Negotiations among the three FCC members on the Lifeline order scheduled for a Jan. 31 vote are expected to get under way in earnest later this week. Questions remain about the mechanisms in the order for controlling the size of the Lifeline fund and are expected to be the subject of more discussion headed into the meeting. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski put the Lifeline order on the Sunshine notice, released Tuesday afternoon, scheduling the order for a vote at next week’s meeting and cutting off further lobbying. Both Genachowski and FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell are in Geneva for the early part of this week, attending the opening of the World Radiocommunication Conference.
Meredith’s moves a few years ago to begin consolidating the back office functions of all its TV stations in a few regional hubs has begun to pay off in the form of more efficient station operations, executives said during the company’s fiscal Q2 earnings call Tuesday. Its EBITDA margins approached 40 percent, nearly matching a record high for the unit during a non-election year, CEO Stephen Lacy said.
It could cost millions of dollars for TV stations to start putting just part of their public-inspection files online, the NAB told the FCC. It estimated that putting existing political ad files online could cost $15 million, and said making electronic other parts of the files would cost even more in employee time and other expenses. But nonprofits told the FCC and the Office of Management and Budget that the costs will be limited. OMB will consider the paperwork burdens of the regulator’s proposal to require all TV stations to put the files online through a commission-hosted website.
Verizon logged a loss of $2.02 billion in Q4 due to a one-time pension charge of $3.4 billion, the company said Tuesday. But, helped by the iPhone, the carrier added 1.5 million net retail customers, the most it has added in three years.
As the authors of the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) work to revise their bills, Mozilla, Wikimedia, Yahoo and other technology companies say the bills are ultimately doomed, unnecessary and unlikely to pass. Technology groups have repeatedly told Congress that the bills deny website owners the right to due process of law, mimic Web censoring technologies used by China and Iran, and undermine the security of the Web. Both Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said they're committed to working with stakeholders to address these concerns, but Hill staffers have been mum on exactly what changes are being considered.
GENEVA -- Nigeria was highly critical of the small digital dividend delivered at WRC-07 and the slow-moving approach European countries are taking to accommodating the needs of lesser developed countries. The comments came in a plenary session at WRC-12. European countries have excellent wired networks and received a sufficient digital dividend at WRC-07, a Nigerian official said, but Africa did not. Germany, Russia and Israel said the matter should be addressed at WRC-15.
The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the FCC’s 2009 wireless zoning shot clock order, in a decision handed down Monday. That was a win for wireless carriers who sought the shot clock, over broad opposition from many local government groups. The New Orleans court rejected arguments by Arlington, Texas, that the way the order was developed was “arbitrary and capricious” and a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). The court dismissed a second petition from San Antonio outright on the grounds that it was filed too late and thus the court lacks jurisdiction.
GENEVA -- Arab and African countries at WRC-12 backed allocations for mobile broadband below 790 MHz and a further identification for use by the standardized technology International Mobile Telecommunications-Advanced (IMT-Advanced). Europe won’t be able to make allocations, an official said. The United Arab Emirates appealed for cooperation in meeting “urgent requirements."
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that police must obtain a search warrant before using GPS technology to track criminal suspects. The ruling was the first by the court that tackled the constitutionality of GPS tracking. Privacy advocates were quick to hail the court’s decision in U.S. v Jones (http://xrl.us/bmpkkt) as a major win, though they acknowledged many difficult electronic privacy questions remain unsettled.
Google spent nearly as much as AT&T and Comcast on lobbying in Q4 2011, according to quarterly federal lobbying reports available last Friday. Facebook and Netflix also accelerated their Washington spending as debate over online copyright issues intensified in the fourth quarter. Spectrum legislation, the recently dissolved AT&T/T-Mobile transaction and controversy over possible LightSquared GPS interference also drove communications industry lobbying in the fourth quarter, the disclosure reports showed.