The wave of incoming freshmen legislators in the House had little early help from the telecom, media and technology industries, an analysis of campaign finance data shows. Among non-incumbent candidates who won seats in the House or Senate, only a handful received more than $5,000 in direct contributions from the large political action committees associated with those industries by October. We looked at contributions made to candidates by PACs including those of USTelecom, NCTA, NAB, CTIA, Verizon, AT&T, CWA, Qwest, Comcast, Disney Employees, Clear Channel, Google and Microsoft, based on Federal Elections Commission data compiled by CQ Moneyline. Contributions made within the final eight weeks of the campaign aren’t yet reflected in the available data.
Verizon Wireless agreed to pay $25 million to the U.S. Treasury after charging more than 15 million Americans an estimated $52.8 million in unwarranted fees for data use, the FCC announced Thursday. The payment, agreed to by Verizon in a consent decree, comes as the commission considers wireless bill-shock rules. Only two companies had previously agreed to pay $10 million or more under a consent decree with the FCC, including in a $24 million 2007 settlement with Univision over company claims that soap operas for children satisfy the commission’s educational programming rules.
Congress is unlikely to make changes soon to retransmission consent rules despite stepped up lobbying by pay-TV companies trying to make the most of an ongoing dispute between Cablevision and News Corp., according to broadcast, cable and Capitol Hill officials. A bill on FCC handling of such disputes that Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., has said he'll introduce soon (CD Oct 20 p1) seems unlikely to pass this Congress, they said. Legislators focused on getting re-elected means there’s less time to pay attention now to the blackout of three Fox TV stations owned by News Corp. on Cablevision systems in the New York area, a cable executive acknowledged.
Public Knowledge representatives asked FCC officials to address their 2007 petition asking the commission to clarify that text messaging is subject to the same nondiscrimination rules as voice communications. “Demands made on the current short code text messaging system simply outpace its capacity and exceed its ability,” Public Knowledge said in an ex parte letter on the meeting. “As the use of short codes and text messaging increases, problems like those experienced by NARAL, Catholic Relief Services, and WeedMaps.com will continue to occur unless the Commission clarifies responsibility.” The FCC could lose control of the process if it doesn’t act, Public Knowledge said: “In the recent case of EZ Texting and WeedMaps.com, a federal judge was a courthouse-steps settlement away from being presented with the very questions that the Commission has failed to answer in the past three years."
Cablevision was refusing to let Verizon carry the first New York gubernatorial debate to its FiOS pay-TV customers, the telco said. Cablevision was sponsoring the 90-minute faceoff among gubernatorial candidates Andrew Cuomo, Carl Paladino and five other smaller-party contenders from 7 to and 8:30 Monday night.
A federal appeals court will hear Thursday oral argument on whether the FCC “abused its discretion and acted arbitrarily and capriciously and contrary to law,” as argued by MetroPCS, in declining to decide what was “reasonable compensation” to a CLEC for terminating telecom traffic originating on MetroPCS’s network. The FCC had determined that the California Public Utilities Commission was “a more appropriate forum to determine a reasonable compensation rate.” The case involves a dispute between MetroPCS and CLEC North County but has wider implications, MetroPCS said.
White spaces spectrum can be a “valuable option” for smart grid communications, said Phoebe Yang, senior adviser on broadband at the FCC, addressing an IEEE conference on smart grid communications in Gaithersburg, Md. Google and Plumas-Sierra Rural Electric Cooperative successfully conducted a smart grid trial using white spaces spectrum in an area with “challenging terrain” encompassing rural California and Nevada mountains, where “other wireless approaches did not satisfy performance requirements,” Yang said. Although the FCC recognizes that white spaces spectrum isn’t the only smart grid “solution,” the agency is “confident that white spaces is good for the smart grid,” Yang said. The commission is “doing our part” to make commercial broadband networks more reliable and appropriate for smart grid communications, she said. “If utilities are gong to use commercial facilities for smart grid applications, they need to be assured the networks will work, especially in times of emergency.” Utility-owned networks will remain an important component of the smart grid, and the federal government should “continue to promote standards” through the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Department of Energy and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, she said. One area that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention is the role that “retail” broadband can play in smart grid deployments, Yang said.
SAN FRANCISCO -- It’s more important that Internet users get useful information, in timely, digestible ways, that they can act on about behavioral advertising than for policymakers to choose between an opt-in or opt-out regulatory system, agreed an FTC lawyer, a privacy advocate and an executive of a location-based services company. The current policy thrust is all toward “simplified, meaningful notice,” FTC lawyer Laura Berger said late Tuesday at the FCBA Seminar West. A privacy report coming from the FTC will stress getting notices to users as they engage in related activities.
SAN FRANCISCO -- State public utility commissions will be the bottleneck through which most smart grid technology investment will pass, industry executives and a California state commissioner said Tuesday. “When we talk about implementation of the grid, what we're really talking about are state policies, state roadmaps and state decisions,” said Mary Brown, Cisco director of technology and spectrum. “There is an awful lot of work to be done where the rubber meets the road at the state commissions,” she told a Federal Communications Bar Association seminar on emerging wireless issues at the CTIA show.
Intensifying FCC review of Comcast-NBC Universal shows which issues the agency is focusing on that likely will be addressed in the final merger order, while holding import for how industry, legislators and others perceive Chairman Julius Genachowski and the agency itself, said former commissioners, communications lawyers and antitrust specialists. That more career staffers are spending additional time on Comcast’s multibillion dollar plan to buy control of NBC Universal and late Monday made another request for information from the companies (CD Oct 5 p8) shows an FCC intent on a thorough review. Should that be done with dispatch, Genachowski’s quest to get a reputation as able to timely decide on complex issues may be helped, said lawyers not part of the deal.