The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials(AASHTO) raised concerns on a 5G Automotive Association waiver request to deploy cellular vehicle-to-everything technology (C-V2X) in the 5.9 GHz band's upper 20 MHz. The band is allocated to dedicated short-range communications. Comments were initially due Thursday at the FCC and some were posted Monday in docket 18-357. Most early commenters supported granting the waiver.
Talks on updating EU copyright law for the digital age stalled as 11 countries balked over several provisions, including creating a news "publisher's right" (Article 11) and making internet platforms liable for infringing content uploaded by users (Article 13). Government representatives "could not agree on the revised text" floated by the Romanian Presidency before a Jan. 21 "trilogue" between the European Commission, Council and Parliament, a diplomatic official said.
Three coordinators of state and local 911 systems said they didn't get warning or immediate direct information from CenturyLink as a network outage last month disrupted such systems nationwide. Officials in Washington state, Colorado and Wyoming's state capital told us they relied on their own information, news reports and Twitter in the early stages as they decided how to respond to problems including static, loss of automatic location data and, in Washington state, hours-long 911 outages.
The full federal government got back to work Monday, after a prolonged partial shutdown that shuttered the FCC, FTC, NTIA and other agencies overseeing communications policy. Incoming FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks will be sworn in Wednesday by Chairman Ajit Pai in an eighth-floor conference room and will participate in the commissioners’ meeting that follows, said industry officials. President Donald Trump signed off Friday on a continuing resolution to reopen the FCC and other shuttered agencies through Feb. 15, after the House passed the measure as expected (see 1901240016).
Despite doomsday scenarios about artificial intelligence, useful data doesn’t exist to determine if the technology would harm U.S. jobs, GAO Chief Scientist Tim Persons told us Friday. “We’re worried about it taking over the world and still can’t answer some basic questions about it,” Persons said after speaking at a Software & Information Industry Association event.
Despite relatively low bids in the first U.S. high-band spectrum auction ended Thursday (see 1901240034), it was a success, regulators and industry officials said. The next step is the start of the 24 GHz auction, which the FCC will announce this week. It plans an auction of the 37, 39 and 47 GHz bands later in the year. “This will allow Americans to see even faster, more competitive, & next-gen broadband services,” Commissioner Brendan Carr tweeted Friday.
Over a dozen court cases on recent FCC actions to spur 5G wireless buildout have largely been consolidated in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and appear likely to be completely consolidated. The D.C. Circuit Friday asked parties to show cause why a final batch of wireless cases shouldn't be transferred to the 9th Circuit, and none objected. The 11th Circuit also is considering an FCC request to transfer to the 9th Circuit a challenge to an August pole attachment order, which the commission had combined with a declaratory ruling prohibiting local and state moratoriums on infrastructure deployment (see 1808090011).
Media deals making their way through federal court -- AT&T/Time Warner at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Disney/Fox at U.S. District Court in Manhattan -- shouldn't face a delay in judicial action due to the partial federal shutdown, antitrust and law experts told us. The month-long shutdown also isn’t seen having much effect on broadcast deals, analysts and attorneys told us.
Frontier Communications pushed back on a scathing service-quality assessment by the Minnesota Commerce Department that said the carrier possibly violated at least 35 laws and rules, based on about 1,000 customer comments. "It maybe is not as large a crisis as the department has portrayed it to be," said Frontier General Counsel Kevin Saville at the Public Utilities Commission's livestreamed Thursday meeting.
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., met Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and former FTC members Wednesday about online privacy, the lawmakers told us Thursday. “My goal is to listen and see what we can do to make sure companies have skin in the game,” Scott told us. The ex-FTC officials talked about preventing future privacy breaches, he said.