New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman urged the State Assembly to pass ticket bot legislation approved last month in the State Senate (see 1605250039). In an op-ed in the New York Post Thursday, the Democrat said the bill “has the chance to finally level the playing field.” The bill imposes criminal penalties for bots used to scoop up tickets from websites and resell them at a premium. Because of bots, events sell out quickly even though tickets haven't been bought by real people. Ticket bots are already illegal software under New York’s Arts and Cultural Affairs Law. S-6931 -- based on a Schneiderman proposal -- strengthens penalties.

Pennsylvania prepared for a future “Black Sky” crisis in which a cyberattack, severe weather or nuclear explosion could knock out power across a large region, disabling utilities including telecom. Gov. Tom Wolf (D) hosted an exercise at the Public Utility Commission Friday, the PUC said in a news release. It was attended by 130 participants from state and federal government agencies, neighboring state utility commissions, military and law enforcement agencies, utility companies, first responders and nonprofit organizations. The full-day training was closed to the public and media. “Many organizations test emergency plans, but rarely do they prepare for a multi-faceted incident quite like a Black Sky event,” Wolf said at the exercise. “Such an event would have an extraordinary impact on our society, causing power and service outages that could last days, weeks, even months.”

The California Senate passed a bill requiring notification of major rural outages of telecom services, voting 34-5 Wednesday, with one senator abstaining. S-1250 requires the California Public Utilities Commission to consult with the Office of Emergency Services to establish rules, enforceable through the Public Utilities Act. It also would require the CPUC to annually report to the legislature on outages, with recommendations on how to improve reporting and ways to avoid or minimize future outages. While existing law prohibits the CPUC from regulating VoIP and IP-enabled services, the bill authorizes the state commission to implement the notification rules for facilities-based VoIP and IP-enabled service providers of telecom services that the FCC requires to provide access to 911. The bill defines a “major rural outage” as a telecom service outage, experienced by a facilities-based telecom service provider required by the FCC to provide 911, that lasts more than 30 minutes and potentially affects 75,000 or more user minutes. User minutes are calculated by multiplying the outage’s duration in minutes by the number of users potentially affected, the bill said. S-1250 next moves to the assembly. The FCC last week approved revised rules on outage reporting and a Further NPRM that would extend reporting requirements to broadband providers (see 1605260054).

U.S. District Court in San Francisco will hear argument Sept. 29 in a case about whether a state commission can compel disclosure of subscriber data to a third party, said a court schedule (in Pacer) released Wednesday. On May 20, the court temporarily banned the California Public Utilities Commission from enforcing a May 3 ruling compelling top ISPs to disclose subscription data to The Utilities Reform Network (TURN) as part of a state investigation of market competition (see 1605240014). The data involves carrier market share and includes Form 477 data that carriers report to the FCC. In their complaint (in Pacer), AT&T, Comcast, CTIA, Verizon and other industry plaintiffs said the data is confidential. Plaintiffs will file opening briefs June 30, followed by the CPUC and TURN July 28. The hearing starts at 10 a.m. PDT.

Skype may provide information services in Indiana, the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission ruled. In an order Wednesday, the commission approved a Skype application for a certificate of territorial authority to provide communications in the state. The certificate lets Skype provide advanced conferencing and unified communications services for businesses, including retail nomadic interconnected VoIP service. No hearing was required because no one objected, the commission said.

The U.S. Supreme Court won’t hear Sprint’s appeal of a New York state lawsuit seeking $300 million from the company, the high court said Tuesday. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had alleged the wireless company failed to collect more than $100 million taxes from customers in the state. The New York Appeals Court denied the carrier’s bid to dismiss the case in October (see 1510210067). The Supreme Court action pleased Schneiderman. The AG “looks forward to a complete victory in this ongoing case against Sprint over alleged tax violations,” said his spokesman. The Supreme Court ruling is "a procedural step in the process" and "the merits of the case have not yet been heard," a Sprint spokeswoman emailed. "The Supreme Court declined to hear an interim appeal on the interplay between a federal statute and the state statute. The case now goes back to the trial court for the parties to engage in discovery and other pretrial proceedings."

State chief information officers should write IoT policies, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) said in a policy brief Wednesday. Most states are discussing IoT only informally, if at all, NASCIO said. “Without specific policy on IoT, states will be caught unprepared to deal with the myriad of issues that can arise with increasing connectedness.” Issues include security, privacy, accessibility, financing, legislation and data management and standardization, it said. States aren’t as far along as cities in developing an IoT road map, but a “smart state” can benefit like a “smart city,” it said. “While a state may not have a bus system to connect to an app, states may use sensor data, mobile platforms, or analytics software for healthcare, transportation or public safety.”

Qwest was within its rights when it compelled arbitration of interconnection agreements with a CLEC, a federal appeals court confirmed. In an opinion Tuesday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed two district courts’ judgments in favor of Qwest and state regulatory commissions in Arizona and Oregon. North County Communications, a CLEC, sued incumbent Qwest for seeking arbitration at the Arizona Corporation Commission and the Oregon Public Utility Commission of the carriers’ interconnection agreements . The CLEC said the commissions shouldn’t have forced North County into binding arbitration on Qwest’s request. But district courts in the two states supported each commission’s authority to arbitrate the agreements. The 9th Circuit agreed, saying in Tuesday’s order that the language in Qwest and North County’s previous 1997 interconnection agreement gave each party the power to compel arbitration by state commissions if negotiations between the parties failed to resolve their disputes. The 9th Circuit also rejected North County challenges to six provisions in the 2011 interconnection agreements. The court said the commissions didn’t violate the 1996 Telecom Act, nor were their actions arbitrary or capricious.

Union and government officials in New York supported proposed conditions for Altice’s $17.7 billion takeover of Cablevision. The New York Public Service Commission sought comments in May on conditions recommended by the advisory staff for the Department of Public Service (see 1605200070). The Communications Workers of America, which initially opposed the deal, said Tuesday that PSC approval with the proposed conditions would meet the interests of its members and the wider public. State Assemblyman Mark Gjonaj (D) said the recommended conditions “build on Cablevision's legacy of investment in the Bronx by requiring Altice to offer faster broadband speeds and a low cost broadband option to lower income New Yorkers.” Another Democratic Assembly member, Didi Barrett, said she's pleased the conditions address broadband deployment in rural areas. In comments dated May 24, the supervisor of Babylon, a New York town hit hard by Superstorm Sandy, applauded conditions on storm preparedness and response. But Entravision restated its concerns the deal will hurt Latino consumers and programming providers (see 1605100038). “The public interest demands that Altice be required, as a condition of merger, to engage relevant minority groups in the Cablevision service areas to develop a memorandum of understanding similar to the MOU in effect in California and before the FCC,” the Latino media company said. Altice and Cablevision accepted the advisory staff’s proposed conditions with one minor clarification, while noting in joint comments that the conditions are “more expansive” than the companies’ voluntary commitments. It’s time to approve the deal, they said. “The record in this proceeding has been developed carefully and fully, and Joint Petitioners believe that the Commission now possesses ample information to evaluate the merits of the proposed transaction and find it to be in the public interest.” The PSC is to rule on the deal June 16.

The National Association of State 911 Administrators released tools and resources to support regionalization of 911 public safety answering point systems. Resources available to state and local 911 managers on a new webpage include case studies and examples of incentive grants and intergovernmental agreements. “The FCC’s Task Force on Optimal PSAP Architecture approved a report in January 2016 which, among other things, encouraged regionalization as an effective way to implement Next Generation 911,” said NASNA President Harriet Miller-Brown. “NASNA has built on the January report by collecting and making publicly available tools and information to help state and local 911 administrators take the next step.”