Senate Privacy Subcommittee Chairman Al Franken, D-Minn., and several consumer privacy groups urged administration officials to create privacy rules to protect Americans’ personal data, in separate comments filed with the NTIA. But industry groups representing Internet companies and mobile application developers told the administration that data privacy laws are unnecessary and urged private discussions among some groups to deter proprietary or sensitive information leaks.
Members of Congress from Louisiana, a state still recovering from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, pressed the FCC to act on a waiver request allowing early construction of a public safety network in the 700 MHz band. The letter was signed by both senators and all seven representatives from the state. Baton Rouge filed the initial petition from the state asking for “expedited” action on a waiver in July 2010.
Tribune’s executives were overruled by the hedge funds that are poised to take over the long-bankrupt broadcaster, forcing the station group to renege on a tacit retransmission-consent agreement that would have kept Tribune’s TV stations on DirecTV’s service this weekend, DirecTV said in a complaint filed with the FCC Monday. Tribune has separately asked the commission for permission to transfer its licenses to a group of creditors, but “it nonetheless appears that Tribune may have already granted these entities control of at least its retransmission consent-negotiations,” the complaint said.
It’s incumbent carriers against the world in the latest round of comments regarding the development of an IP-to-IP policy framework, addressed in the further notice of proposed rulemaking as part of the USF/intercarrier compensation order. Commenters also addressed the FCC’s ongoing transition to a bill-and-keep framework. States urged the FCC to proceed at a slower pace or even pause the implementation of intercarrier compensation rules.
Dish, NCTA and the FCC filed their final briefs in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, concerning Dish’s petition to review whether the FCC has jurisdiction to adopt encoding rules for all MVPDs, including satellite. Dish reiterated its claim that Section 629 of the Communications Act does not give the commission jurisdiction to adopt the rules. NCTA further urged the court to deny Dish’s petition.
Concern over the rollout of a 4G LTE network in rural areas and mobile broadband investment were included in reply comments urging the FCC not to revoke LightSquared’s ancillary terrestrial component authority. Other replies in docket 11-109 claimed that revoking the ATC authority and withdrawing a conditional waiver allowing the company to offer terrestrial-only service would be in the public interest. Some of the companies responding also addressed NTIA’s conclusion that LightSquared’s proposed operations would impact aviation GPS receivers (CD Feb 15 p1). Replies were due Friday.
Ethics.gov could still use some improvements, experts say. The White House’s new transparency-promoting database appears to have some glitches, our research found. For example, if one were to search ethics.gov for AT&T and then limit the results to lobbying information, no information shows up. But AT&T lobbying data will show up when searched directly in the lobbying section. Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, experienced similar glitches on the site, he said. These issues probably occur because the site was just recently launched, he said.
The U.K. may be preparing to broaden Internet traffic data retention powers to include social networks, online gaming chat rooms and Skype, as well as real-time monitoring. The plan, expected to be announced next month in the Queen’s Speech, aims to maintain continued availability of communications data as technology changes, the Home Office said. But privacy advocates said the proposal, which was proposed several years ago by the Labor government and then scrapped due to strong opposition, would put the U.K. in the same surveillance league as China and Iran. Moreover, said one, it could be a back-stop if the European Commission decides to make major changes to the controversial EU data retention directive, which is currently under review.
Steps being taken may quicken the switch to all digital textbooks, said David Stevenson, educational software, systems and assessment provider Wireless Generation’s vice president of government affairs. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s goal for K-12 schools to use only digital textbooks within five years may be more reachable due to items discussed in closed meetings among Genachowski, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and education technology industry leaders on Thursday and Friday (CD Feb 30 p12), Stevenson said. In attendance were executives and leaders from Apple, Aruba Networks, Chegg, Discovery Education, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Idaho Department of Education, Inkling, Intel, Knewton, Kno, the Leading Education by Advancing Digital (LEAD) Commission, McGraw-Hill, News Corp., Pearson, Samsung, Sprint and T-Mobile.
The FCC’s Emergency Access Advisory Committee turned back a move for the group to approve a resolution calling on the FCC to adopt short message service (SMS) as a temporary solution for texting to 911, while various stakeholders develop a long-term fix. The motion came from Sheri Farinha, representing the Norcal Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing on the EAAC. The EAAC ultimately approved a resolution expressing general support for adoption of SMS, as a minimum standard, as well as “other technologies as appropriate, with a three-digit short code 911,” as an interim fix. A vote on the resolution came after a sometimes tense discussion, lasting almost an hour.