The FCC is reviewing its indecency enforcement policy in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Fox v. FCC decision, agency Chairman Julius Genachowski said Friday after the Justice Department dropped its case against Fox over a program that depicted bachelor parties featuring strippers. “In the interim, I have directed the Enforcement Bureau to focus its resources on the strongest cases that involve the most egregious indecency violations,” Genachowski said. “We will also continue to reduce the backlog of pending indecency complaints."
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski praised Comcast’s Internet Essentials program Monday as a way to help connect underserved communities to broadband. He spoke as Comcast continues to mark the start of the second year of the program, which offers low-cost broadband service to families with children eligible to receive free lunches under the National School Lunch Program, as well as affordable computers and digital literacy training. The program is set to continue through at least the 2013-2014 school year (CD May 19/11 p1) . More than 400,000 Americans -- 100,000 families -- have gotten broadband service through Internet Essentials, according to Comcast. In the Washington market, the Internet Essentials $9.95 monthly product has about 2,000 subscribers. The company agreed to start the service to get FCC okay to buy control last year of NBCUniversal. Comcast was surprised at the number of people who joined the program in its first year, said Executive Vice President David Cohen. The program helps to “level the playing field” for the families it serves, he said. Comcast has recently entered into new partnerships related to the Internet Essentials program with City Year, the Department of Labor and Connect2Compete, Cohen said. The company’s working to promote the product and “digital literacy training” with the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Washington, Byte Back, other groups and D.C. public libraries, Comcast said in a news release. Genachowski said his conversations with teachers, parents and students have reinforced for him the need to expand access to broadband technology. When he talked to teachers in low-income areas, they tell him that when they attempt to incorporate Internet-related projects into their curriculum, they run into difficulty when it comes to assigning their students to work on them at home. “They say, ‘half my kids don’t have broadband at home,'” Genachowski said. “'What am I supposed to do?'” During a trip to Nebraska, Genachowski heard the story of a family who had a son serving in the military overseas. They wanted to communicate with him online but were unable to because their part of the state didn’t have broadband access, but friends elsewhere were able to do so, Genachowski said. “That’s wrong.” Continuing to “move the needle” on broadband access is essential, Genachowski said.
In an update to the FCC on its Kansas City, Kan., fiber deployment, Google executives discussed “the importance of being able to provide customers with access to must-have live regional sports programming,” and the difficulty in licensing such programming, an ex parte notice said (http://xrl.us/bnq883). Google employees also asked about “the continuing ability of competitors and new entrants to access essential regional sports programming” in the context of the FCC’s program access rule review, the notice said.
LightSquared requested confirmation from the FCC that stringent buildout conditions set in 2010 for the company’s proposed terrestrial network are no longer applicable. The company said it should be relieved of the buildout milestones “until they are reassessed once the status of LightSquared’s ATC [ancillary terrestrial component] authorizations is clarified.” An ex parte filing in docket 11-109 said that until issues of GPS compatibility are resolved, spectrum resources “will necessarily lie fallow simply because no party is in a position to deploy a terrestrial network in the L-band.” The commission has granted relief in other, less compelling situations, LightSquared said: This illustrates that the company “cannot properly be expected to satisfy the milestones in the circumstances presented here.” LightSquared’s plans for a terrestrial service have been stalled due to an FCC proposal to revoke its ATC component (CD Feb 15 p1).
A federal appeals court denied a motion to stay the FCC’s recent DTV “viewability” rule, court filings show. Broadcasters, including the NAB, had sued the FCC over the order at the U.S. Appeals Court for the D.C. Circuit and had sought to block the rule the agency adopted this summer that will let cable operators stop distributing must-carry stations in analog if they offer subscribers certain digital cable equipment (CD Aug 3 p5). The appellants have “not satisfied the stringent requirements for a stay pending court review,” Judges Judith Rogers, David Tatel and Brett Kavanaugh decided. The ruling is a disappointment because the new requirements will hurt low-income consumers, said Andrew Schwartzman, a communications attorney following the case. “It is always hard to tell why a stay is being denied, so it doesn’t foretell what will happen once the case receives a full briefing,” he said.
A recent survey shows Oregonians have more broadband access than most states, the Oregon Public Utilities Commission said Friday. The telephone survey, done by Opinion Research Corp. for the commission’s state broadband data and development grant project, said 88 percent of state residents have a computer, compared to 78 percent nationally (http://xrl.us/bnq856). The 108-page report broke down the different geographic regions of the state, saying people are least likely to have computers in eastern Oregon, and Portland is the “most wired” location. About 18 percent of Oregonians are “cell-phone-only households,” lower than the national average of 24 percent, the report said. Major factors examined include income level, age and education. The sample size was over 4,000, the report said. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 1.5 percentage points.
Apple sold out its initial supply of iPhone 5s, but stores “continue to receive iPhone 5 shipments regularly and customers can continue to order online and receive an estimated delivery date,” CEO Tim Cook said Monday. Demand “exceeded the initial supply and while the majority of pre-orders have been shipped to customers, many are scheduled to be shipped in October,” the company said. Apple said it sold more than 5 million iPhone 5s in the device’s first three days. That’s more than the 4 million-plus iPhone 4Ss that Apple said it sold on the prior device’s three-day launch weekend last year. But Apple shares slipped Monday, likely because some analysts had projected Apple could sell 6-8 million iPhone 5s over the weekend and said the company would have if supplies didn’t fall short of demand. Shares closed 1.3 percent lower Monday at $690.79. Apple also said Monday that more than 100 million iOS devices were updated with iOS 6, the latest version of its mobile operating system. The iPhone 5 shipped Friday in the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and the U.K. It will be available in 22 more countries starting this Friday and more than 100 countries by the end of the year, said Apple. Verizon spokeswoman Brenda Raney said Monday that the Verizon version of the iPhone 5 is “unlocked” for 3G GSM roaming in the U.S. The device will also work using AT&T’s network, giving users the option to switch carriers once the current contract expires. Raney declined to say why the capability was included on the Verizon version of the device.
CEA and member companies lobbied the FCC to okay CEA’s petition to redo some Internet Protocol captioning rules. That’s so DVD and other removable media players need not caption broadcast and pay-TV content when sent in IP, and other consumer electronics that must comply with the rules don’t need to unless made starting Jan. 1, 2014 (CD June 7 p15). “CEA’s members need certainty in the near future as they design products affected by issues raised in the” group’s petition for reconsideration of the agency’s IP captioning order, the group said in a filing (http://xrl.us/bnq86e). Friday’s ex parte disclosure in docket 11-154 reported on a meeting with FCC General Counsel Sean Lev and others in his office as well as Media Bureau staff attended by CEA, Panasonic and Sony executives. “Apparatus closed captioning rules” should only cover “devices intended by the manufacturer to receive, play back, or record video programming, rather than broadly applying them to any device with a video player,” the filing said.
The FTC can’t be trusted to adequately punish Google for its alleged privacy violations going back to the “Wi-Spy” scandal over its Street View vehicles’ collection of Wi-Fi data, Consumer Watchdog told the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Given permission last month to file a friend-of-the-court brief criticizing the agency’s $22.5 million settlement with the company -- resolving its claims that Google violated the earlier Buzz consent order by bypassing privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser -- the vocal Google critic laid into the commission as “halfhearted and ineffectual” in its dealings with Google (http://xrl.us/bnq83o). The settlement is “so markedly deficient that it fails to meet the relevant legal standards of ‘adequacy’ and furthering ’the public interest,'” Consumer Watchdog said. A Google spokeswoman told us it was “confident that there is no basis for this challenge.” We couldn’t reach the FTC for comment. Commissioner Thomas Rosch dissented from the settlement on narrower grounds than those of Consumer Watchdog, mostly concerned that the fine was too small and Google was allowed to deny wrongdoing (CD Aug 10 p3). Consumer Watchdog put the settlement into the context of the commission’s past reviews of Google actions, which the brief refers to as “halfhearted and ineffectual attempts to make Google respect the privacy of Internet users,” starting with Wi-Spy. As German authorities, members of the U.S. Congress and even the FCC took Google to task for the episode with investigations and fines, it was “lights off” at the FTC, the brief said. The commission’s “okeydoke” consent order following the Buzz incident bound Google only to get permission from users before sharing data outside the company, not even for using data for a different purpose internally, Consumer Watchdog said. The FTC “ballyhooed” to the press and public a “comprehensive” privacy program foisted on Google that in reality “largely overlapped” Google’s own internal changes the year before, the brief said. The commission, in contrast to “howls of outrage” from Congress and other countries, “took no action” after Google said in January it would combine user information among Google services without user consent, it said. The Safari-circumvention settlement won’t “deter and prevent Google from additional violations of the Buzz decree,” despite the fact that the FTC’s initial complaint asked for such relief and the “proposed order’s caption and text clearly contemplate it,” Consumer Watchdog said. It echoed Rosch’s description of the $22.5 million fine as “de minimis” given Google’s revenue and noted that the commission itself said it could be “dismissed as insufficient.” Commission staff, “as before, immediately took to the airwaves” following Rosch’s criticism and that of other commentators, doing press calls and social-media chats, “all for the purpose of ’selling’ the notion” that the settlement “protected the public,” the brief said. Consumer Watchdog said it agrees with the FTC on one thing: The “most important question” is whether Google will follow the underlying Buzz settlement “going forward.” But the FTC is wrong to think it will, the brief said.
Netflix updated its streaming app for Android devices, making the user experience “much more immersive” than before, Chris Jaffe, director-product innovation, said Monday at the Netflix blog (http://xrl.us/bnq84e). The new version of the app provides an experience that is “much closer to the Netflix experience on tablets, which got a major upgrade late last year,” he said. For example, he said, the top of the new browse screen on Android phones is a row that lets users continue watching shows or movies that they previously started watching from the point where they left off. Also, a “simple tap on any title” now presents all of the information for that title and a double tap starts instant playback, he said. Search is also now available everywhere in the application, so users “can always find” what they're looking for, he said. The new version of the app is available for Android devices using Gingerbread and newer operating systems and can be downloaded from the Google Play service, he said. He said at the blog last week that a similarly enhanced Netflix app was made available for iPhones and iPod touch devices. Netflix didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment after published reports said the company lost its access to content from A&E and History Channel after deals ended with them last week.