Rep. James Langevin, D-R.I., prefers a comprehensive bill, rather than one that is piecemeal, to establish a cybersecurity policy, he said Wednesday at a Brookings Institution event: “I'd like to see a major piece of legislation make it through the Congress this year.” However, “I don’t know how realistic that is,” said Langevin, who co-chairs the House Cybersecurity Caucus and formerly chaired the House Homeland Cybersecurity Subcommittee: “We're waiting to see what the Senate will do.” The important thing is to get something done this year, he added.
Public safety believes it has enough GOP votes on the House Communications Subcommittee to approve an amendment there that would give them the 700 MHz D-block, a top Public Safety Alliance official said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. Dick Mirgon, the immediate past president of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials, and John Walsh from America’s Most Wanted urged Commerce Committee leaders to stop delaying a spectrum markup in the Communications Subcommittee. “There is no reason” for the messing around that’s going on with this, Walsh said.
The Justice Department and FCC worked very closely together to review Comcast’s purchase of control in NBCUniversal, approved by the government and completed in January, officials from both agencies said during an American Bar Association webcast Wednesday. They laid out some behind-the-scenes interagency work in reviewing the multibillion-dollar deal, with collaboration that a lawyer for Comcast called “unprecedented.” Justice continues oversight of the joint venture Comcast and NBCUniversal created with former NBCU parent General Electric to house all of their programming assets. There are regular meetings of a committee overseeing Comcast’s compliance with terms of the department’s antitrust settlement with the company. That’s according to committee member and DOJ Antitrust Division attorney Yvette Tarlov.
Sprint Nextel reduced its net loss to $301 million in Q3 from $911 million it lost a year ago, and signed a non-binding cooperation agreement with Clearwire to work on specifications for the LTE network, CEO Dan Hesse said during a conference call Wednesday. Executives expect to sell one million iPhones in Q4 and predicted $7 billion to $8 billion in value from Sprint’s four-year contract with Apple.
SAN FRANCISCO -- An official of the U.S. government’s international-media agency explained Wednesday to a high-tech policy audience facts of Washington life and the frustrations they can produce. “It takes … a year to get 10,000 bucks out the door” for proxy-server technology to get around foreign blocking of the government’s news and views sites, said Michael Meehan, a public relations executive, member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors and chairman of its Global Internet Freedom Committee.
The New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission is working with the state legislature on appropriate retail regulations for phone companies, said Katherine Bailey, telecom director with the agency. Among the issues under consideration is regulatory treatment for ILECs like FairPoint, which had service quality issues after it took over Verizon’s northern New England landlines in 2009, she told us. The company, which claimed it had made progress improving service quality, is asking regulators and legislators in New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont to relax ILEC regulation, officials said.
AT&T is clinging “to an outdated and unworkable conception of intercarrier compensation” when it lobbies against cable operators’ request to allow CLECs to charge the same access rates as ILECs even when the CLECs don’t terminate calls, Comcast, Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable said in a letter filed Monday (CD Oct 24 p6). The dispute between the two companies flared up late last week, as the sunshine rules took effect and closed lobbying on the pending Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation system order. AT&T was trying “to maintain ILEC-centric rules,” but is striving “mightily to obscure a simple, fundamental point,” the cable companies said.
State and consumer advocates pushed the FCC to adopt tough anti-cramming rules, but industry said that even if problems exist they can be fixed without regulations. Comments came pouring into docket 11-116 Monday and Tuesday.
SAN FRANCISCO -- A State Department official denounced an Internet code of conduct proposed in the U.N. General Assembly by China, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan last month. Michael Posner, the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, said Tuesday the system would replace the historical “multi-stakeholder governance” of the Internet with a “system dominated by centralized government control.” At the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference, he defended the U.S. government’s emphasis on intellectual property protection, “sometimes seen as in conflict with Internet freedom.”
A district judge appeared skeptical that Sprint Nextel had made a plausible argument that an AT&T/T-Mobile combination would harm competition, in oral argument Monday at the U.S. District Court in Washington. Sprint Nextel and C Spire had asked the court to deny an AT&T motion to exclude the two competitors from the lawsuit filed by the U.S. Justice Department against the AT&T/T-Mobile deal. Sprint and C Spire each filed antitrust complaints against the deal. Sprint and C Spire also argued for their separate motion that would give the competitors access to information learned in discovery in the government’s case against AT&T.