The FCC Wireless Bureau established a pleading cycle on Deutsche Telekom’s proposed buy of MetroPCS. Petitions to deny are due Nov. 26, oppositions Dec. 6 and replies Dec. 27 (http://xrl.us/bnwoaf). “To allow the Commission to consider fully all substantive issues regarding the Applications in as timely and efficient a manner as possible, petitioners and commenters should raise all issues in their initial filings. New issues may not be raised in responses or replies,” the notice said. “A party or interested person seeking to raise a new issue after the pleading cycle has closed must show good cause why it was not possible for it to have raised the issue previously. Submissions after the pleading cycle has closed that seek to raise new issues based on new facts or newly discovered facts should be filed within 15 days after such facts are discovered. Absent such a showing of good cause, any issues not timely raised may be disregarded by the Commission."
The FCC appears unlikely to step in to address usage-based pricing for wireless, said Leslie Marx, Duke University economist and former chief economist at the FCC, in a Monday blog (http://xrl.us/bnpgey). “At this stage, the FCC has enabled the competitive marketplace to determine prices, the market is working, and I don’t foresee the FCC taking actions in this area to begin regulating consumer prices,” Marx wrote. “Unless more can be done to get more spectrum into the hands of all the carriers, they will all eventually have to manage network capacity through data caps and data sharing plans. With this in mind, it is critical that policymakers and lawmakers work with industry to move forward with spectrum incentive auctions and begin to more clearly define how spectrum sharing would work. Of more immediate impact, the FCC can continue to facilitate secondary market transactions to free up more spectrum for commercial wireless broadband services."
Correction: Righthaven is the online copyright venture that Gannett Senior Associate Counsel Barbara Wall criticized as having a business model that may not work (CD Oct 29 p11).
The World Wide Web Consortium must come up with a meaningful do-not-track (DNT) standard, the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe said Monday. The W3C is working on a standard for DNT, a feature already included in all major Web browsers, IAB said. When activated, the setting sends a signal to visited sites and other entities present on those websites that the user doesn’t want to be tracked, it said. But the W3C still hasn’t agreed on DNT, including on what “tracking” actually means and what it covers, IAB said. Both organizations agree there should be three “states” of DNT -- “on,” “off” and “not set” -- which resemble the accepted settings for cookies, IAB said. Despite the lack of an agreed standard, the advertising industry is strongly committed to interoperability between DNT and IAB Europe’s online behavioral advertising self-regulatory framework, it said. Some activities using anonymous and aggregated data need to be excluded from DNT, where it’s not about tracking individuals, said Patrick Marck, IAB Belgium general manager and chairman of IAB Europe’s Web analytics committee. With such critical issues not yet resolved, interpreting a DNT setting “would require looking into a crystal ball,” he said. Companies can’t rely on the current DNT signals, he said. The e-privacy directive wants users and subscribers to be given clear, comprehensive information in order to exercise their choice about tracking, he said. Without that information, the DNT signal has no meaning because it doesn’t let users make an informed decision, and it’s also likely users don’t understand what DNT means, he said.
Verizon and Sprint continue to fight over charges Verizon has attempted to collect from Sprint, before the New York State Public Service Commission. The two parties have been engaged in an interconnection agreement, the PSC documents said. “Discovery just received reveals that Verizon is actually mischaracterizing traffic, and as a result, is erroneously assessing transit charges and RPCs [record processing charges] on Sprint calls that are not transit,” Sprint said in a brief posted Monday (http://xrl.us/bnwm9y). “While conclusively demonstrating that all Verizon RPCs must be fully credited, this revelation will also require examination of the TTS [tandem transit service] charges themselves ... Significantly, Verizon now admits that its assessment of RPCs on ’traffic not within the definition of TTS’ is a valid ground for removal of such charges.” Much of Sprint’s reply brief repeats charges first offered in March but now with supplemental material gained in discovery. Verizon is wrongly “charging the RPC on calls that never leave the Verizon network” and “charging the RPC on non-local, interstate calls,” Sprint said. The telco questioned the validity of Verizon’s practices. Verizon called the charge “a long-standing tariff” that Sprint has attempted to charge, according to an Oct. 19 Verizon brief (http://xrl.us/bnwnaa). “Sprint should be directed to pay those charges, together with authorized late payment charges,” Verizon told the PSC, adding it’s entitled to the “full” amount. Verizon traces the current disagreement back to withheld Sprint payments from 2007. Its brief is a revised version of one first submitted last November. The telcos will be examining ways to change the charge in the second phase of this PSC proceeding, they said.
After announcing a multi-year deal with Warner Home Video to offer Warner video titles through its Redbox kiosks 28 days after release, Coinstar on its Q3 2012 earnings call last week proclaimed the physical disc alive and kicking. Redbox and Warner had parted ways in January after Warner said it would require Redbox to adopt a 56-day rental window to renew the company’s distribution agreement. That left Redbox to patch together a workaround solution to secure Warner titles for its rental kiosks. Quoting figures from the Entertainment Merchants Association, Coinstar CEO Paul Davis touted the $18 billion home entertainment market where “physical media is dominant, with $4 of every $5 spent on physical content.” He reiterated Coinstar’s position that it believes in the long tail of the physical disc market, but the support for the shelf-life of physical discs was noticeably more optimistic on this latest call than in recent webcasts. Coinstar executives again provided few details about the Redbox Instant by Verizon joint venture that’s due to start this quarter. Trials have moved from alpha to internal beta testing, Davis said. He wasn’t clear on the breadth of the rollout that’s been promised before the end of the year. “We plan to expand that beta to the public,” he said. He wouldn’t specify the week when that would occur, saying only, “we're committed that it will be out before the end of the year.” The joint venture is “gaining great insights that will lead to a strong product offering,” Davis said. The “smart and efficient” acquisition strategy to buy content on a per-subscriber basis avoids a large capital outlay for content, he said. Content deals are negotiated separately with studios for the physical and digital distribution deals, Coinstar executives said, but the deal announced with Warner includes streaming through Redbox Instant by Verizon. The agreement will make Warner titles available in VOD and electronic sellthrough formats, allows Redbox Instant by Verizon to support and distribute Warner UltraViolet-enabled movies and covers a multi-year subscription video-on-demand agreement supporting feature-length content, the companies said. As part of that agreement, Redbox also plans to join the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) and to promote its UltraViolet digital locker service, Coinstar said. Coinstar attributed its “challenging results” for Q3 to competition from the Olympics that “negatively impacted” all entertainment channels “with the exception of NBC,” including theaters, TV networks, video-on-demand services and physical disc sellthrough. The quarter included nine weeks with two or fewer titles in a time period “that historically is one of our highest rental periods,” the company said. A drop in rental frequency for the quarter was driven by “the low level of content over an extended period of time,” Davis said. Coinstar Q3 revenue grew 16 percent to $537.6 million over Q3 2011.
The FCC Wireline Bureau seeks comment on petitions by Free Mobile, ICON Telecom and NewPhone Wireless for limited designation as eligible telecom carriers for the provision of Lifeline service in Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Washington, D.C., Florida, New Hampshire, North Carolina, New York, Tennessee and Virginia, a public notice said Thursday (http://xrl.us/bnv75b). Comments in docket 09-197 are due Nov. 26, replies Dec. 10.
Ad industry-supported versions of the self-regulatory Do Not Track program still collect data on Internet users’ activities, but limit targeted ads, TechFreedom President Berin Szoka said Friday during a BroadbandUS.TV webcast. “For the versions that the advertising industry has indicated any willingness to go with, there’s no limits on collection from before,” he said. “The difference is that … the ad frequency and the ad specificity get turned down. But the collection of data, at least according to the industry, stays the same.” As the Digital Advertising Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium have worked on setting the standards for the program, they have been operating under different definitions of what “tracking” means and thus have different expectations of what the program will accomplish, said Szoka. As the FTC has waded into Internet privacy issues in recent years, it has sought to strike a balance between protecting consumers’ privacy and still giving them the ability to enjoy the Internet’s benefits, said Deborah Matties, aide to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. It has also sought to address these issues by having industry players self-regulate and develop common standards they will all abide by, she said. “I think we're pretty optimistic that the process is moving forward in a good way, and we think that we will have something if not this year, then sometime early next year."
FairPoint Communications urged prompt action on its petition for relief so the FairPoint cost companies’ interstate special access services can be converted to price cap regulation and withdrawn from the NECA pool as of Jan. 1. Companies representatives met last week with aides to Commissioners Ajit Pai, Robert McDowell and Jessica Rosenworcel, as well as Wireline Bureau officials, an ex parte filing shows (http://xrl.us/bnv74r). No opposition has been filed to its petition, and several public interest benefits would flow from granting the requested waivers, it said, noting the “substantial reductions in its interstate special access rates that could be expected.”
Verizon does not know how its CLEC customers deploy unbundled network elements (UNEs) to serve mass-market locations, it told FCC Wireline Bureau officials Tuesday, an ex parte filing said (http://xrl.us/bnv736). Verizon was meeting with bureau officials about the upcoming mandatory data request on the state of the special access marketplace (CD Oct 26 p3). “Verizon is unable to distinguish between UNEs that CLECs use to serve mass-market locations and those that they use to serve business locations,” it said. Verizon also discussed the availability of historical 2010 data in its billing systems.