U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia should reject the FTC’s $5 billion privacy settlement with Facebook (see 1908060022) because the deal’s release from liability is too broad, consumer groups argued Tuesday. Public Citizen, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, Common Sense Media and U.S. Public Interest Research Group filed (in Pacer) an amicus brief (in Pacer) in opposition to the agency’s consent decree. The settlement releases Facebook from claims prior to June 12 that the company violated a 2012 commission order and any FTC Act Section 5-related claims the agency was aware of before the same date. “Because of the release clause’s breadth, the proposed consent decree was not fair or reasonable and should be rejected by the court,” the groups argue. The Electronic Privacy Information Center's brief (in Pacer) argued the deal's “both procedurally and substantively unfair and must be rejected due to the expansive and vague release of liability granted.” The Center for the Legalization of Privacy in a third opposition brief said (in Pacer) the FTC order can be interpreted to grant the FTC and DOJ warrantless access to Facebook user data.

FirstNet opposed Verizon’s request for the FCC to address interoperability rules for the national first responder network (see 1909270054). Replies were posted Tuesday in docket 19-254 on Colorado's Boulder Regional Emergency Telephone Service Authority (BRETSA) petitions for declaratory ruling or rulemaking. “Verizon’s comments substantially mischaracterize and minimize the FirstNet Authority’s duties and responsibilities under” the Spectrum Act, which created FirstNet, that authority said, filed by NTIA. “Congress made the FirstNet Authority the agency expressly responsible for carrying out the provisions implementing and overseeing the NPSBN [the nationwide public safety broadband network], and those duties and responsibilities extend far beyond mere 'administrative and business-related actions.'” Relief sought by BRETSA is “unnecessary, unworkable and unwise,” said AT&T, which is building FirstNet. “Neither the Spectrum Act nor the Communications Act authorizes the relief BRETSA seeks,” AT&T said: “BRETSA and its handful of supporters fail utterly to rebut these arguments.” But T-Mobile said the FCC has responsibilities under the Spectrum Act. “As Verizon noted, FirstNet is a Commission licensee, over which the Commission enjoys discretion to impose terms and conditions,” T-Mobile commented: “There is nothing in the … Act that removes from the Commission its general jurisdiction over licensees and their conduct.” BRETSA urged FCC action. “The BRETSA Petitions are not about core-to-core interoperability, placing commercial traffic generally on the NPSBN … or requiring FirstNet to build or support multiple networks,” BRETSA said: “BRETSA’s Petitions are instead about the very practical and essential needs of the public safety community to utilize extant communications resources (i) which serve areas extending beyond the FirstNet footprint, (ii) in which investment of limited public funds have already been sunk, or (iii) which better serve the unique needs of a specific jurisdiction.” BRETSA said: “Until FirstNet achieves a nationwide footprint for the interoperable NPSBN, and public safety agency budgets permit, there will be public safety agencies which will have no choice but to rely upon extant public safety radio systems and commercial providers.”

State Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service members asked the FCC to expand the contribution base for federal USF programs to include a fee on broadband internet access service, filing in docket 96-45 Tuesday. Commissioners Chris Nelson of South Dakota, Sally Talberg of Michigan and Stephen Bloom of Oregon recommend "a connections-based assessment on residential services and an expanded revenues-based assessment on business services." Having different contribution methodologies for residential and business services is "equitable and nondiscriminatory," they said. Under a new contribution mechanism, the FCC would assess fees on businesses that use virtual private network services, video conferencing, web conferencing, unified communications and business wireless broadband access services. For residential customers, a separate fee should be assessed for voice and broadband connections, they proposed. "A connections-based mechanism will provide stability for the Commission, administrative efficiency for carriers, and transparency for customers." About 50 percent of USF support would come from residential connections, and an initial surcharge for wireline, wireless and broadband would be 55 to 60 cents per connection, they suggested. The state commissioners recommend the FCC establish a firm budget for each of the four USF programs "with those budgets not growing any more than the Consumer Price Index for any given year." They want the FCC to "take specific steps to assure the continued viability of state universal service mechanisms promoted by Congress." It's "up to the FCC to determine what to do with the State Members’ recommendation," emailed South Dakota's Nelson (R), the joint board's state chair. "It became clear to the State Members that it was not going to be possible to get a recommendation from the full joint board, so we moved forward with this release of our work product." The other state Joint Board members didn't comment right away. The contribution factor for this quarter is a record 25 percent (see 1909130003). Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel this summer asked the states to raise their concerns about needed action on revisions to the USF contribution mechanism and not wait for an FCC rulemaking (see 1907110020). Commissioner Mike O'Rielly, who chairs the Joint Board, opposes a fee on broadband access or use (see 1906250011). His office didn't comment now. "The filing is very interesting, and we are looking at it closely," said Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition Executive Director John Windhausen.

The rechartered FCC Advisory Committee on Diversity and Digital Empowerment will have its first meeting Oct. 30, said Friday’s Federal Register. The meeting will include establishing working groups, the FR said.

CTIA, NCTA and USTelecom officials urged the FCC to adopt a “broad safe harbor that protects voice service providers’ good-faith efforts to combat abusive robocalls,” in a meeting with Consumer and Governmental Affairs and Wireline bureau staff. Commissioners approved a declaratory ruling in June allowing carriers to block unwanted robocalls by default (see 1906060056) and industry groups emphasized the importance of the safe harbor (see 1907250039). “Adopting a broad safe harbor will provide the clarity and certainty needed to meaningfully advance the Commission’s goal of relieving consumers from the onslaught of illegal and unwanted robocalls while protecting legitimate calls,” the groups said in docket 17-59, posted Friday: “The Associations’ member companies include voice service providers that serve every corner of the country, all of whom share the Commission’s top consumer protection priority: to stop illegal and unwanted robocalls. These providers have made significant strides towards combating illegal and unwanted robocalls within the Commission’s current regulatory framework.”

The threat to networks is real, Clete Johnson, of Wilkinson Barker, said at a Silicon Flatirons spectrum conference Thursday. The threat comes from intelligence services and their agents in countries including North Korea, China, Iran and Russia, he said. There are “tens of thousands of people” who “go to school, go to work, they provide for their families, they find fulfillment in their daily life by trying to figure out how to get into our networks and devices,” Johnson said. “It’s their job. So it’s not some abstraction. It’s a concrete set of forces who are out there working on this every day.” The more everything is connected “everything is vulnerable” and 5G will pose new threats, he said. The government and industry need to work together, Johnson said: “If everything is connected, then all of the solutions need to be connected.” Monisha Ghosh, engineering professor at the University of Chicago and program director at the National Science Foundation, said the U.S. is researching the security threat. “A lot of the news items that you see of threats being discovered or solutions being proposed are coming from the academic community,” she said: “We need to get that community much better connected to industry as well as federal agencies.” Ghosh said “funding is never adequate” and the joke is “NSF stands for not sufficient funds.” Some of the threats will be revealed only as networks launch, she said. “5G is going to roll out as a production system,” she said: “It’s not being experimented with at the scale at which it’s going to roll out. When it rolls out is when you’re going to find the holes.” Rebecca Dorch, senior spectrum policy analyst at the NTIA Institute for Telecommunication Sciences, oversaw testing of systems in the new 3.5 GHz citizens broadband radio service band. Researchers did their best to identify the unknowns, she said. “My nightmare scenario is, notwithstanding all of the careful analysis, … something unexpected or unanticipated could occur within that entire ecosystem that could actually cause harmful interference,” she said. Dynamic spectrum sharing in general poses risks, Dorch said. “Sharing between very, very different types of communications systems, as that increases, and the density of those devices and systems … that’s where I think that we really haven’t fully tacked for potential for interference at the RF level,” she said: “We’ve got some real vulnerabilities potentially there.” Johnson recalled the financial crisis of 2008, where problems in the subprime mortgage market in the United States developed into a full-blown international banking crisis. “You had a problem in one place that cascaded and took over the entire economy,” Johnson said: “My nightmare is as the speed of innovation increases, or the rate of innovation increases, and we deploy billions and billions of devices” it connects people and companies “that may not be aware or where their data sits or how it can be corrupted or manipulated.” We need to test networks, but we don’t know what the “bugs are” until 5G rolls out on a mass scale, he said. Cooperation is crucial, Johnson said: “We’re all part of this increasingly symbiotic relationship and we don’t know exactly what the effects of that are going to be when something goes wrong.”

T-Mobile/Sprint opponents in California protested an amended joint application filed last month (see 1909200033). It lacks detail on new elements, preventing the California Public Utilities Commission from ensuring it will be in consumers' interest, said the CPUC Public Advocates Office, Communications Workers of America, The Utility Reform Network and Greenlining Institute in docket A.18-07-011 Wednesday. “The Amended Application contains limited or incomplete information and does not fully explain the effect of the Asset Purchase Agreement on California-specific commitments.” A preconference hearing was to have occurred Thursday (see 1909260046). T-Mobile and Sprint didn’t comment.

A USTelecom executive and a former FCC adviser debated net neutrality and a recent decision from the U.S Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Court on The Communicators scheduled to be televised this weekend on C-SPAN and available online Friday. Patrick Halley, USTelecom senior vice president-advocacy and regulatory, and Gigi Sohn, a former aide to then-Chairman Tom Wheeler, discussed Chevron, Brand X, state vs. federal jurisdiction over broadband, and other details. Halley noted that the court ruled the FCC was within its discretion to regulate broadband as an information service, and while the court said the FCC can't expressly pre-empt state laws on the matter, "it would be an over-reach to say states can write their own laws," especially as much of internet use is interstate, not intrastate. Sohn suggested the FCC has abdicated its authority to regulate the broadband market: "The court was really clear: If an agency lacks authority, it can't then tell a state it can't regulate." Sohn was not suggesting states would have an easy time, but nor will industry, in determining when states can regulate over issues of net neutrality: "It will be case by case. It won't be a slam dunk." With the recent court decision, states will test the boundaries, she said, "and to me that argues for a federal law." Halley "completely" agreed with the need for a federal law, and said the sides likely agree on the concept of net neutrality as well. "The best answer for all of this is a federal, modern national framework that provides the net neutrality protection" that most consumers and businesses want. When it comes to one of the issues that the court remanded to the FCC, on how it will regulate broadband in the USF Lifeline program, the court said only that the agency did not sufficiently address the matter in its arguments, Halley said, not that it lacks such authority. Last week, the court upheld most of a 2017 FCC net neutrality repeal but remanded several matters to the FCC for clarification (see 1910010018).

Julius Knapp, chief of the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology, told a Silicon Flatirons conference Thursday that protections against spectrum vulnerability have to be built into design. People have to recognize that “because they’re using the airwaves at times, they may be vulnerable to interference,” he said at the conference streamed from Boulder, Colorado. Device and network flexibility is important, Knapp said. Most cellphones contain more than a dozen radio transmitters, he said: “They’re capable of operating in different modes … making trade-offs for the signals not getting through.” Challenges will get harder, Knapp said. “The downside is if you’re looking at spectrum vulnerabilities, there are lots of bands to be concerned about,” he said. “We’ve got a lot more things out there that are relying on the airwaves.” Every device generates “some spurious noise and contributes to the soup,” he said. Managing spectrum isn’t easy, he said. “We’re always trying to put new things on airwaves and allow for innovation for the new applications that you see coming out every day,” Knapp said: “For the incumbents, what they care about is it’s not going to disrupt the services.” The question becomes what data do you collect on interference, Knapp said. “If you’ve got a phone and its throughput is reduced because of the noise level, how would you know?” he asked. “There’s immediately privacy concerns when you start collecting this kind of data.” It’s difficult for FCC engineers to gauge whether data is reliable and figure out how to interpret and analyze it, he said. “I know don’t if there are easy answers there,” he said. It’s important “to anticipate every way some 12-year-old who is up to no good has figured out a way to undo all your protections,” he said. We’re trying to replace wires with wireless, Knapp said. He said 5G will “greatly expand the use cases … coming for connectivity.” Enforcement actions help but are complex, Knapp said. “These aren’t like parking tickets,” he said. The Enforcement Bureau has to do the investigation, then “build a case” against violators, he said. The FCC is focused on jammers and goes after them, he said: “It’s tough because of all the different ways that people can find to get them out there.” Everybody "has a piece of this, everybody plays a role” on security, Knapp said: “There are so many different agencies that are involved in trying deal with the cyber issues and the kinds of things we’re talking about today.” Network operators, equipment designers, standards organizations and app developers all have responsibilities, he said: Don’t “think about this afterwards because then it becomes a big problem and very expensive to fix,” he said: Danger comes when people think that “'I’m following the security standard, what could possibly happen?'” Wireless devices pose a special problem, said Pierre de Vries, co-director of the Spectrum Policy Initiative at Silicon Flatirons. For wireless devices to work, “they have to be open to the world because if your radio can’t hear anything, it doesn’t operate,” he said: “They don’t have the refuge of hiding behind the wire or fiber.” The question is: “How do you secure something that everybody has access to,” de Vries said.

The Supreme Court again delayed considering an appeal of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' decision that VoIP is an information service exempt from state regulation. Minnesota and Charter Communications disagreed, in letters posted Wednesday, about the meaning of last week’s net neutrality decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The high court gave no new date Wednesday as it rescheduled the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission appeal of the decision supporting Charter in the case about state VoIP regulation (18-1386). The PUC’s writ petition was scheduled to be heard at a Friday conference (see 1910070034). The PUC wrote the Supreme Court last week about the D.C. Circuit decision that the FCC couldn’t pre-empt state net neutrality policies (see 1910010018). Dissenter Judge Stephen Williams “explained how the majority’s holdings created a conflict with the Eight Circuit,” the Minnesota agency said. The appeals court said any state regulation of information service conflicts with the FCC’s nonregulation policy, but Williams said this “approach to preemption ‘seems wholly incompatible with the majority’s idea that there is no Commission preemptive authority vis-à-vis [an information] service,’” the PUC said. Charter responded Monday that the D.C. Circuit’s holding “does not create the circuit split with the Eighth Circuit that Petitioners claim.” The court “took pains to emphasize that it was not opining on whether conflict preemption might likewise displace state broadband regulation, and that it was not ‘mak[ing] a conflict preemption assessment in this case …,’ instead declining to consider the issue as not properly presented in light of the specific FCC order under review and the Commission’s defense of the order on appeal.”