Wisconsin lawmakers tried to push forward a 5G wireless bill over emotional warnings by public health advocates at a livestreamed Wednesday hearing. The Maine House that day passed a shorter small-cells bill that similarly seeks to streamline small-cells deployment by pre-empting local governments in the right of way. Maine bills challenging recent FCC policies on ISP privacy and net neutrality also advanced, while Ohio and New York lawmakers took up bills on ways local governments could help spread broadband.
The biggest challenges to setting up an ATSC 3.0 station are legal rather than technical, said Pearl TV Engineer Dave Folsom Wednesday on a panel. Technical issues are “straightforward,” but programming agreements, sharing arrangements and rights issues generate an “immense amount of legal work” behind the scenes, said Folsom, who oversees Pearl's ATSC pilot project in Phoenix. “The legal piece is going to be by far the long pole in the tent,” said Sasha Javid, chief operating officer for the Spectrum Consortium, at the ASTC event.
Frontier Communications agreed to sell its wireline operations in the northwest U.S. for $1.35 billion to investment firms, including one founded and run by a cable entrepreneur Steve Weed. It continues a trend of asset sales of around that size by telcos throughout the country. More wireline assets in other parts of the country may also be on the block, noted Wells Fargo's Jennifer Fritzsche. She and others noted that some of Frontier's assets now being sold were themselves previously acquired from others.
The digital divide is narrowing "substantially," with Americans without a 25/3 Mbps connection dropping from 26.1 million at the end of 2016 to 21.3 million a year later, the FCC said Wednesday in its 2018 broadband deployment report. But the agency's minority Democratic commissioners dissented, saying the report is built on a shaky foundation of invalid data -- sentiments echoed by some observers. "The rosy picture ... is fundamentally at odds with reality," Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said. The agency withdrew and reworked an earlier draft due to "drastically overstated" deployment data from one ISP (see 1905010205).
Questions are being raised at the FCC on parts of the robocalling declaratory ruling, set for a commissioner vote June 6 (see 1905150041). The biggest questions are about the decision to press forward without seeking comment on what some see as a vague “reasonable analytics” standard for blocking even lawful calls, said lawyers involved in the proceeding. Consumer groups hope the FCC will approve the ruling.
The House and Senate Commerce committees are likely to begin focusing on whether to reauthorize the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act, during two upcoming hearings, but those panels will only be a first act in the debate, lawmakers and lobbyists told us. Both committees are expected to have hearings during the first week of June on media market issues, seen as a way to set the stage for the STELA debate (see 1905150062 and 1905210071). Lawmakers' interest in talking about STELA has risen in recent months, particularly after Senate Commerce Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., called recertification of the statute a must-pass bill (see 1902270018 and 1903150045). The 2014 STELA renewal expires at the end of 2019.
The FTC should add at least 500 new privacy staffers so agency enforcement can keep pace with the digital economy, Intel Global Privacy Officer David Hoffman blogged Monday. Intel released its latest iteration of a federal comprehensive privacy bill, declaring a “privacy crisis.” The Consumer Protection Bureau’s Division of Privacy and Identity Protection has about 50 full-time employees. About 500 employees are within Consumer Protection overall and about 600 within Competition.
An uptick in privacy complaints and the first investigations and fines mark the end of the first year of the EU general data protection regulation. GDPR became effective May 25, 2018. Data protection authorities (DPAs) told us they're seeing increased citizen awareness of the law as well as more inquiries from companies about compliance. While compliance appears to be on the rise, businesses continue to struggle with the rules, with some in America's tech sector calling for a complete review of the GDPR and urging the U.S. not to copy it.
While questions have come from its own eighth floor and from the Commerce Department about the role the FCC should take in orbital debris oversight, space experts tell us it's not clear who, if anyone, could fill the agency's role. Also last week, Commissioner Brendan Carr noted his hopes (see 1905090031) the agency gets input from expert agencies like NASA. He called this literally "rocket science," speaking on C-SPAN's The Communicators. Who should be the orbital debris czar "is the central question of the entire space traffic management debate," said Secure World Foundation technical adviser Brian Weeden. He was among the experts we interviewed.
The promise of a rapid buildout of 5G infrastructure, especially across rural communities, justifies moving the U.S. from a market with four major wireless providers to three, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr suggested last week in an interview on C-SPAN. There appear to be enough commissioner votes to approve T-Mobile's buy of Sprint, following promises the combined company would commit to building out 5G infrastructure within three years to 97 percent of the U.S. population (see 1905200051). DOJ hasn't publicly weighed in.