DirecTV said common-law agency principles should govern the question of whether a call was made “on behalf of” a seller, in an ex parte filing on the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (http://bit.ly/14jHtSZ). But the efficacy of this approach “could be undermined if it is qualified by examples of activities that a reader might interpret as alone sufficient to indicate the existence of an agency relationship,” it said in docket 11-50. The filing expands on issues raised by DirecTV in recent meetings with the FCC, it said. Improperly compromising the principles of common-law agency by including examples “would have real-world consequences for DirecTV and the third party retailers with whom it contracts,” it said. Common-law agency principles “are defined by a large, well-developed body of precedent that needs no further elaboration or examples,” DirecTV said.
To protect themselves from intellectual property theft before the rollout of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs), U.S. businesses should register with ICANN’s Trademark Clearinghouse, which launches Tuesday, the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) said Monday (http://bit.ly/YAoZtz). “Though not guaranteed to protect your trademark from cybersquatting, registering with the Trademark Clearinghouse is the first critical step for trademark owners to protect their brands,” said SIIA Vice President-IP Policy and Enforcement Keith Kupferschmid. “Failure to register with the Clearinghouse makes it easier for thieves to purchase a domain that uses a trademarked name -- essentially stealing that trademark from its rightful owner.” ICANN posted a video Friday (http://bit.ly/102PDK8) explaining the “initial evaluation results” for gTLD applications. In the video, ICANN’s new gTLD Director Christine Willett called ICANN’s recent unveiling of initial evaluation results (http://bit.ly/YupOnQ) “a tremendous milestone” for ICANN. The first 30 applications have been reviewed, and results have been posted -- except for the few whose applications have been held up for “primarily administrative reasons,” she said. Applications that do not pass may be eligible for extended evaluation, during which ICANN will review the application’s financial eligibility, technical and operations eligibility and registry services eligibility, Willett said. The first 108 applications to be evaluated are internationalized domain names (IDNs), she said: ICANN prioritized IDNs “to serve the internationalization of the Internet and make the Internet more accessible to individuals in parts of the world who are not familiar with the Latin script.” Willett said she expects the first applicants who successfully complete the remainder of the application process to have the new domains as early as May or June.
On-demand streaming service Spotify launched its first ad campaign Monday, introducing the company to “a mass audience in the U.S.” and demonstrating “the wide-reaching, emotional power of music,” said a spokeswoman for the company. The integrated TV, digital and social-media campaign was developed by Droga5 New York, she said. It kicks off with a commercial titled “For Music” (http://bit.ly/ZjHiTi) that was scheduled to debut Monday night on NBC’s “The Voice.” Additional videos and print assets for the campaign are available at http://bit.ly/ZnGsBv.
Congress voted 46-53 against an amendment aimed at curbing USF subsidies for wireless service during Friday’s Senate budget resolution vote (S. Con. Res. 8). The amendment, proposed by Sen. David Vitter, R-La., would have prohibited subsidizing commercial mobile service with USF funds, without raising new revenue.
SES Americom requested a 60-day special temporary authority license for its AMC-5 satellite. SES wants to shift the satellite’s orbital position to 80.85 degrees west “pending submission of and action on a modification application to reassign AMC-5,” it said in its application to the FCC International Bureau (http://bit.ly/11DqOpq). Intelsat is seeking to modify the authorization of the Intelsat 10 satellite, it said in its application (http://bit.ly/YAhgvN). It intends to relocate Intelsat 10 to 47.5 degrees east in the C- and Ku-bands pursuant to the ITU filings of the German federal government, it said.
The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to return to Earth Tuesday. Its original return on March 25, was postponed “due to inclement weather developing near its targeted splashdown site in the Pacific Ocean,” NASA said in a press release (http://1.usa.gov/ZianuS). The delay “will not affect science samples scheduled to return aboard the spacecraft,” it said. Dragon is the only International Space Station resupply craft able to return to Earth intact, NASA said.
The FCC’s continuing refusal to determine that the U.S. wireless market is effectively competitive contravenes the Communications Act (CD March 25 p7), Phoenix Center economist George Ford said Monday in a blog post. “Considering the response to earlier reports, I expect that many will be dismayed by the agency’s failure to make findings, particularly as to whether the U.S. wireless industry is ‘effectively competitive,'” Ford wrote (http://bit.ly/YPGAtI). “After all, Section 331(c)(1)(C) requires the agency to perform ‘an analysis of whether or not there is effective competition,’ and a failure to do so seems to be in direct contradiction to the statute.” Some FCC critics want the FCC to conclude “that because some observed factor X is above or below some arbitrarily defined critical level, the market is or is not effectively competitive,” he said. But the report also, correctly, rejects that approach, he said. “Put simply, the Commission concludes that ‘concentration’ bears no direct relationship with ‘competition,'” he said. “This conclusion is profoundly significant and absolutely legitimate.”
Residents of communities with super-fast networks are trying to build a case for how to best use fiber’s speeds, KC Digital Drive Managing Director Aaron Deacon wrote in a Friday op-ed for Silicon Prairie News (http://bit.ly/13qF0a0). He spotlighted a weekend event in the Kansas City area called Hacking the Gigabit City, sponsored by his organization and focused on answering those questions and looking at how the dynamics play out in that region, where Google is building a network capable of gigabit speeds. “We couldn’t be more excited to collaborate with other cities and organizations in building out fiber use cases, whether from our fellow fiber city of Chattanooga [Tenn.,] or from crack developer teams working on interactive online education, 3D imaging and visualization and all sorts of other next-generation apps,” Deacon said. “Success in Kansas City requires and facilitates the success of next-gen networks in other places.” Google has brought a fast network but not a fiber use case, he said, saying it’s up to residents. He pointed out that failures and possessing speed worth wasting is an important part of the process. The Kauffman Foundation, based in Kansas City, Mo., and focused on education and entrepreneurship, supports both Silicon Prairie News and the weekend hacking event.
Google must use an objective, non-discriminatory mechanism to rank and display search results, including links to its own products, the European Consumer Organization (BEUC) said Monday. It has now become a formal party in the European Commission’s probe into Google’s potential abuse of dominance in online search, and published a paper on the issues and possible solutions from the consumer perspective. The EC is concerned about four aspects of Google’s business practices, BEUC said: vertical search, indexing third-party content, search advertisements and AdWords. Vertical search is consumers’ main concern, it said, because the search engine shouldn’t display its own “vertical” content, such as Google Maps, more prominently than rivals’ products. “This is the stumbling block for an early resolution and the issue which could prevent a complete settlement of the case,” it said. Google can address search ads and AdWords fairly easily, BEUC said. They're mostly contract issues and don’t implicate the company’s presentation of search results. Similarly, the issue of indexing third-party content is also fairly easy to solve if Google stops indexing things such as user reviews for display in its vertical service or general search results. However, BEUC said, that raises the question of whether the search giant would need authorization to index other forms of content in advance. Any remedies must focus on consumer welfare and effectively wipe out anticompetitive behavior, the organization said. Above all, Google “must be even-handed,” holding all services, including its own, to the same standards and using the same crawling, indexing, ranking, display and penalty algorithms. Other recommendations included: (1) Ensuring that Google clearly and conspicuously label its own content and services, not in any enhanced format. (2) Barring Google from penalizing legitimate websites for illegitimate or anticompetitive reasons. Where there are legitimate reasons, penalty or demotion criteria must be applied equally across all websites and services, including Google’s own. (3) Preventing the search engine from coercing others into accepting exclusive terms in contracts or agreements related to its dominant products, including search, paid search advertising services and the Android operating system. BEUC also urged the EC to consider structural conditions such as splitting Google’s different services and assets. Finally, it said, compliance with EC rules must be monitored via annual certifications, technical monitors and significant fines for noncompliance.
France’s telecom regulator rolled out a system for measuring and tracking the quality of fixed Internet access services, it said Monday. The goal is to give users better information about net neutrality and for the Autorité des regulation des communications électroniques et des postes, a way to meet its obligation to supervise the overall quality of fixed calling and Internet access services, ARCEP said. The new system has two components: (1) Main measurements, to be done by operators in a controlled environment and on dedicated lines. This will enable a high degree of comparison between access providers and a sufficiently broad range of the various network access conditions users encounter, it said. Metrics obtained will cover seven performance indicators: four generic technical indicators (particularly throughput), and three relating to Web browsing, streaming video and peer-to-peer file-sharing. The measurements will be carried out separately on fiber-to-the-home and fiber-to-the-last-amplifier connections as well as on the local copper loop. (2) Supplementary measurements, which ARCEP will perform. Volunteer users will run those tests on their own equipment, assessing their lines’ performance and transmitting the results to ARCEP. The results of the tests will be published each quarter, with the first scorecard expected in December, the regulator said.