The FCC’s approach to cybersecurity is to “break down the challenges into categories that allow for meaningful discussion and problem solving,” Chairman Julius Genachowski told a U.S. Central Command conference in Herndon, Va., Wednesday, according to his prepared remarks provided by the FCC Thursday. Commercial networks, the FCC’s primary focus, are “increasingly integrated” with networks that sustain vertical industries like financial services and the energy grid, he said. The commission tackled small-business security problems -- 83 percent in the U.S. don’t have cybersecurity protection plans -- by bringing together the Small Business Administration and business groups to develop “basic materials with easy-to-understand steps small businesses could take to improve their security,” Genachowski said. He made a “deliberate choice” in a multistakeholder initiative with ISPs, to focus on specific areas -- botnets, “Internet route hijacking” and domain name fraud -- rather than a “general charge” on cybersecurity, he said. That led the FCC’s Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council, including Verizon, Amazon and PayPal, to develop an “anti-bot code of conduct,” recommend ISPs implement “expert-designed security improvements” for the domain name system, and come up with technical standards for ISPs to secure Internet routing through an “authoritative registry,” he said. As a result ISPs serving about 90 percent of the country have committed to implement the council’s recommendations, Genachowski said. The FCC’s work has been guided by the broader values of Internet freedom and privacy, which is “complementary” to security because “both are essential to consumer confidence in the Internet and to adoption of broadband.” A newer FCC focus is mobile device security, because the commission is “concerned that consumers are generally not taking adequate precautions against the threats that can harm their devices and exploit the information on their devices,” he said: The FCC will announce “concrete steps” to protect such devices “in the coming weeks.” The commission’s approach is to recruit “top talent” in each of these areas, coordinate with stakeholders including businesses and other federal agencies, and give them “concrete problems” to solve, he said. It used the same approach in the government response to Superstorm Sandy, supporting the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other agencies by reporting “daily” on communications networks’ status in New York and New Jersey, and regarding the 2010 Haiti earthquake where the FCC collaborated with FEMA and the U.S. military to restore communications there, he said. Genachowski said that approach should also be used regarding “cable landing stations,” often controlled by private licensees and “under protected” as pieces of critical infrastructure. The chairman discussed cybersecurity’s role in the World Conference of International Telecommunications (WCIT) taking place in Dubai next month, “which poses real challenges to these values” of Internet freedom and market-based approaches: “Calls to add cybersecurity provisions in the International Telecommunication Regulations are misplaced and ultimately counterproductive. International regulations are simply too broad, too inflexible, and too slow to change to effectively address cybersecurity issues.” WCIT will succeed by taking a “pragmatic, flexible, and real-world approach” and avoiding “extreme positions,” he said. Genachowski said the FCC is committed to “greater transparency … and making information about our policies and practices available online.” It’s “actively engaged” in the region the U.S. Central Command directs for the military, and the FCC has hosted 28 delegations from countries including Egypt, Iraq, Qatar and Yemen in the past two years, he said.
The rest of the world is watching to see whether the U.S. will regulate a portion of the Internet, and FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell finds the idea “a little unsettling,” he said at a Silicon Flatirons conference on spectrum policy Tuesday. The danger, he said, is that a bad idea adopted by U.S. policymakers could get “amplified abroad” as teams at the ITU read everything the FCC writes. McDowell also discussed ideas for getting more spectrum into the hands of consumers, and endorsed the idea of paying federal users to get off their spectrum.
A 911 task force identified the “vulnerability of newer technologies” in a preliminary report about Verizon 911 failures during the June 29 mid-Atlantic derecho wind storm. Traditional hard-wired connections meant power loss didn’t result in loss of a dial tone or service, it said. The report named VoIP and standard Internet Protocol as two very different technologies that, when the power’s out, lose “access to 9-1-1 once the back-up battery contained within the equipment, drains,” the 911 directors said. Cellphones also encounter problems due to network congestion and the possibility of physical damage to cell sites, the report said.
Federal users need financial incentives to get off their spectrum, FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said Tuesday at a conference on the next ten years of spectrum policy. Giving federal users the proceeds from spectrum auctions could be a “catalyst” to get federal frequencies into the hands of commercial users, and let the commission reach the 500 MHz benchmark for new wireless broadband use called for in a 2010 executive order, she said. Rosenworcel urged creating model rules for tower siting, and an “honest conversation” about network reliability after storms like superstorm Sandy. The conference was presented at the Pew Research Center by CTIA, Public Knowledge and the Silicon Flatirons Center.
BALTIMORE -- The recent series of natural disasters, including superstorm Sandy and the summer derecho, rattled officials and regulators this week at the NARUC meeting in Baltimore. They brainstormed about the best practices to keep communications networks resilient in the face of what may be increasingly volatile weather and discussed potential 911 innovations and strategies.
Sky Angel alleged that C-SPAN has illegally withheld its programming from the online video distributor, in an antitrust complaint filed Tuesday. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court, Washington, D.C., marks the latest attempt of Sky Angel to litigate whether it has rights to programming controlled by incumbent pay-TV distributors. Sky Angel, which sells a package of family-friendly programming under the FaveTV brand to subscribers who use a set-top box to obtain the programming over the Internet, lost a bid this summer to force the FCC to weigh in on a similar question (CD July 17 p7). It wanted a federal appeals court to compel the commission to act on a pending program access complaint against Discovery Communications, but the court gave the agency more time.
BALTIMORE -- State regulators faced the ramifications of AT&T’s recent petition on a transition to Internet Protocol infrastructure and its $14 billion rural investment at their November meeting. NARUC discussed the implications of IP in multiple panels in initial days. AT&T promoted transition planning as Verizon defended its migration of customers off copper. State officials and regulators worried about consumer protections and reliability, and had many questions about what the future would mean for them. The focus centered on AT&T’s announcement and Verizon’s migration of customers, both of which seek to move consumers off traditional networks.
BALTIMORE -- State regulators are confronting an increasingly tortured relationship with the FCC, creating a task force to address it Monday at the NARUC meeting. It consists of seven commissioners and is already official and active. Meanwhile, two NARUC resolutions directly address the fractured FCC relationship, as was expected (CD Nov 2 p12), and NARUC adopted both resolutions as policy Tuesday after they advanced through the telecom subcommittee and committee. One urges FCC referral to the Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service as well as to the Federal-State Joint Board on Jurisdictional Separations on major decisions, and another addresses a pending Supreme Court case on the Chevron doctrine, looking at the risk of federal overreach of authority.
Carriers’ capital expenditures may be a boon for small firms and those owned by women, minorities and other disadvantaged groups, the heads of PCIA and USTelecom said Thursday. Building more towers and adding other equipment to meet subscribers’ demand for data applications gives such firms an opportunity, speakers at a Minority Media and Telecommunications Council event said. CEOs Walter McCormick of USTelecom and Jonathan Adelstein of PCIA cited AT&T’s plan disclosed Wednesday to spend $14 billion on wireless and wireline broadband capacity (CD Nov 8 p11).
Nine data companies’ responses were inadequate to questions about their business practices, said a joint statement Thursday from Reps. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Joe Barton, R-Texas, co-chairs of the Congressional Privacy Caucus, and other lawmakers. “The data brokers’ responses offer only a glimpse of the practices of an industry that has operated in the shadows for years,” the lawmakers said. They want more information about “how they analyze personal information to categorize and rate consumers.” The legislators said they'll “continue our efforts to learn more about this industry and will push for whatever steps are necessary to make sure Americans know how this industry operates and are granted control over their own information” (http://xrl.us/bnyohp).