Congress should investigate the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs that allow it to access phone records (CD June 7 p1) and online communications (CD June 10 p5), said 86 civil liberties groups and Internet companies in a letter to lawmakers Monday (http://bit.ly/11EzTA5). Signatories include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the Center for Democracy and Technology and Knowledge Ecology International as well as browser maker Mozilla, social news site Reddit and meme site 4chan. “This type of blanket data collection by the government strikes at bedrock American values of freedom and privacy” and “violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which protect citizens’ right to speak and associate anonymously and guard against unreasonable searches and seizures that protect their right to privacy,” the groups said in their letter, urging Congress to reform the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act and create “a special committee to investigate, report, and reveal to the public the extent of this domestic spying.” The groups also launched an online petition (www.stopwatching.us) where users can sign on to voice their support for the calls made in the letter.

"The FCC is working to promote expanded opportunities for women,” said acting FCC Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn at the Women in Cable Telecommunications lunch at the NCTA Cable Show Monday. Clyburn said there is a much higher proportion of female engineers working at the FCC than in previous years, and the commission’s Office of Communications is “working to remove barriers to women” in the telecommunications industry. Clyburn said being a woman on the FCC “ratchets” up the pressure of the job, and that learning she would be acting chairwoman was the greatest moment of her professional career.

The FCC Wireless Bureau granted eight licenses to Club 42 CM Limited Partnership, for spectrum for which the company was the high bidder in the 2008 broadband PCS auction. All of the licenses cover parts of California. The bureau took that step after denying a petition by Alpine PCS, which had won the same licenses in an earlier auction, but failed to complete installment payments for the spectrum due in 2002 (http://bit.ly/17D5MNH).

Time Warner Cable said the FCC should create a “bright line rule” barring joint negotiation on retransmission consent, according to an ex parte filing by the cable provider Monday (http://bit.ly/17AMpVA). The TWC letter attacks previous NAB filings supporting the negotiation practice. “There simply is no legal or policy justification for such collusive negotiations,” said TWC. “This anti-competitive practice drives up retransmission consent fees and increases the risks and incidence of programming blackouts, thus imposing significant harms on consumers.” TWC accused NAB of hypocrisy, pointing to instances when broadcasters objected to joint negotiation by other broadcasters, and attacked NAB claims that lower retrans fees would not lead to lower fees for consumers. “While NAB declares that there is no evidence that reducing retransmission consent fees would lower consumers’ bills, that again ignores the record evidence that fees are passed through to consumers and are a direct cause of the higher bills about which consumers have been complaining,” said TWC. The cable operator also blamed “the current regulatory framework” for rising retransmission fees, saying it “exacerbates, rather than curbs, Big Four broadcast stations’ market power by guaranteeing carriage on the basic tier in rate-regulated systems, forcing consumers to purchase the basic tier as a prerequisite to accessing any other programming services, and enforcing anticompetitive territorial-exclusivity agreements.” “Time Warner Cable’s filing is based on a notion that the public and policymakers believe that small and medium-market local TV stations have as much market clout as the second largest cable company in America,” NAB said in response. “That is a fantasy that just won’t fly, particularly given Time Warner Cable’s decades-long abusive treatment of consumers.”

Dish Network is continuing to meet with Sprint Nextel to conduct the due diligence process the companies began late last month and are still negotiating the terms of a deal to buy control of the No. 3 U.S. wireless carrier (http://bit.ly/15Rp25W), it said Monday. Dish submitted an initial bid of $25.5 billion for Sprint in April, months after SoftBank had submitted its own $20.1 billion bid for the carrier. Sprint stockholders are to vote Wednesday on whether to accept SoftBank’s offer.

The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) said it now has 100 members, having added 10 since November. The new member companies are: CableLabs, MediaTek, Mosaik Solutions, NEC Biglobe, Qualcomm, Sharedband, Smith Micro, Spice Digital, Telkom Indonesia and Telecom New Zealand. The WBA said Monday its Next Generation Hotspot and Interoperability Compliance Program for Wi-Fi roaming are “laying the groundwork to make Wi-Fi truly seamless, interoperable and secure."

A three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit panel ruled Friday that the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) must hear a patent case pitting InterDigital Communications against LG Electronics; the ruling overturned the ITC’s earlier decision that the companies enter into arbitration over the dispute, which the Federal Circuit’s majority opinion called “wholly groundless.” InterDigital had filed a complaint with the ITC in 2011 claiming multiple companies, including LG, were infringing its patents on 3G wireless technology; the ITC agreed with LG’s argument that an expired patent licensing agreement between InterDigital and LG required the companies to use an arbitrator. The Federal Circuit ruled that since the licensing agreement between the companies had expired, LG no longer held a license for the 3G technology and therefore could not use the agreement to justify the ITC’s decision. The ITC and LG claimed the Federal Circuit did not have jurisdiction because it could only decide cases involving the ITC where there was a final determination. That was an “overly restrictive” description of the court’s jurisdiction, Judge Sharon Prost wrote in her majority opinion. Judge William Bryson joined the majority opinion. Judge Alan Lourie said in a dissenting opinion that while he agreed with the majority that LG’s argument for arbitration lacked merit, he did not feel the court had jurisdiction (http://1.usa.gov/195P4H6). An ITC spokeswoman declined comment, noting that the agency doesn’t discuss matters under litigation. An InterDigital spokesman also declined to comment. LG did not respond to a request for comment.

T-Mobile offered counterarguments to a Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy study which said if Verizon Wireless and AT&T were barred from bidding in the incentive auction of broadcast TV spectrum, auction revenue could be 40 percent lower than if they are allowed to bid (CD May 1 p12). The authors of the study “erect a strawman in which the Commission would entirely exclude AT&T and Verizon from the auction and, from this faulty premise, assert that auction revenues would be reduced by pro-competitive spectrum aggregation limits,” T-Mobile said Monday in a letter to the FCC. “In fact, no party has proposed to exclude AT&T and Verizon from the incentive auction.” T-Mobile said three of the authors of the study have done work in the past for AT&T. “Permitting the two dominant players to acquire all of the available 600 MHz spectrum would undermine the goal of limited government and, in particular, the successful model of the last 15+ years under which the wireless industry was allowed to operate on the basis of competition rather than intrusive regulation. Excessive concentration in spectrum resources, especially the critical lower-frequency spectrum, will entrench market power and diminish competitive pressure in the wireless industry, which, in turn, will lead to calls for undesirable government intervention over the terms and conditions of wireless service offerings,” T-Mobile said.

Apple’s ad-supported iTunes Radio service, announced Monday, chops a third off the price of Pandora’s annual music subscription fee for customers who choose the $24.95 annual iTunes Match version. Users willing to listen to commercials can use the service for free, Apple said. ITunes Match leverages Apple’s iCloud ecosystem, allowing iTunes Match customers to access all of their music -- from iTunes Radio, imported tracks from CDs and their iTunes libraries stored in iCloud, it said. Another tie-in to the Apple ecosystem is the ability to buy or tag a track on the radio with one click, Apple said. According to an Apple statement, iTunes Radio evolves along with a user’s listening habits. “The more you use iTunes Radio and iTunes, the more it knows what you like to listen to and the more personalized your experience becomes through iTunes,” Apple said. ITunes Radio promises access to “thousands of new songs every week” and to deliver exclusive music from new and popular artists. It will deliver live streams of special events, the company said. According to reports from Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, where iTunes Radio was announced, iTunes Radio will be built into iOS 7, the iOS Music app, Apple TV and iTunes.

The FCC’s inquiry into indecency rules is limited and doesn’t propose to allow swearing or nudity on broadcast television, a Wilkinson Barker attorney said. The commission seeks comments on its policy on fleeting expletives, “those times, usually in live broadcast, where a single profane word or phrase slips out onto the airwaves,” media attorney David Oxenford said on the law firm’s blog (http://bit.ly/13yaNCY). While other issues may arise, “they arise in this context of dealing with these fleeting incidents, not as part of an attempt to turn broadcast TV into some X-rated video service,” he said. These issues are being tackled because the FCC has to clarify the rules after the Supreme Court found that it hadn’t “adequately justified the more aggressive posture that it took on indecency in the last decade,” he said. Comments in docket 13-86 are due June 19, with replies due July 18, the FCC said in a Federal Register notice (http://1.usa.gov/12gfPG4).