CTIA will ask a federal judge Oct. 20 to block enforcement of a San Francisco law requiring cellphone retailers to make disclosures provided by the city about health questions concerning radiation (CD Oct 4 p18). A hearing is scheduled then before U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco on a motion for preliminary injunction that the association filed late Tuesday. It accompanied a complaint amending one that had been lodged against a previous version of the ordinance and then put on hold.
The Department of Energy should “defer” pursuit of “conventional regulation” of set-top boxes and instead “participate in and support” the Energy Star program for the devices, the CEA said in comments. Besides being difficult to “properly define,” the boxes are “evolving in numerous ways that affect total power consumption of the household configuration … making single-product regulation possibly improperly focused and even counterproductive to overall energy efficiency,” the group said.
The FCC confirmed that Chairman Julius Genachowski will circulate a proposed order that he hopes will lead to reform the universal service and intercarrier compensation regimes. The FCC called a briefing with reporters where agency officials spoke on the condition they not be named and said Genachowski will deliver a speech Thursday laying out some of his proposals. FCC officials declined to discuss specifics in Tuesday’s briefing, set for Thursday at 10:30 a.m. at FCC headquarters, instead reiterating their talking points about why reform was necessary.
Public Knowledge asked the FCC to clarify how it and other organizations can challenge whether redacted information in the AT&T/T-Mobile and other proceedings should be made part of the public record. Too much of the time, AT&T and T-Mobile have stamped as confidential information they want to keep out of the public view, which is not the kind of “competitively-sensitive information” the FCC ought to protect in protective orders, Public Knowledge said in a letter signed by Legal Director Harold Feld (http://xrl.us/bmfba3).
All VoIP calls look and feel like traditional phone calls and as a result, the FCC needs to protect the public by imposing 911 location-accuracy requirements on outgoing only VoIP calls, the Association for Public-Safety Communications Officials told the agency in comments on a July further notice of proposed rulemaking. But the VON Coalition said imposing the mandate on outgoing only services is a step too far. The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions said requirements should be based on the way a device is physically attached to the access network, not on the nature of the voice technology. ATIS said industry will need some time to develop technology needed for any mandate.
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Comcast’s vision of delivering high-quality video services to multiple devices in the home, among them its new hybrid IP-QAM device in field trials, includes HTML5 as an application platform, said Senior Vice President Steve Reynolds. At the TVNext conference Tuesday, he said the emergence of idiosyncratic application platforms has been a step in the wrong direction.
To make networks safer from botnets and other malware, public-private partnerships and a minimal role for government are the best approaches, said officials from the FCC, Commerce Department and other agencies. Any framework for protecting and notifying end-users of an attack should be voluntary and comprised of input from multiple stakeholders, they said Tuesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Recent efforts in Washington to reduce government spending have led to another barrier to a wide-scale use of hosting of government payloads on commercial satellites, panelists said Tuesday at the Hosted Payload Summit in Washington. While hosted payloads have long been touted as a cost-saving tool, some satellite operators have had trouble making that point because hosted payloads are considered “something separate” and extra, said Rich Pang, director of hosted payloads at SES Government Solutions. It’s common to hear from the government that there’s “no new money,” he said.
The Supreme Court is increasingly seen as likely to side with broadcasters and rule against the government by striking down the FCC’s censuring of broadcasts with fleeting expletives or brief nudity, industry lawyers specializing in the First Amendment said Tuesday. They said last term’s rulings in cases touching on violent videogames in Brown, access to data in IMS Health and allowing a funeral protest in Snyder all show a court generally inclined to side with First Amendment petitioners. Panelists spoke at an event at the MPAA that was organized by the Media Institute.
The FCC might not adopt any existing plan to revamp the Universal Service Fund in its entirety, state officials said at a webinar by the National Regulatory Research Institute Monday. Even if the commission is to adopt an order for the Oct. 27 meeting, it might not be a final order, said James Cawley, chair of the state member of the Federal/State USF Joint Board.