The telecom industry is at a “defining moment” that gets to the heart of “the way we used to think” about investment, versus how the industry needs to think about it in the future, said Bob Quinn, AT&T senior vice president of federal regulatory. At a Minority Media and Telecom Council event Wednesday, telecom executives urged lifting legacy regulations they say are counterproductive in an increasingly wireless world. Panelists also called for more spectrum to help narrow the digital divide, and more outreach programs to encourage broadband adoption.
Don’t doubt the success of the federal government’s wide-ranging broadband stimulus launched two years ago, program officials said. NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling gathered representatives from four of its 224 Broadband Technology Opportunities Program grantees at the Brookings Institution Wednesday to discuss different projects’ virtues, lessons learned and as Strickling said, “to demonstrate the successes” and “humanize” the $4-billion stimulus investment with “tangible” details of how the different projects work. The message glossed over past concerns, such as overbuilding (CD Sept 27 p6), accountability (CD Nov 15 p15) and, in the past year, partial suspension of eight of the program’s largest infrastructure grantees -- seven in May due to FirstNet compatibility concerns (CD Aug 7 p1) and one in December (CD Dec 10 p6) due to compliance problems. The event coincided with NTIA’s 15th quarterly BTOP update to Congress (http://xrl.us/boa3z2).
Policymakers and telecom industry leaders must ensure opportunities for small, minority-owned business are created and that the openness and proliferation of innovation aren’t stifled by regulation, said current and former members of Congress. The way broadband and mobile devices will be used in the future is “mindboggling,” said Cliff Stearns, former chairman of the House Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee. “There’s convergence, yet there is sort of a digital divide,” he said Wednesday at a Minority Media & Telecom Council event. Mobile broadband and other technologies are creating enormous opportunities for individuals and economies around the world, said David Grain, Grain Communications CEO. Over the next five years global mobile data use and higher speeds are expected to grow, he said. “We should recognize that the picture isn’t universally bright."
Mobile privacy stakeholders may soon have a voluntary code of conduct on mobile applications’ use of short-form notices to inform users how their data are collected and used. Stakeholders participating in the NTIA mobile privacy discussions, including members of the mobile application and online advertising industries as well as civil liberties and consumer advocates, will meet Thursday to discuss the most recent discussion draft of the voluntary code of conduct put forth by a group including the Application Developers Alliance, ACLU, Consumer Action and World Privacy Forum (http://xrl.us/boa4g9).
President Barack Obama urged Congress to authorize a study of the effects that violent videogames have on children, in a speech Wednesday at the White House. The president signed 23 executive orders relating to violence reduction, a month after the elementary school shootings in Newtown, Conn. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said he plans to reintroduce legislation next week to authorize such a study.
Roku will eventually build its operating system into TVs, migrating it from the set-tops and Streaming Stick devices that currently house the technology, CEO Anthony Wood said Wednesday at the Needham investment conference.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy, D-Vt., said privacy will be at the forefront of his technology priorities for the committee in the 113th Congress, during a speech Wednesday at the Georgetown University Law Center. Leahy said he will “keep pushing to update our privacy laws to address emerging technology and the Internet,” including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). Leahy said he'll seek to pass a reauthorization bill to extend the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act (STELA), which expires Dec. 31, 2014. Notably absent from the speech was any mention of pursuing copyright legislation like Leahy’s PROTECT IP Act (S-968), which was stymied last year after Wikipedia, Craigslist and thousands of other websites blacked out their homepages in a coordinated protest of the bill.
Before the FCC can implement its Connect America Cost Model, it must settle a more fundamental question than what capabilities should be added to the model, said commenters on a December rulemaking notice on the features. The real question, they said in filings and interviews, is whether to use a greenfield or a brownfield approach to estimating costs. “Of any changes that could be made to the model, this is by far the biggest,” said Ross Lieberman, American Cable Association vice president-government affairs. The ACA has been a primary proponent of the brownfield model, one option offered in the latest version of the CACM.
The lack of exclusive deals between unaffiliated regional sports networks and multichannel video programming distributors undercuts cable industry arguments that exclusive deals among affiliated RSNs and cable MVPDs create diversity of programming choices, said Verizon and Verizon Wireless in reply comments filed with the FCC Monday. Verizon’s reply and others (http://xrl.us/boax3q) responded to the commission’s rulemaking notice on program access rules, which contained a proposal that would make it harder for MVPDs to withhold RSNs they own from competitors by setting up a rebuttable presumption that such withholding is unfair under the Communications Act. The rulemaking was initiated as the commission allowed a ban on exclusive contracts between affiliated networks and distributors to expire (CD Oct 9 p1).
An FCC proposal to open up to 195 MHz of spectrum in the 5 GHz band for Wi-Fi is likely to run into opposition, especially from the automotive industry, which plans to use some of the spectrum for a vehicle-to-vehicle warning system, which is already being tested. The FCC is expected to propose use of most of the 5350-5470 MHz and the 5850-5925 MHz bands for Wi-Fi.