CaptionCall -- a subsidiary of Sorenson -- wrote to the FCC’s Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau Friday to explain the measures it will take to comply with new IP Captioned Telephone Service rules (http://bit.ly/K9V9Ix). CaptionCall noticed many “conflicts” between the text of the final order and the codified rules, it said, such as when users must be registered. The rules are also “ambiguous” as to the permitted and excluded categories of third-party professional certifications, CaptionCall said, or what is meant by “business relationships,” “family relationships,” or “social relationships.” CaptionCall detailed a meeting with bureau staffers in July to seek clarification, but has not received guidance, it said. “Should the Commission disagree with any of the compliance measures CaptionCall intends to implement, CaptionCall requests immediate guidance and clarification."

A New York state senator told the FCC she’s “greatly concerned” with the impact the FCC’s prison calling order will have on county jails in her district (http://bit.ly/K9W6Rl). Elizabeth Little asked that the implementation date be postponed from Feb. 11 to “a later date,” because county governments “have acted on their budgets for the year and have not accounted for the loss of funding that will be incurred due to this rule change.” She said the order is “especially worrisome for smaller county jails that experience high turnover rates of inmate populations.”

A federal judge defended the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone metadata in a ruling Friday by U.S. District Judge William Pauley in Manhattan in American Civil Liberties Union v. James Clapper. The ACLU plans to appeal the ruling and make its case in the 2nd Circuit in New York, it said (http://bit.ly/1jQfh2Q). “This blunt tool only works because it collects everything,” Pauley said, judging the program lawful while acknowledging the danger to privacy if the program were unchecked (http://bit.ly/Jxc9Ig). “The question of whether that program should be conducted is for the other two coordinate branches of Government to decide,” he said, citing the “extensive oversight” the program operates under. The court granted the government’s motion to dismiss the ACLU’s complaint, filed in June. He lamented the “level of absurdity” in ACLU’s lawsuit given the group only learned of the program through leaks earlier in the year. “A target’s awareness of Section 215 orders does not alter the Congressional calculus,” Pauley wrote. He defended the ability of intelligence officials to make connections on the basis of metadata collection: “The effectiveness of bulk telephony metadata collection cannot be seriously disputed.” What corporations do with consumer data is “far more intrusive,” he said. He said the program does not violate the Fourth Amendment, pointing to the 1979 Smith v. Maryland Supreme Court case, or the First Amendment, calling the need to determine that “unnecessary” due to another previous ruling. The court’s decision “misinterprets the relevant statutes, understates the privacy implications of the government’s surveillance and misapplies a narrow and outdated precedent to read away core constitutional protections,” said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director, in a statement. “As another federal judge and the president’s own review group concluded last week, the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephony data constitutes a serious invasion of Americans’ privacy.” The phone surveillance program, done under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, has been upheld by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court multiple times, but a federal court shot it down as likely unconstitutional in Klayman v. Obama earlier this month. Lawmakers and the White House have reexamined the program and announced intentions to change it.

The rebanding of a final group of 800 MHz public safety agencies, those located along the Mexican border, is under way and about 195 licensees there are expected to have to retune their systems, the 800 MHz Transition Administrator said in a report filed Friday at the FCC. The U.S. and Mexico agreed last year to an amended protocol, which takes into account the FCC’s landmark 2004 800 MHz rebanding order (CD June 7/12 p7). “With most non-border licensees and Canadian border licensees having completed physical retuning, the TA’s focus is on those licensees that have not finished,” the TA said (http://bit.ly/1cFRG0S). “Licensees that have not completed physical retuning should expeditiously complete their implementation activities,” the TA said. “A delay in the completion of an implementation task by a licensee that has a downstream impact on other licensees (i.e., by blocking another licensee’s replacement frequencies or because the first touch of its subscriber units needs to be completed before an interoperable licensee can retune its infrastructure) can have a cascading effect and cause delays for other dependent licensees and, in some cases, for an entire region."

The FCC is seeking comment on several requested exemptions from its closed captioning rules, the commission said in a public notice Thursday (http://bit.ly/JxrFUx). Comments and oppositions are due within 30 days. “Petitioners claim that compliance would be ‘economically burdensome,'” said the PN. The entities requesting exemptions are Curtis Baptist Church in Augusta, Ga.; Gerald Bryant TV in Chicago; First Lutheran Church in Albert Lea, Minn.; Dawson Memorial Baptist Church in Birmingham; Gray Publishing in Soldotna, Alaska; and First Baptist Church in Jonesboro, Ark.

Free Press allegations that sharing agreements in Sinclair’s proposed purchase of Allbritton would give Sinclair financial control of ostensibly separate stations are based on “unsubstantiated estimates,” Sinclair’s lawyer said in a letter to the FCC Media Bureau last week (http://bit.ly/1caQ5xe). Free Press had claimed (CD Dec 9 p5) that some of Sinclair’s sharing arrangements involved the affected stations -- which would be owned by affiliated company Deerfield Media -- paying out nearly their entire annual revenue to Sinclair, which would bring the arrangement into conflict with the FCC’s local ownership rules. However, Free Press’s numbers are based on estimates from 2012. “The application of these unsubstantiated estimates to future performance of the stations is wholly speculative and should be dismissed for that reason alone,” Sinclair said. If operated under the terms proposed in the transaction, the stations involved in the sharing agreements will have “more than adequate revenues” to pay the fees involved with the sharing arrangements and “generate a significant operating profit for the licensee,” said Sinclair. The Media Bureau had also asked Sinclair to show how the companies that will own the stations involved in the sharing arrangements will have a financial incentive to control their own programming. “Every station license, whether or not involved in sharing agreements, has an inherent incentive to control programming” to attract more viewers and increase value to advertisers, Sinclair said. Since the “key costs” of a station involved in a sharing arrangement to receive services are fixed, “operating profits will increase if the revenue increases,” Sinclair said. The Media Bureau has also previously approved sharing arrangements similar to the ones proposed in the Allbritton transaction, and with a similar profit sharing breakdown, Sinclair said. That’s one of the reasons behind Free Press’s challenge of the transaction, Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood told us. Such transactions are a workaround for avoiding the commission’s ownership rules, he said. “This is why we want the full commission to take this up,” he said. Sinclair also disputed the Media Bureau’s contention that the company violated reporting rules by not including copies of local marketing agreements in its submission to the commission. Since the agreements cited by the bureau don’t involve stations involved in the Allbritton transaction, Sinclair had no reason to include them in the submission, the broadcaster said. The Department of Justice review of the Sinclair/Allbritton deal has been put on hold pending the FCC and Sinclair resolving the dispute over the sharing arrangements, Sinclair said. “It is vital that there be a prompt resolution of these matters so that antitrust review can be completed,” Sinclair said.

Mobile video relay service (VRS) apps offered by major equipment makers still need improvement and often aren’t interoperable, the Technology Access Program at Gallaudet University said in a letter filed at the FCC. “We note that mobile interoperability, while greatly improved since our 2012 tests, still is in no way comparable to the level of voice interoperability seen in the mainstream,” wrote Christian Vogler, one of the researchers (http://bit.ly/1btO2AX). “Also, there still exists no single VRS-provided app that can successfully interoperate with every other provider for both outgoing and incoming calls; in fact, the provider that tops the rankings for outgoing calls is different from the one that tops the rankings for incoming calls.” The program tested mobile interoperability and battery life using apps from six VRS providers: Sorenson, ZVRS, Purple, Convo, CAAGVRS and Global VRS. “It is still impossible for a consumer to operate only one ten-digit number and be assured that they can connect with everyone else, no matter whether deaf or hearing,” Vogler wrote. “We further note that interoperability across answering machines still is substantially worse than for live point-to-point calls, and essentially unchanged from 2012.” The group reported that VRS applications don’t drain the mobile devices’ batteries “to a significant extent while idle on Wi-Fi. However, on Android devices there’s still some room for further improvement. It is also not yet clear how much battery drain there would be under a cellular data connection with fluctuating signal strength."

Comcast petitioned to be excluded from municipal rate-setting for basic-video and some other prices for seven communities in Virginia, said a filing posted in FCC docket 12-1 (http://bit.ly/KamafB). The petition cited video competition from DirecTV and Dish Network. The proposed deregulation would affect about 23,000 households, including the communities of Bridgewater, Harrisonburg and Elkton.

Continued speculation about a possible Sprint/T-Mobile US merger has been a major boon for Sprint’s stock value, said Seeking Alpha in an email Friday to investors. Sprint’s stock value rose 32 percent between Dec. 13 -- the day The Wall Street Journal first reported speculation about a possible merger -- and noon Friday, Seeking Alpha said.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo released style4.5 million in broadband grants Thursday. The Democrat issued a statement emphasizing the significance of high-speed Internet connections. Nine projects will receive money, including Clarity Connect, Slic Network Solutions, MTC Cable and New Visions Communications. “Together, these nine projects will deliver broadband services to 29,117 households, 2,052 businesses, and 236 community anchor institutions, and will provide 614 miles of new fiber,” Cuomo’s office said in a news release (http://bit.ly/1llG3eP). Much of the money will go to support last-mile service, it said.