BURLINGAME, Calif. -- Federal broadband efforts were criticized at the eComm conference by Google’s policy chief as lacking effective follow-through on the National Broadband Plan and by a former Obama White House official as failing to deal to what she sees as the central fact of monopolies in wired and wireless communications. Then an anti-regulation think tanker denounced what he called impulses to reimpose public-utility regulation on U.S. telecom.

Seven public interest and consumer groups urged the FCC to hold field hearings on AT&T’s proposed buy of T-Mobile. The Tuesday letter said the FCC has held such hearings on other key transactions, including Comcast/NBC, and on other topics as well. Public Knowledge, Consumers Union, Free Press, the Future of Music Coalition, Media Access Project, the National Hispanic Media Coalition and the Open Technology Initiative of the New America Foundation signed a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski seeking hearings.

Parents should seek to educate themselves and their children about the privacy implications of location-based services (LBS), mobile industry experts said at a joint public forum hosted by the FCC and FTC in Washington Tuesday. In the 21st century it’s becoming increasingly important for parents to communicate to their children what the parents’ values are for offline behavior and encourage them to retain those same values while online, said Nat Wood, assistant director of the FTC division of consumer and business education. At the same time, developers of applications and mobile services have a responsibility to implement better notice and transparency into their LBS technologies, Wood said.

The Wireless Internet Service Providers Association agreed in general with Wireless Bureau recommendations for geographic restrictions and frequency separation requirements on band sharing in a public notice examining Fixed Service (FS) sharing of the 7 GHz and 13 GHz bands. NAB also agreed in general with the bureau’s latest sharing plan. In a June 27 notice, the bureau asked follow-up questions to an August 2010 rulemaking on removing regulatory barriers to the use of spectrum for wireless backhaul and other point-to-point and point-to-multipoint communications.

Speakers clashed during an FCC forum Tuesday on location-based services (LBS) on whether regulation or legislation is needed to protect consumer privacy as wireless subscribers make use of a growing number of applications that track their locations. The FCC, in consultation with the FTC, took a deep dive at the forum into the complicated issues surrounding LBS. The FCC appeared to mostly be on a fact-finding mission, with no hints from FCC officials that LBS rules are in the works.

The FTC and marketers each are working to get a handle on data practices in mobile, seen as a huge new privacy frontier, officials said Tuesday. “We have nonpublic investigations in this area,” said Jessica Rich, deputy director of the commission’s Consumer Protection Bureau, on a teleconference held by the American Bar Association’s science and technology law section. There’s “not enough effort being made to address privacy in this space,” and it’s “just going to get bigger and bigger” as a data privacy issue, she said.

Some who seek to change retransmission consent rules want an FCC inquiry into what TV stations charge multichannel video programming providers, to show what they contend are rising prices in a broken system. Officials at the American Cable Association and Public Knowledge, among the 14 entities that in 2010 petitioned the agency to change how it handles retrans disputes, and MVPD SureWest said in interviews that such an inquiry will help make their case. A lawyer for TV stations which oppose changes to the rules told us the onus is on MVPDs to show costs to carry TV stations’ signals are too high. An NAB official said more government involvement isn’t needed.

Spectrum legislation could become part of the budget deal for fiscal-year 2012, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., told us Tuesday. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has mentioned that as a possibility, so Rockefeller hasn’t talked to Reid about separate floor time for his legislation S-911, Rockefeller said. Congress has been trying to make a deal on debt ceiling legislation that must pass before Aug. 2 or the U.S. will default on its obligations. Meanwhile, Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, said he’s hoping the FCC will work on 700 MHz interoperability.

The Supreme Court likely will spend much time on a landmark broadcast indecency decision, reviewing whether the FCC has constitutional authority to find that an isolated occurrence of nudity or instance of cursing is indecent, industry lawyers and professors predicted. They said the 1978 Pacifica case, where the high court found the commission can find certain swear words indecent, is likely to get more attention than the 1969 Red Lion ruling upholding broadcast regulation because of the scarcity of spectrum. That’s because in certifying for oral argument cases involving the ABC and Fox networks, the court on Monday said it will limit consideration to issues involving the First and Fifth Amendments.

A handful of rural rate-of-return telco executives took aim at the USTelecom-led efforts to create cost models for Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation regime reforms, an ex parte notice released Monday showed. USTelecom had brought in analyst CostQuest to create cost models as it continues to lead industry-wide talks on wholesale reform. CostQuest executives have been sitting in on ex parte meetings since at least May to discuss some of their findings (CD May 24 p14).