Privacy groups, lawmakers and former employees are urging the Senate to swiftly fill the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), a key intelligence advisory group that has been without quorum since January 2017.
FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn said Thursday another key staffer, Chief of Staff David Grossman, is leaving her office. Clyburn announced his departure in a news release, which also discussed the departure of wireline aide Claude Aiken (see 1803220014), who's expected to be named president of the Wireless ISP Association. But with Senate Democrats yet to say for certain whom they collectively want as Clyburn’s replacement, she hasn't said when she'll leave the FCC. Clyburn spoke to the Competitive Carriers Association Thursday in a speech that had the feel of being a victory lap. She didn’t discuss her plans.
The FCC could release some basic plans about disbursement of new repacking reimbursement funds approved by Congress (see 1803230038) by the April 7 NAB Show, broadcast attorneys and industry officials told us. The agency will have to create new procedures and issue documents such as cost catalogs for reimbursing radio, low-power TV (LPTV) and translators, so any information would likely be very preliminary, they said. The addition of $350 million could also affect the upcoming second allocation of reimbursement funds for full-power stations, attorneys said.
Europe is lagging behind the U.S. in 5G preparedness now, but it doesn't have to, GSMA officials and others told us. There are many ongoing 5G-related activities, including a strategic focus on the technology by the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) and Body of Regulators of Electronic Communications (BEREC), and there's strong political will to push Europe to the forefront, they said. But the 5G killer application remains elusive, EU efforts to boost investment in new networks have become bogged down, and political will is being sapped to some extent by more pressing issues such as Brexit and other world events, they said.
Facing DOJ assertions that a permanent Turner blackout could cost an MVPD 12 percent of its subscriber base, counsel for AT&T and Time Warner on Thursday went after the study the agency commissioned that came to that conclusion. "You can't reconcile" that past temporary Turner blackouts resulted in sub losses of a fraction of a percent for MVPDs with the model that indicates a shorter, one-month Turner loss would mean an 8.2 percent departure rate, said Peter Barbur, of Cravath Swaine, during the court argument. "I believe my numbers are accurate," replied John Hauser, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of marketing and a surveying expert.
Perfecting the autonomous vehicle (AV) is 99 percent of the way there, “but the last 1 percent takes 99 percent of the time,” said Karl Iagnemma, CEO of Massachusetts Institute of Technology AV software spinoff NuTonomy, on a panel on technical, economic and policy obstacles to AVs at Tuesday’s 2018 Automotive Forum sponsored by J.D. Power and the National Automobile Dealers Association.
Consumer Watchdog and other privacy groups said Facebook should end campaign contributions and “electioneering,” and hire an independent auditor to monitor the platform’s use of personal data in relation to election advertisements (see 1803270043). Facebook should be barred from election efforts, given the platform’s influence over the U.S. electorate, said Consumer Watchdog President Jamie Court during a conference call Wednesday. “This is all about stealing America,” Court said, accusing Facebook of allowing the personal data of 50 million Americans to improperly fall into the hands of Cambridge Analytica, which he described as electioneers.
When Time Warner was a vertically integrated company, encompassing both programming and Time Warner Cable, the notion of blacking out other distributors to get higher prices or to drive subscribers to TWC, or that Turner enjoyed more leverage due to that vertical integration, never came up, Turner CEO John Martin testified Wednesday in the U.S. v. AT&T/TW trial. An adverse witness for DOJ, Martin under questioning from AT&T/TW counsel attacked many of Justice's central tenets in the case.
The FCC’s Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council approved a report Wednesday on the “Best Practices and Recommendations to Mitigate Security Risks to Wireless Protocols,” which looks at the vulnerabilities of networks as industry starts to deploy 5G. The report was the first to be completed by the current iteration of CSRIC. The FCC also is focusing on threats from foreign actors, in an NPRM set for a vote at commissioners’ April 17 meeting (see 1803260037).
An FCC rural call completion order and Further NPRM draft seek new ways to solve problems with long-distance calls to rural areas, which often aren't connected or are dropped. The draft item in docket 13-39 would shift from "covered provider" data reporting and related requirements to relying on monitoring of "intermediate carrier" performance, and seek to implement a new rural calling law. Another draft NPRM in docket 17-144 would offer business data service (BDS) "incentive regulation" to rural telcos receiving model-based Connect America Fund USF subsidy report. Both items were put on the April 17 commissioners' meeting tentative agenda announced Monday and released Tuesday (see 1803260028 and 1803270052).