As the authors of the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) work to revise their bills, Mozilla, Wikimedia, Yahoo and other technology companies say the bills are ultimately doomed, unnecessary and unlikely to pass. Technology groups have repeatedly told Congress that the bills deny website owners the right to due process of law, mimic Web censoring technologies used by China and Iran, and undermine the security of the Web. Both Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said they're committed to working with stakeholders to address these concerns, but Hill staffers have been mum on exactly what changes are being considered.
GENEVA -- Nigeria was highly critical of the small digital dividend delivered at WRC-07 and the slow-moving approach European countries are taking to accommodating the needs of lesser developed countries. The comments came in a plenary session at WRC-12. European countries have excellent wired networks and received a sufficient digital dividend at WRC-07, a Nigerian official said, but Africa did not. Germany, Russia and Israel said the matter should be addressed at WRC-15.
The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the FCC’s 2009 wireless zoning shot clock order, in a decision handed down Monday. That was a win for wireless carriers who sought the shot clock, over broad opposition from many local government groups. The New Orleans court rejected arguments by Arlington, Texas, that the way the order was developed was “arbitrary and capricious” and a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). The court dismissed a second petition from San Antonio outright on the grounds that it was filed too late and thus the court lacks jurisdiction.
GENEVA -- Arab and African countries at WRC-12 backed allocations for mobile broadband below 790 MHz and a further identification for use by the standardized technology International Mobile Telecommunications-Advanced (IMT-Advanced). Europe won’t be able to make allocations, an official said. The United Arab Emirates appealed for cooperation in meeting “urgent requirements."
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that police must obtain a search warrant before using GPS technology to track criminal suspects. The ruling was the first by the court that tackled the constitutionality of GPS tracking. Privacy advocates were quick to hail the court’s decision in U.S. v Jones (http://xrl.us/bmpkkt) as a major win, though they acknowledged many difficult electronic privacy questions remain unsettled.
Google spent nearly as much as AT&T and Comcast on lobbying in Q4 2011, according to quarterly federal lobbying reports available last Friday. Facebook and Netflix also accelerated their Washington spending as debate over online copyright issues intensified in the fourth quarter. Spectrum legislation, the recently dissolved AT&T/T-Mobile transaction and controversy over possible LightSquared GPS interference also drove communications industry lobbying in the fourth quarter, the disclosure reports showed.
The FCC has denied the most ambitious multicasting must-carry proposal (CD Dec 31/08 p3). The Media Bureau said the petition to start a new TV network targeting urban, African-American audiences won’t fly. Using Urban TV as a multicast broadcast signal that would be guaranteed pay-TV carriage doesn’t comport with existing rules, Video Division Chief Barbara Kreisman of the Media Bureau wrote Ion Media and billionaire Robert Johnson’s company. Urban TV’s proposal to “separate a multicast DTV channel currently controlled by ION and establish a new license for each programming stream” isn’t “consistent with our licensing rules,” Kreisman wrote.
The U.S. Supreme Court denied Dish Network’s petition that it review an appeals court decision awarding NDS $17.9 million in attorneys fees. The fees were granted by U.S. District Judge David Carter, Los Angeles, following a month-long trial in 2008 in which a jury awarded Dish Networks $1,500, not the $1.6 billion it sought from NDS for allegedly hiring hackers to crack its encryption system.
Trade associations look forward to finding solutions on cybersecurity in 2012, as legislation like SOPA and the OPEN Act remain important topics, officials said in response to questions about 2012 policy goals. Another common telecom focus this year, among groups we surveyed that do some FCC and FTC lobbying, are spectrum incentive auctions. Groups like CompTIA and the Distributed Computing Industry Association have different solutions in mind, and different opinions about how to achieve those solutions, their officials said. They keep general themes of balancing common goals like reform of the Federal Information Security Management Act and reaching an overall consensus with other stakeholders on the issues they work on.
Comcast criticized an FCC staff decision and an administrative law judge, who each ruled against the cable operator in its programming dispute with an independent channel. The full commission should overturn the 2010 Media Bureau order that sent the Tennis Channel’s program carriage complaint to the ALJ in the first place, Comcast said. And it asked the commission to find differently than a December order which said the cable operator violated program carriage rules.