The FCC proposed fining Waubonsee Community College $13,000 because its Sugar Grove, Ill., Class A TV station didn’t keep in its public-inspection file kids’ programming reports, said a Media Bureau notice of apparent liability released Tuesday (http://xrl.us/bn2o9b).
The FCC delayed program access comment deadlines by a total of almost a month, said a Media Bureau order dated Monday (http://xrl.us/bn2o56). It granted NCTA’s request that cited the disruption Superstorm Sandy caused to some members, with comments now due in docket 12-68 on Dec. 14, replies Jan. 14. The agency in October approved a further rulemaking notice on revising rules on cable channel carriage (CD Oct 9 p1).
Suddenlink’s purchase has been completed. BC Partners, CPP Investment Board and the cable operator’s management team led by Chairman Jerry Kent bought the company for $6.6 billion, it said in a Tuesday news release (http://xrl.us/bn2o49). The FCC earlier this month approved the purchase by leveraged buyout and pension-management firms (CD Nov 2 p20).
Correction: The year of the last FCC filing window for FM translators was 2003 (CD Nov 20 p6).
A Band 12 interoperability mandate would cause significant harm to competition and consumers, despite what consulting firm V-Comm and others claim, AT&T representatives told the FCC Wireless Bureau during a meeting Monday. Such a mandate “would produce none of the benefits alleged by its supporters,” Joseph Marx, AT&T assistant vice president-federal regulatory, said Tuesday in an FCC filing (http://xrl.us/bn2ozw). The perceived benefits of a Band 12 mandate are “illusory,” while the potential harms are “substantial,” AT&T said in a presentation at the meeting, also filed with the FCC (http://xrl.us/bn2o2n). V-Comm released a report in July on behalf of a group of 700 MHz A block licensees that called for the FCC to proceed with an interoperability mandate, arguing that band class distinctions are not necessary to protect some operations from interference (CD July 16 p10).
The FCC Office of Engineering and Technology issued an order and notice of proposed rulemaking on the allocation of radio spectrum. It adopted the order last Thursday and released it Monday (http://xrl.us/bn2ow7). The changes implement decisions made at the 2007 World Radiocommunication Conference in Geneva, the order said. The FCC will “make certain updates to our rules” in the spectrum falling between 108 MHz and 20.2 GHz as well as correcting typographical errors, it said. Changes include allocating the 1900-2000 kHz band to amateur radio operators on a “nearly exclusive basis,” modifying the quiet zone rules for radiolocation systems and allocating some parts of spectrum for aeronautical mobile route service, satellite and fixed and land mobile service. It’s seeking comment on two issues -- whether it should “allocate the 135.7-137.8 kHz band to the amateur radio service on a secondary basis, subject to the protection of power line carrier operations,” and whether it should “remove a lightly-used primary non-Federal AMT allocation in the 2345-2360 MHz band and an unused primary radionavigation service allocation from the 24.75-25.05 GHz band.” The comment deadline is 60 days after publication in the Federal Register and the reply deadline is 90 days after, the order said.
Communications Daily won’t be published Thursday, Nov. 22 because of the federal Thanksgiving Day holiday. Our next issue will be Friday, Nov. 23.
The District of Columbia Public Service Commission is launching an app. It will officially debut Nov. 28 at the PSC’s headquarters following an open meeting, the commission announced Monday (http://xrl.us/bn2ovb). The app is called “PSC on the Go” and features multiple categories users can click, including ones for electric system reliability and Pepco power outages, according to the photo included of the app. Users can also click on such categories as Newsroom and Low Income Discount Program. The PSC recommends that anyone coming to the launch bring smartphones so they can try out the app.
The U.S. and EU agreed Tuesday to make the Internet safer for children, the European Commission said. The declaration (http://xrl.us/bn2ohv), signed by Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes and U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, calls for joint campaigns on the annual Safer Internet Day, with DHS participating in the EU’s Feb. 5 observance. Both sides also committed to contribute to international cooperation in fighting child sexual abuse online in the immediate future, the EC said. The declaration acknowledged that parents and guardians need to trust the content and services their children access and promised to keep working with industry and other players to help parents and youngsters make informed choices on the Internet. In related news, the European Parliament approved a non-binding resolution calling for stronger online protection of children. Lawmakers pressed EU governments to ramp up efforts, through law, cooperation or sharing good practice, to combat illegal or harmful content and ensure that online resources are less risky. The resolution proposed that education in new digital media for children, parents and teachers be included in formal and informal education programs, Parliament said. It also recommended that Internet service suppliers and institutional players coordinate better on hotlines to make it easier to report illegal content or abuse. Parliament stressed the need for better cooperation with non-EU countries to allow content to be taken down faster. It also backed technologies such as parental control tools or age verification systems to keep children from accessing inappropriate content.
The European Commission’s proposed digital “right to be forgotten” won’t be enforceable by technology alone and must rely on a mix of technical and international legal provisions, the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) said in a report published Tuesday. The EC raised the idea in a January proposal for updating EU data protection rules, saying Internet users should be allowed to ask for digitally held personal information to be deleted. ENISA’s report (http://bit.ly/Sbqc6c) focused on how to achieve forgetfulness in information systems. One problem is that the EC doesn’t precisely define what constitutes personal data, who can request their deletion and how deletion can acceptably take place, ENISA said. Personal data are broadly defined as information that can be linked, either alone or in combination with other available data, to uniquely identify a natural person, but it’s unclear whether that includes information that can be used to identify someone with high probability or that focuses on someone as a member of a small set of individuals such as a family, it said. Another question is how aggregated forms of data might be affected when some of the raw data from which statistics are derived is erased, it said. The problem is that developing technical ways to ensure the right to be forgotten requires an exact definition of the data and the circumstances to which the right should apply, when EU regulations and laws tend to be deliberately broad and general, it said. The question of who has the right to demand the deletion of data is also unclear, it said. For example, if Bob incorporates part of a tweet he received from Alice into a longer blog post of his own, and Alice then exercises her right to remove her tweet, must Bob take down his entire blog post or remove the tweet and rewrite the post? A related question is how to balance the right to be forgotten against the public interest in accountability, journalism, history and scientific inquiry, ENISA said. Another question is what constitutes “forgetting.” A strict interpretation would mean that all copies of the data would be erased and removed from any derived or aggregated representations. A slightly weaker and possibly more practical approach would allow encrypted copies of the information to survive as long as they can’t be deciphered by any unauthorized parties. An even weaker interpretation would allow clear text copies of the data to survive as long as it no longer appears in public indices, database query results or search engine listings, it said. The main technical challenges surrounding the right to be forgotten are how to allow a person to identify and locate personal data stored about her; how to track all copies of an item and all copies of information derived from it; how to determine whether someone has the right to seek removal of a data item; and how to erase all exact and derived copies, ENISA said. In a completely open system like the Web, it’s generally not possible for anyone to find all personal data items stored about her, or to determine whether she has the right to demand their removal, and no single person has the authority to effect deletion of all copies, it said. “Therefore, enforcing the right to be forgotten is impossible in an open, global system, in general,” it said. It could be technically feasible in closed systems such as corporate networks, but that would mean that users and providers would be “strongly authenticated using a form of electronic identity that can be linked to natural persons,” it said. But regardless of the type of information system, unauthorized copying of information by human observers is ultimately impossible to prevent by technical means, it said. Nor can digital duplication be stopped in open networks. There’s ongoing research on encrypting personal data with an expiration date; securing privacy-sensitive content posted on social networks by storing it on external, trusted servers; and developing owner-centric architecture that establishes dedicated storage locations for all data to which only the legitimate data owner has access, the report said. But these solutions offer only a partial technological solution, it said. Among other things, ENISA recommended that the EC consider the possible “pragmatic” approach of ordering search engine operators and sharing services within the EU to filter references to forgotten information stored inside and outside the EU region.