The FCC is backtracking on an AllVid proposal it floated (CD March 24 p1) as an alternative to cable and telco-TV providers having to connect to consumer electronics, said agency and industry officials. They said the alternative to a gateway connector approach the Media Bureau floated in recent months, for pay-TV providers to let CE devices connect to their IP streams using application programming interfaces, appears dead. Lobbying by the CE industry against the plan and technical concerns within the bureau and possibly the office of Chairman Julius Genachowski sunk it, said commission officials and executives in the CE and pay-TV industries. AllVid aims to replace CableCARDs.

Pay-TV interests ratcheted up criticism of terrestrial broadcasters Monday, in a fight over whether the FCC should change rules on retransmission consent deals. Terrestrial TV is archaic, a “needless expense” that’s “propped up” by outdated rules for a technology with a “brilliant run to obsolescence,” wrote an economist who often opposes regulation. The paper, heavy with historical reviews of regulation and technology, was paid for by pay-TV companies and others seeking retransmission-consent changes. In it, George Mason University Professor Thomas Hazlett backed reallocating TV stations’ frequencies for newer technologies like mobile broadband. The NAB, which along with its members has said retrans works, criticized the paper, while the CEA said it offered some good points on reallocating spectrum.

Sprint Nextel is urging regulators in California and West Virginia to follow Louisiana in reviewing AT&T’s plan to buy T-Mobile for $39 billion. The Louisiana Public Service Commission, which opened a proceeding, is requesting information on the deal, a commission spokesman said.

DALLAS -- Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, is “confident” that her joint spectrum bill with Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., will get through both houses of Congress and be signed this year, she said in response to our question after a speech at the TIA convention. Hutchison said the bill has “changed enormously” since Rockefeller initially introduced it, making it more appealing to both parties.

Carriers, E-commerce companies and trade associations have joined forces to form the Download Fairness Coalition to push for a national tax framework. The group seeks to end what it calls discriminatory and multiple state and local taxes, officials said during a conference call Thursday.

The FCC majority got things wrong last year when it declined to find in its annual wireless competition report that the U.S. market, is “effectively competitive,” Joshua Wright, associate professor of law at George Mason University, said at a Mercatus Center conference late Wednesday. The GMU-based center asked experts to comment on the future of the report, which the FCC has released every year since 1995, following a congressional mandate. Wright was sharply critical of how FCC economists interpreted the data collected on the state of the market.

AT&T faces mounting criticism from public, educational and governmental channel advocates (CD March 31 p11) calling anew for the telco to make major changes to how its pay-TV service delivers PEG channels to subscribers so the blind can easily access them. The campaign for AT&T to stop putting PEG channels on a subchannel, and to instead make each one a separate channel as the company’s U-verse service does for other programming, intensified with a letter Thursday to AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. He was written by American Community Television (ACT) President John Rocco, who can’t see well and said he’s among those that can’t use on-screen menus to choose PEG networks within channel 99.

Not one Capitol Hill proposal to renew Patriot Act sections expiring May 27 sufficiently protects U.S. citizens from government spying, civil liberties advocates said Thursday. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., on Wednesday introduced a much scaled-back alternative to the extensions bill approved in March by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Expiring Patriot Act sections relate to roving wiretaps, lone wolf attacks and Section 215 orders to obtain “any tangible thing.” House lawmakers will vote next week on an extension bill, but it was unclear Thursday on which proposal.

Senate lawmakers again chided Facebook, Apple and Google at a mobile privacy hearing held Thursday for failing to protect minors. Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., took a hard line against the three companies for behaviors that he said might violate the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). FTC official David Vladeck said that the commission is targeting “a number” of companies for alleged COPPA violations and asked Congress for more assistance.

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."