromecast, which plugs into the USB port on an HDTV, enabling viewers to “cast” online content to the TV screen. Microsoft, meanwhile, announced embedded support for Miracast last spring in Windows 8.1. It could be a steep climb for all of the technologies, said John Buffone, analyst with NPD Group. According to NPD data, 94 percent of smartphone and tablet users aren’t aware of Miracast since the certification of the technology last September. The primary challenges for all of the sharing technologies are “more or less the same,” Buffone said, including delivering features consumers want in an easy-to-use manner and generating awareness. Google’s Chromecast works with Netflix, YouTube, Google Play Movies & TV, and Google Play Music, Google said. More apps, “like Pandora,” are coming soon, said Google’s Sundar Pichai, senior vice president-Android, Chrome & Apps, in a blog post, calling Chromecast an “easy solution” for viewing content from mobile devices on USB-equipped TVs throughout the house. Google is including a three-month free subscription to Netflix with the device, which could be a “small, but important positive” for Netflix subscriber growth in the second half, “depending on consumer excitement for Chromecast,” said BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield. After connecting Chromecast, viewers can use a smartphone, tablet or laptop to browse and cast content to the TV, eliminating the need for a remote control for functions including play and pause and volume up or down. Users can multitask while casting programs -- send emails or surf the Web -- while watching TV, Pichai said. The device works across platforms including Android tablets and smartphones, iPhones and iPads and Chrome for Mac and Windows, with more to come, he said. A new feature in the Chrome browser, currently in beta, allows viewers to project any browser tab to the TV, including images from a photo-sharing site or a video clip. “We're excited for people to try it out and give us their feedback,” Pichai said. Google has developed Google Cast, a technology that enables developers to build “consistent, intuitive” multiscreen experiences across mobile devices and TVs, Pichai said. Google launched a preview version of Google Cast for developers to incorporate into their apps, Pichai said. More supported apps are “coming soon,” and Google expects the technology to be embedded in hardware products in the future, he said.

The “gray market” for counterfeit mobile phones will continue to contract through the end of 2013, IHS iSuppli’s China Research Service said Wednesday. Worldwide shipments of counterfeit mobile phones are expected to drop by 12 percent in 2013, the China Research Service said. Shipments of the counterfeits peaked in 2011 at 250.4 million gray-market phones; 194.6 million gray-market phones will ship through the end of this year, and 173.8 million are expected to ship in 2014, the China Research Service said. The gray market has been contracting as sales of feature phones have decreased dramatically in recent years, the China Research Service said. The market for ultra-low cost handsets and smartphones has continued to grow, but is not enough to offset the drop in feature phone sales. “A combination of supply and demand factors is causing demand to decline for gray-market cellphones,” said Kevin Wang, IHS’s director-China research. “On the demand side, the consumers in emerging markets who used to be the major purchasers of gray-market cellphones increasingly are preferring brand-name handsets. On the supply side, some gray-market handset makers have become branded manufacturers in order to promote their own names in developing countries” (http://bit.ly/12jACtl).

Copyright protection should not be weakened for the sake of potential technological innovation, Copyright Alliance Executive Director Sandra Aistars wrote in her prepared testimony for Thursday’s House Intellectual Property Subcommittee copyright hearing. In examining the Copyright Act, subcommittee members should “strive for a well functioning copyright act that will unite the interests of all stakeholders to a common goal” and not “proceed from the basis of any particular business model,” she wrote. Aistars suggested lawmakers use the oversight role of the committee “to encourage law enforcement to take seriously criminal violations of the copyright law, and it can encourage all stakeholders in the Internet ecosystem to proactively take commercially reasonable, technologically feasible measures to reduce the theft of intellectual property.” The need for strong copyright protection “is today, at an all-time high” due to the ways visual media can be shared online, said Eugene Mopsik, executive director of the American Society of Media Photographers, in his prepared testimony. “The advent of the digital era has made it fast, easy and simple for images to be stolen or otherwise infringed,” he said. Without copyright protection, the future of professional photographers and “the integrity of our visual history” would be at risk, Mopsik wrote. Thursday’s hearing is also scheduled to include testimony from Getty Images General Counsel John Lapham, Stereo D President William Sherak and Yep Roc Records cofounder Tor Hansen.

RST Global Communications expanded its broadband network coverage in North Carolina from 500 to 3,000 miles over the last seven months, it said in a news release Wednesday (http://reut.rs/13d1p5o). “The aggressive growth was made possible through additional network builds and recent mergers and acquisitions.” It described “investment in fiber built by MCNC through the Golden LEAF Rural Broadband Initiative, the recently completed $144 million expansion of the North Carolina Research and Education Network.” It’s a “core out” all-fiber underground network, its speeds reaching 10 Gbps, said the company.

The National Health Information Sharing & Analysis Center (NH-ISAC) is leading development of a healthcare sector version of the Cybersecurity Framework that the National Institute of Standards and Technology is developing in conjunction with industry partners, the group said Wednesday. NH-ISAC co-hosted NIST’s third framework development workshop July 10-12 at the University of California-San Diego. NH-ISAC’s role in developing the Cybersecurity Framework “provides an incredible opportunity for the nation’s health sector to have a defining voice in the design and implementation of an ‘actionable’ cybersecurity framework representing what is critical for operating environments including engaging senior management at all levels,” said NH-ISAC Executive Director Deborah Kobza in a news release (http://bit.ly/18A285h). NIST will host its final framework development workshop Sept. 11-13 at the University of Texas at Dallas.