Most FCC members are expected to make the trip to New York and New Jersey next week to attend at least part of the eight hours of hearings scheduled by the commission on Superstorm Sandy. Commissioners Mignon Clyburn, Jessica Rosenworcel and Ajit Pai will make the trip, according to aides. The FCC said (http://xrl.us/bodpn5) the morning session will start at 9 a.m. EST Tuesday and take place at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Customs House, 1 Bowling Green, Manhattan. The second four-hour hearing, at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., is to start at 2:30 p.m. EST.
The FCC shouldn’t accept Montgomery County’s surreply in a proceeding to determine whether certain Comcast systems in the area are subject to effective competition, the cable operator said (http://xrl.us/bodpp3). The county had asked the commission to deny Comcast’s petition for special relief and stop granting such findings of effective competition based solely on competition from DBS subscribers (CD Jan 4 p7). Comcast did not raise new arguments in its reply to the county’s opposition and the county’s motion for leave to file its surreply should be denied, the cable operator said. Moreover, “there is no latitude for the Commission to ignore ... unequivocal [statutory] language,” Comcast said. “Comcast is entitled to a prompt resolution... and the County’s Opposition and Surreply offer no credible grounds for either denial or delay,” it said.
The deadline for uploading older public file information to the FCC’s database is Monday night, a public notice said (http://xrl.us/bodpob). Certain documents are exempted from the requirement, such as public correspondence and older political file information, it said. But other documents that were in a station’s public file before Aug. 2, 2012, are due to be uploaded. The commission will provide “limited assistance” Saturday, Sunday and after hours Monday to accommodate broadcasters, it said. During normal business hours, online support and a the licensing support hotline will be available, it said.
Liberty Global’s stock price could increase more than 20 percent, Evercore Partners analysts Bryan Kraft and Peter Lee wrote in a note to investors. Liberty Global, which operates cable systems overseas, is “underpenetrated in broadband and digital TV, leaving significant untapped addressable market and opportunity for volume growth,” they said. Moreover, upgrades to its digital video product could help increase its average monthly revenue, they said.
SpaceX and Spacecom signed an agreement to launch Spacecom’s AMOS-6 satellite on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle. The satellite will provide communication services, including direct satellite home Internet for Africa, the Middle East and Europe, SpaceX said in a news release (http://xrl.us/bodppn). The satellite, which will be built by Israel Aerospace Industries, is targeted for a 2015 launch, it said.
The FCC International Bureau dismissed applications from Harris Corp. and Corridor Television to operate earth stations. The application has internal inconsistencies, “which renders it unacceptable and subject to dismissal,” the bureau said in a letter to Harris (http://xrl.us/bodpfh). Harris listed a value of its effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) that is inconsistent with the bureau’s calculation, it said. The bureau said the EIRP values listed by Corridor also are inconsistent (http://xrl.us/bodpjd).
Senate Judiciary Ranking Member Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, blamed violent videogames for acts of mass violence, during opening remarks at the committee’s Wednesday hearing on gun violence. “There are too many video games that celebrate the mass killing of innocent people -- games that despite attempts at industry self-regulation -- find their way into the hands of children,” he said. Grassley noted that Anders Behring Breivik, the shooter who in 2011 killed 77 people in Norway, told a judge that he trained for the attack by playing Call of Duty. “Where is the artistic value in shooting innocent civilians?” said Grassley. “I share Vice President Biden’s disbelief of manufacturer denials that these games have no effect on real-world violence.” The Entertainment Software Association had no comment. A spokesman for the International Game Developers Association said “it is vital that the U.S. government focus on what works rather than seeking scapegoats in the entertainment industry,” in an email statement. “That plan has always failed, whether the scapegoat was Elvis, crime novels, comic books or Shakespeare’s plays. It won’t work when the scapegoat is a video game.”
The Philadelphia tri-state area received $186 million in investment from Verizon Wireless, the company said Tuesday (http://yhoo.it/WyhaDv). About 94 percent of the people living there, in the nearby parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, receive 4G LTE, it said. “This is the ninth consecutive year the company has invested more than $100 million in the region,” totaling $1.6 billion total, Verizon Wireless added.
The National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters is no longer considering a compromise media ownership plan it made to the FCC earlier this month, the group said Wednesday. NABOB’s proposal (http://xrl.us/bocb4m) was for forthcoming rules to allow a company owning no more than two radio stations to also hold a daily newspaper in the same market, or one in smaller markets (CD Jan 28 p7). “Having given such consideration, however, NABOB has decided not to endorse it,” Executive Director Jim Winston reported (http://xrl.us/bodphh) telling Commissioner Mignon Clyburn on Tuesday. After speaking with more NABOB members than he had canvassed initially, Winston decided that the group could no longer offer to potentially support some deregulation of cross-ownership rules, Winston told us. The group’s stance remains that “there should be no relaxation of that, or any, broadcast ownership rules,” Winston wrote. The current version of the draft Media Bureau order would allow common ownership of radio stations and dailies in any market, and waivers for holding a daily and non-top four rated TV station in the same top-20 market, agency officials said. The Newspaper Association of America, meanwhile, continued seeking rules that allow cross ownership, saying of 1,300-plus U.S. dailies, about 25 are cross-owned with TV stations that were grandfathered because the arrangements preceded the ban. “These newspapers have received an extraordinary total of 30 Pulitzer Prizes during the time that they have been cross-owned,” NAA said (http://xrl.us/bodphd) in docket 09-182, where NABOB’s filing also was posted. “Many of these Pulitzer Prizes went to small and mid-sized cross-owned papers."
Hundreds of CEOs from the nation’s largest companies said they would support a voluntary federal program to develop cybersecurity best practices, said a memo made public Wednesday by Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. (http://xrl.us/bodpfb). The comments conflict with arguments made last year by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that American businesses would oppose even voluntary cybersecurity standards because they would permit the government to impose new obligations on them (CD July 27 p12). The rationale was employed by the Chamber in its efforts to sink the revised Cybersecurity Act, S-3414. “Our review of the companies’ answers to these questions shows that the Chamber of Commerce’s vehement opposition to the legislation was not shared by many companies in the private sector,” Rockefeller’s memo said. Last Fall, Rockefeller asked CEOs from the nation’s top 500 companies to detail their cybersecurity practices (http://xrl.us/bnqgpz) (CD Sept. 20 p8). Rockefeller specifically asked the CEOs what cybersecurity best practices they employ, how they were developed, what role the government played in the development of their cybersecurity practices, and what concerns companies have with conducting cybersecurity risk assessments in coordination with the government, among other questions. Rockefeller then said he wrote to the CEOs because he wanted to “hear directly from our nation’s business community to understand their views on cybersecurity ... without the filter of Beltway lobbyists.” Responses from the companies revealed that lawmakers should continue their work to advance cybersecurity legislation this Congress, the memo said. Many of the companies said they support a federal program to facilitate cooperation between the private and public sectors to evaluate the nation’s greatest cybersecurity risks and ways to address them, according to the memo. “The concerns with such a program were generally related to the manner in which it would be implemented, not with the fundamental notion of whether to create it,” the memo said. “Companies understand that the cyber threats we face are real and they understand that the federal government must play an important role in the nation’s cybersecurity moving forward,” Rockefeller said in a news release. “The companies’ responses will be a great resource as we refine much-needed cybersecurity legislation to improve and deepen the collaboration between our government and private sector.” Last week Rockefeller introduced S-21, the Cybersecurity and American Cyber Competitiveness Act (http://xrl.us/bob2o7), a bill that expresses the sense of Congress that legislation is required to secure the nation’s communications networks from cyberattacks.