Lawmakers and data brokers should be able to agree on the need to protect children’s online privacy, said Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., co-chair of the Congressional Privacy Caucus, at a Thursday caucus briefing on data broker practices. If data brokers and lawmakers can agree on that, he said, they can use that agreement as a starting point for a broader conversation on data brokers during the next Congress. Lawmakers respect the role of advertising in a world with free online content, said caucus co-chair Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas: “We're not anti-ad. … We're not even anti-targeted advertising.” He and Markey simply favor users having access to what information is collected on them, Barton said.
The broadcasting industry remains relevant as the public’s viewing habits change, NAB President Gordon Smith said on C-SPAN’s The Communicators in an interview scheduled to air this weekend. In spite of the challenges facing the industry, like spectrum availability, the changing mobile landscape and the broadcasting regulatory burden, broadcasting has a bright future, he said. TV remains highly relevant to the future, “because when you look at the top hundred programs that are watched, 90 of them are broadcast content,” Smith said. “We remain highly relevant because, what we do, it is local,” and it’s free, he said.
FCC rules implementing the Commercial Ad Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act took effect Wednesday as the commission continued fielding last-minute requests for waivers from the rule. The law was designed to ban TV ads whose volume is much louder than the programming they're airing with, which during a press conference Thursday Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., called a “small issue compared to the big challenges facing our nation,” but an “unnecessary annoyance in the daily lives of many Americans.” Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Whitehouse sponsored the initial legislation.
Next-generation 911 will take significant, costly and long investments of time and money before the system can work, National Emergency Number Association (NENA) officials said at a Thursday USTelecom briefing. The future will spell change for regulations and the number and arrangement of 911 centers, the officials said. The U.S. “must address” NG-911 if the public switched telephone network will be sunsetted in the next few years, said NENA CEO Brian Fontes, citing the FCC’s recent push on text-to-911 and this week’s FCC Technological Advisory Council report (CD Dec 11 p2). Fontes asked USTelecom members to engage with NENA.
Many agree the Telecom Act of 1996 is out of date, but whether Congress attempts a rewrite anytime soon will come down to one question, said speakers at a Practising Law Institute event Thursday: “Can we make it better, or will we make it worse?” One consideration is whether the weight of a rewrite can be carried by the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act (STELA), which Congress must deal with by its expiration at the end of 2014 (CD Nov 2 p5). Congress is also watching the net neutrality appeal closely to see what the courts think about the FCC’s authority over the Internet, speakers said.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- The U.S. delegation put its foot down in Wednesday’s session of the World Conference on International Telecommunications. There must be clear limitations on what kind of operators will be covered by the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), said Richard Beaird, deputy head of the U.S. delegation, introducing language to limit the treaty to “operating agencies authorized or recognized by a Member State to establish and operate a public correspondence international telecommunications service."
The long-awaited order seeking data on the special access market was approved on circulation, FCC officials said Wednesday. Chairman Julius Genachowski said at a House Communications Subcommittee hearing that the order has been voted on by all commissioners, and agency staff is finalizing the order. Commissioners Robert McDowell and Ajit Pai dissented from part of a further notice of proposed rulemaking, which would be implemented in the middle of 2013, agency officials told us. The text of the order was not released Wednesday.
Under new content deals, major studios will pay Redbox Instant by Verizon per-subscriber fees to give the new streaming service incentive to add subscriptions, said Scott Di Valerio, chief financial officer of Redbox parent Coinstar, Wednesday at the Wedbush Capital conference in New York. Like standard content deals the studios have with Netflix and Amazon, Redbox Instant by Verizon also will pay the studios upfront fees, but the new streaming service hopes the per-subscriber payments, small as they might be, could potentially spur a new round of content competition, Di Valerio said.
Minnesota will fall short of its broadband goals, a governor’s task force said this week. The 13-member group assembled its recommendations over 12 months, it told Gov. Mark Dayton, the Democrat-Farmer-Labor party member who created the group in November 2011. Minnesota should offer grants or tax credits to encourage some of its roughly 120 providers to deploy in unserved areas, the task force recommended. Its members include the presidents of AT&T Minnesota, Communications Workers of America Local 7201, MVTV Wireless and the Midwest Region of CenturyLink. The state should also expand a tax credit for central office equipment to cover fiber and broadband equipment purchases, coordinate the efforts of supplying broadband to anchor and safety institutions to help deploy in rural Minnesota, coordinate broadband deployment with highway construction and develop a Minnesota Fiber Collaboration Database, among other proposed initiatives like funding students in need of broadband scholarships and spending more on library and school computer stations, it said.
The FCC is considering collecting more detailed data for mobile users who are “more comfortable” sharing detailed statistics that “identify their phone” at specific coordinates at a particular time, said FCC attorney James Miller. He’s heading the mobile broadband measurement group’s effort to develop a privacy disclosure statement (CD Nov 29 p3). The group met Wednesday to get a sneak-peek at what the smartphone app will look like, and to discuss potential privacy issues. Officials emphasized that all data collected would be cleansed of detailed GPS information before it’s released publicly.