FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Wednesday the FCC will move to free up a “substantial” amount of spectrum in the 5 GHz band for Wi-Fi. Genachowski told the Consumer Electronics Show the FCC would work with Congress to make more airwaves available for Wi-Fi in that band through increased sharing with government users, including the Defense Department. “It’s time to move,” he said. “I think we can predict a Wi-Fi traffic jam in the same way that we can project a mobile spectrum crunch.” Genachowski said the FCC would take up an initiative at its February meeting. The initiative will “increase and free up the unlicensed spectrum available for ultra-high-speed, high-capacity Wi-Fi -- known as ‘Gigabit Wi-Fi’ -- by up to 35 percent,” the FCC said in a news release. “This effort will enable higher data speeds and greater capacity -- most notably, improved HD video distribution capability.” CEA President Gary Shapiro said at the start of his annual face-to-face discussion with the FCC chairman that the association wants to bestow on him a new title. “We want to call you the spectrum chairman, because freeing up more spectrum for wireless broadband has really been what you're about,” Shapiro said. “Here in this room we have talked about spectrum and you've been passionate about it.” Genachowski credited fellow members of the FCC and commission staff. “We don’t agree on everything, but we do agree on what the large challenges are facing the country” and the need “to work together to get things done,” he said. The session was interrupted by someone who stood up to shout questions at Genachowski about the health risks posed by radio frequency exposure. “You're giving people cancer and you know it,” the man shouted before being ushered out of the conference by security personnel.
The Copyright Office published final rules, effective Feb. 8, on providing refunds to cable royalties paid under the 2010 satellite bill. The new rule clarifies refunds for overpayment of royalty fees made before the bill became effective “will be made only when a cable operator has satisfied its outstanding royalty obligations ... including the obligation to pay for the carriage of each distant signal on a system wide basis,” a notice in the Federal Register said (http://xrl.us/bn94o9).
Efforts to ban the sale of imported goods because they use industry-set standard-essential patents (SEPs) may not be in the public interest, said the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and Department of Justice Tuesday in a policy paper. “Interoperability standards have paved the way for moving many important innovations into the marketplace, including the complex communications networks and sophisticated mobile computing devices that are hallmarks of the modern age.” But such standards-setting can also result in the owner of an SEP gaining “market power and potentially take advantage of it by engaging in patent hold-up” and “may induce prospective implementers to postpone or avoid making commitments to a standardized technology or to make inefficient investments in developing and implementing a standard in an effort to protect themselves,” the agencies said. They said consumers then may pay higher prices because of “unwarranted higher royalties” on SEPs. The U.S. encourages the use of voluntary fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory licensing commitments, “rather than the imposition of one-size-fits-all mandates for royalty-free or below-market licensing, which would undermine the effectiveness of the standardization process and incentives for innovation,” the agencies said (http://xrl.us/bn94mz). The FTC’s consent order with Google should require the company to license its SEPs on terms that are fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (F/RAND) without current exceptions in light of Tuesday’s policy statement from Justice and USPTO, said Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner in a blog post (http://xrl.us/bn94mv). The two agencies said they have concerns “about the potential impact of exclusion orders on ‘competitive conditions in the United States’ and ‘United States consumers’ in some cases involving F/RAND-encumbered patents that are essential to a standard.” In its settlement with Google, the FTC issued a consent order requiring the company to license its F/RAND-encumbered SEPs to competitors. Heiner said settlement “does not live up to the approach outlined by the DOJ and the PTO” because it allows Google to “abandon its promise to make its standard essential patents available on reasonable terms with regard to any firm that has tried to obtain an injunction against any product made by Google on the basis of that firm’s standard essential patents.” In addition to being “logically inconsistent” with the FTC’s settlement with Google, the exception “appears to endorse the notion that holders of standard essential patents may indeed sue each other for product injunctions ... creat[ing] the very harm that the FTC is seeking to address by its order,” Heiner said.
The U.S. International Trade Commission will conduct two investigations of digital trade in the country’s economy, the agency announced Wednesday (http://xrl.us/bn94on). As requested by the Senate Finance Committee late last year, the first investigation -- with resulting report to be released July 14 -- will examine U.S. digital trade in relation to the broader economy, U.S. digital cross-border trade, obstacles to digital trade, “potential approaches for assessing the linkages and contributions of digital trade to the U.S. economy, noting any challenges associated with data gaps and limitations,” according to the release. The second investigation -- with resulting report to be released by July 2014 -- will examine the value of U.S. digital trade and the way U.S. digital trade affects the U.S. economy as well as present case studies of U.S. digital trade in specific industries and examine “notable barriers to digital trade on selected industries,” said the release. A December letter (http://xrl.us/bn94oa) from Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., cited research showing “the Internet has fostered GDP growth, improved productivity for large and small firms, acted as a catalyst for job creation, and provided substantial value to individual users.” The changing landscape means that “policymakers are facing unprecedented challenges as they seek to ensure that digital trade remains open while producers’ and consumers’ data remains secure,” Baucus continued, requesting the investigations “to assist in better understanding the role of digital trade in the U.S. economy."
Public Knowledge said it supports a request from the major TV content companies to limit the disclosure of confidential distribution agreements by online video distributors (OVDs) seeking to license programming from Comcast-NBCUniversal under the terms of the FCC order approving that combination. After the FCC Media Bureau recently clarified that OVDs seeking access to Comcast-owned programming under the Benchmark Condition of that merger order must provide Comcast’s outside counsel and experts with their peer agreements, the content companies -- CBS, News Corp., Sony Pictures, Time Warner, Viacom and Disney -- asked the commission to stay the bureau’s action and review it (CD Jan 7 p1). Those companies’ reluctance to share such information with a competitor could lead them to “not sign deals with OVDs in the first place” or otherwise preclude them from taking advantage of the condition, Public Knowledge said. “This undermines the purpose of the Benchmark Condition ... as well as calling into question the entire basis of the Merger Decision,” it said (http://xrl.us/bn94f7).
Media General CEO George Mahoney met with FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel and an aide to talk about how joint sales and shared services agreements can benefit the public interest. Such agreements would become attributable ownership stakes under draft FCC media ownership rules (CD Nov 15 p1). Mahoney talked about how Media General has added more than four hours of local news and a half hour of locally originated programming at Schurz Communications’s WAGT Augusta, Ga., where Media General owns WJBF, after it began selling ads and providing other services for the station in 2010, an ex parte notice said (http://xrl.us/bn94dv). Media General also added more local news and locally originated programming to WAGT’s multicast stream, and increased the amount of such programming on WJBF’s main and multicast channels. “The Commission should not make JSAs attributable,” the notice said. If the FCC wants to keep its plan to make them attributable, it should open a new proceeding to develop a full record on the issue, the company said. If the commission moves forward with the plan without loosening restrictions on how many stations in a market one licensee can own, it should set up an exemption or waiver process based on the amount of local news and locally originated programming carried on JSA stations, it said. “Such an exemption would encourage programming improvements ... that would otherwise very likely be absent because of the frequently poor pre-JSA financial condition of brokered stations.” A JSA waiver process has been under consideration at the agency (CD Dec 27 p1).
The FCC Wireline Bureau is seeking comment on USTelecom’s petition for declaratory ruling that ILECs are non-dominant in the provision of interstate mass market and enterprise switched access service (http://xrl.us/bn94d9). The association filed a petition in December urging the commission to alter several policies in response to the ongoing transition of voice networks to Internet Protocol technologies (CD Dec 20 p3). Comments in WC docket 13-3 are due Feb. 25, replies March 12.
State-of-the-art telecom infrastructure is crucial to the economy, said Gov. Jack Markell (D) of Delaware, National Governors Association chair, in the prepared text for the association’s first State of the States address (http://xrl.us/bn94cq) in Washington, D.C. Both he and his vice chair, Republican Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, tied broadband to public safety. Governors “worked with the first responder community and others to secure needed broadband radio spectrum to build a national emergency communications system,” Markell said Wednesday. Fallin referred to the governors’ role in securing the 2012 FirstNet legislation and what she called “the development of one of these critical tools for first responders by providing sufficient radio spectrum needed for the construction of a broadband network for public safety communications.” Fallin also spotlighted the governors’ cybersecurity work, risk to critical infrastructure and its creation of the Resource Center for State Cybersecurity. “The Resource Center is examining the role state policy can and should play in ensuring adequate cybersecurity for state-owned and state-based infrastructure including data and communication systems, financial records, banking systems, water systems, electrical grids and energy companies,” Fallin said.
The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) said Comcast, Cox, DirecTV, Time Warner Cable and Orange have deployed products that use DLNA’s premium content guidelines to deliver premium video to more connected devices in subscribers’ homes. “Service providers are now allowing consumers to stream their favorite television programs and movies” to digital TV sets, tablets, phones, Blu-ray players and game consoles, said Nidhish Parikh, DLNA chairman. U.S. cable operators are rolling out the technology as new set-top boxes are deployed, they said. “Cox is actively deploying its Cox Advanced TV Plus video service” which uses DLNA specs for its whole-home DVR service, said Steve Necessary, vice president-video product development and strategy for Cox: “We expect more than 500,000 subscribers to have DLNA premium content functionality … within a year.” Time Warner Cable has “millions” of DLNA-capable set-tops deployed, said Mike LaJoie, its chief technology officer. Comcast and DirecTV both said they're using the technology to enable whole-home DVR applications.
Correction: The Communications Workers of America union only filed comments with the FCC, rather than a formal petition to deny, over its concerns about the proposed T-Mobile/MetroPCS merger (CD Jan 9 p3).