FCC hires Jean Kiddoo, ex-Bingham McCutchen, as Wireless Bureau deputy chief ... Marc Andreessen resigns from eBay board ...Center for Democracy & Technology hires Lisa Hayes, ex-American Constitution Society for Law & Policy, as vice president-program & strategy, and Chris Calabrese, ex-American Civil Liberties Union, as senior policy director ... Pandora hires Steve Bené, ex-Electronic Arts, as general counsel ... Wilson Sonsini hires Margaret Lassack, ex-FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection's Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, as of counsel ... SoftBank Group hires Rajeev Misra, ex-Fortress Investment Group, as head-strategic finance, effective Nov. 3.
What FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and his team will propose on net neutrality remains unclear, industry and agency officials said in interviews this week. The officials agree the most likely proposal remains some iteration of Title II reclassification of broadband, possibly based on proposals by Mozilla and Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu, an early proponent of net neutrality.
Creating net neutrality rules under Title II would require edge providers to make payments to ISPs for termination services, said George Ford, Phoenix Center chief economist, during a teleforum Wednesday. Reclassification, he said, would turn edge providers into ISP customers, which would require the broadband providers under Section 203 of the Communications Act to tariff termination service for Internet content. The FCC can’t forbear the tariff because the broadband providers are considered terminating monopolies, and competition is the basis for Section 10 forbearance, said Ford, who made the argument in a policy bulletin last month (http://bit.ly/WEvdLa). That the tariff requirement hasn’t been discussed in depth during the net neutrality debate “reveals the superficial nature of this debate,” Ford said during the forum. Tariffing has “significant compliance costs,” and neither carriers nor the agency is set up to handle tariffs, which have become less common, said Wiley Rein’s Thomas Navin, a former Wireline Bureau chief, during the forum. Title II proponents disagreed. The agency could forbear the tariffing requirement in Section 203, said Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld, pointing to his Oct. 2 blog post (http://bit.ly/10K8cZV), because other statutes like Sections 201 and 202 allow the FCC to act in the case of “unjust reasonable rates and practices and otherwise protecting consumers.” Edge providers “are not in fact the customers of the end-user ISP. There is no service there,” said Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood, and “there'd be a real danger in that view,” because “quite literally every website in the world becomes a customer of Comcast’s just because I view that site on my Comcast connection.”
Panelists at the final FCC net neutrality roundtable agreed Tuesday that litigation is all but certain as the FCC pushes forward with net neutrality rules. The sixth and final session focused on the open Internet and the law, with FCC General Counsel Jonathan Sallet asking most of the questions.
The FCC’s new Licensing and Management System is planned to completely replace the commission’s Consolidated Database System by late 2015 or early 2016, said a Media Bureau official in an interview Friday. The first phase of that replacement took affect Thursday, with LMS coming online and replacing CDBS as the only way for full-power TV stations to electronically file for construction permits and licenses to cover them (CD Oct 1 p17).
Since House Republicans said in December they plan to overhaul the 1996 Telecom Act, there has been limited Commerce Committee leadership outreach to House Democrats and committee Republicans, said lawmakers and Capitol Hill staffers. Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., hasn’t yet sought out his Democratic counterpart. Republicans said the minimal outreach is by design, with substantial dialogue expected to kick off soon.
Navigating the Federal Aviation Administration for an exemption may well not be the only challenge for companies or groups seeking permission to operate commercial drones. A day after the FAA’s chief issued a sweeping call that his agency “is open to receiving petitions from anyone” seeking an exemption like those granted Thursday to filmmakers to operate commercial unmanned aircraft systems (CD Sept 26 p6), an industry group representing major battery suppliers issued a stern advisory warning that “companies should be aware of the stringent transportation regulations applicable to the lithium ion batteries that power virtually every” commercial drone.
The FCC’s first-of-its-kind auction may present complexities beyond the technical details for longtime telecom attorneys with clients that may sell broadcast-TV frequencies to the agency or wireless carriers that may be wanting to buy that relinquished spectrum for wireless broadband. Such firms representing multiple clients in the incentive auction, which government and industry officials have called extremely complex, may face challenges avoiding conflicts of interest, said wireless and broadcast attorneys in recent interviews. Firms that represent both wireless and broadcast clients -- such as Wilkinson Barker and Wiley Rein -- may not be able to do so in the auction, under local bar association ethics rules or possibly FCC anti-collusion rules, the attorneys said. Since the parties are buyer and seller on opposite sides, firms may not be able to act for both kinds of participants in the auction expected to raise many billions of dollars.
The Federal Aviation Administration “is open to receiving petitions from anyone” seeking an exemption like those granted Thursday to filmmakers to operate commercial unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), FAA Administrator Michael Huerta told a media briefing.
Though details “are not yet clear” on President Barack Obama’s forthcoming executive order on privacy concerns about commercial drones, it’s expected to “task” the NTIA with convening a multistakeholder process to develop privacy guidelines, “likely either in the form of best practices or a voluntary code of conduct,” said Wiley Rein lawyers Kathleen Kirby and Ari Meltzer in a blog post Friday (http://bit.ly/1poKN4V). “Best practices generally are not enforceable,” they said. “A voluntary code of conduct, however, is legally enforceable against companies that affirmatively commit to follow it. While the decision to adopt a code of conduct is voluntary, a public pledge to follow the code generally would amount to a representation enforceable by the FTC under its consumer protection authority.” There are incentives to adopting voluntary codes of conduct, as NTIA has done in its previous proceedings, they said. “Companies build consumer trust by engaging with consumers and other stakeholders in multi-stakeholder processes and by adopting privacy codes of conduct developed during those discussions,” they said. “Enforceable codes of conduct provide the public clear, understandable baseline protections and offer businesses greater certainty about how agreed upon privacy principles apply to them. Indeed, in any enforcement action based on conduct covered by a code, the FTC likely would consider a company’s adherence to such a code favorably. In the absence of a generally agreed upon code of conduct, the FTC could enforce privacy guidelines on a case-by-case basis, with less predictability and thus greater risk for businesses."