For the second month in a row, the FCC won’t take on any high-profile issues at its monthly meeting. The agenda for the June 9 open meeting lists four items, none likely to excite much attention (CD May 23 p6). The May meeting’s agenda was similarly light (CD May 13 p 9).

DALLAS -- The prospect of wireless security regulation is “changing the basic incentives of many management structures,” said Sam Curry, RSA chief technology officer. RSA is the security division of storage hardware and data recovery firm EMC. But officials at the TIA convention said that may not be happening quickly enough as malware for Android operating systems, for example, proliferates with a compounded growth rate of 400 percent monthly. “Security is a dirty word at many companies,” Curry said. “The language of risk at the C-level and elsewhere is not always fully developed.” Chief financial officers see security as just a cost to be managed, said Phil Attfield, CEO of Sequitur Labs. He said they need to start seeing security as a “profit center."

OMAHA, Neb. -- The FCC shouldn’t fall for the “misperception” that satellite can’t provide effective voice and broadband service, WildBlue Vice President Lisa Scalpone said late Wednesday at a commission workshop on changing the Universal Service Fund to pay for Internet service. “We don’t want to be foreclosed,” she told federal and state regulators, including FCC members Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn. ViaSat, WildBlue’s parent, is scheduled to launch ViaSat-1 in July. Scalpone said that once that satellite is operational, WildBlue will go from download speeds of 2 Mbps to 12 Mbps. “At least let satellite perform in pilot programs,” she said. “We'll have the programs up and running."

OMAHA, Neb. -- Industry and public interest advocates have yet to devise a comprehensive proposal addressing all the problems of the Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation regime, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said at a commission roundtable. “We want to see more from stakeholders in this program, and we want to see it quickly.” The chairman led a public forum on the pending overhaul late Wednesday at the University of Nebraska at Omaha to close a day-long set of discussions. He reiterated the four corners of his reform program: Moving to a broadband fund and phasing down intercarrier comp rates, (including intrastate revenues); “controlling costs and constraining the size of the fund;” “demanding accountability;” and “market-driven and incentive-based policies to maximize the impact of scarce program resources.”

OMAHA -- The FCC should take an active role in creating and enforcing broadband guidelines in its Universal Service Fund reform, T-Mobile Corporate Counsel Teri Ohta said at an FCC workshop Wednesday. “We do feel that the federal government ultimately has the responsibility to make sure those funds are distributed properly.” T-Mobile is worried that giving states authority over broadband regulations will lead to a confusing patchwork of regulations that will make it difficult to deploy broadband, Ohta said.

Staff in the office of FCC Commissioner Meredith Baker was lobbied on more than a dozen occasions by Comcast, the NCTA, cable company rivals, nonprofit groups and others as she considered a job offer at Comcast, agency records show. Since April 18, when Baker privately recused herself from voting on anything at the FCC (CD May 16 p7), the lawyers who advise her also were visited by executives of AT&T, the CTIA, News Corp., Verizon and other companies and public interest groups. Baker’s not the first FCC member to directly leave for a large company regulated by the agency, though it’s been decades since that’s believed to have last occurred, said several who have long watched the commission.

Christine Aarnes, chief of telecom of the Kansas Corporation Commission, recommended the commission deny Verizon’s petition to amend the eligible telecommunications carrier designation held by Alltel to reflect Verizon as the ETC in Kansas for federal USF support, a filing (Docket No. 11-CELZ-176-ETC) with the commission said. Granting the petition would cost millions of dollars in high-cost support that could otherwise be invested in telecom infrastructure in the state, she said. Many common carriers are affiliated with other carriers that operate within the state but the commission has neither received nor granted a blanket request for such designation, she said.

Leaders of the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association and the Iowa Telecommunications Association gave a cool reception on NCTA’s proposal to freeze the RUS broadband loan program. The RUS relaunched its troubled broadband loan program earlier this year and published interim rules. The comment period on the proposed rules closed last week. In its filing with RUS, the cable association said the broadband loan program was structured as if high-speed broadband suffered under geographic monopolies like old water and electric systems (CD May 16 p14). Offering broadband subsidies to telcos in areas where cable already offers it puts government in the “totally inappropriate role for a government agency,” by “picking winners and losers in the marketplace.”

Broadband reclassification is once again haunting the FCC’s proceedings, this time as rural telcos seize on broadband’s Title I status to lobby on Universal Service Fund reforms. The commission elected to take a Title I approach in its net neutrality order (CD Dec 2 p1), but in recent weeks, executives of rural telcos have begun to argue that proposals to roll universal service cash into a Connect America Fund for broadband will raise “a host of legal and practical complications” under Title II (CD May 9 p13).

Companies are beefing up lobbying efforts in Maine: One bill now before the legislature would put ILECs like FairPoint under the same regulatory structure as CLECs, while another bill seeks to deregulate VoIP. The latter proposal would interfere with ongoing litigation, now before the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, consumer advocates said.