COCKEYSVILLE, Md. -- About 70 people with protest signs, a megaphone and a stack of cardboard boxes made up to look like hollow TV sets gathered to protest outside the Sinclair shareholders' meeting for about two hours Thursday, yelling back at honking cars and chanting against “Trump TV.” Most we interviewed said protesting would help to generate more public opposition to Sinclair's proposed purchase of Tribune Media but conceded their demonstration doesn't have much of a chance of swaying Sinclair's shareholders. “No, it doesn't,” said shareholder James Patterson, 63, who described both shareholder votes and peaceful protests as “part of the democratic process.”
Growing delay in establishing a Lifeline national verifier is worrying some states and put Utah in a difficult situation, where its state eligibility system may terminate before the national system is available, state officials told us this week. Utah eligible telecom providers plan to self-certify consumers starting July 1, though some warned such a process can increase fraud risk.
The FCC approved 3-1 an order to further relax telecom service discontinuance duties and related regulatory processes in an effort to remove barriers and encourage the industry shift from legacy wireline to next-generation, IP-based offerings. Commissioners also voted 4-0 to adopt an order to relieve certain rural telcos of USF contribution obligations on their broadband services to equalize their treatment with other carriers and promote affordability. Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel largely dissented on the discontinuance order and concurred on the rural telco USF order.
LAS VEGAS -- Though few consumers suffer a direct impact from widely publicized data breaches, their high level of concern over security is legitimate, panelists said at Integrated Life Day (see 1806050067) at Infocomm Tuesday. Worse, panelists said, they can't do anything about their concerns. Parks research says 75 percent of U.S. broadband households say keeping data and communications safe -- and keeping them private -- are important, and for 23 percent polled in Q4, those concerns are a barrier to buying smart home products. “Consumers’ data is regularly being exposed,” said Parks analyst Patrice Samuels. “If consumers cannot trust us to keep their data secure, or to handle it responsibly, then we’re not going to be able to harvest all the valuable potential that data can bring.”
Between now and the U.S. 5G future sit hurdles ranging from an "urban crunch" of spectrum availability to the morass of dealing with legions of local zoning and permitting steps, speakers said at an Axios event Wednesday. North America “started late” on 5G standardization, behind the Far East, but the country has reversed its position in the past two years and the first large-scale rollout likely will happen within the next 12 months in the U.S., said Ericsson North America CEO Niklas Heuveldop.
Application developers interacting with Facebook still have access to friend data if the linked friends have downloaded the same app, Facebook Privacy and Public Policy Director Steve Satterfield said Wednesday. Developer access to friend data is considered one of the major issues that enabled the Cambridge Analytica privacy breach (see 1804100054 and 1804110065). Friend access allegedly allowed Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan to take user data from 300,000 people and access information from as many as 87 million users.
A March FCC order on wireless infrastructure attracted reconsideration petitions this week from localities, a major American Indian tribe and a tower company in docket 17-79. NATOA said the order isn’t in the public interest, fails to acknowledge existing limits and ignores impact of dense deployments in small areas, among other problems. It “will inflict serious injury” on tribes, said the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma. The move is a “step forward,” but the FCC should have stepped further, said T-Mobile unit and tower company PTA-FLA. Residents of Montgomery County, Maryland, also sought reconsideration due to concerns including about possible radiation from RF emissions.
September's expiration of DOJ-imposed behavioral conditions on Comcast's buy of NBCUniversal will unleash a vertically integrated behemoth with plenty of incentive to squash competition, panelists said at a Public Knowledge-organized panel Wednesday. There were no Comcast-friendly voices, and much discussion involved how to extend the conditions or whether broader changes are needed in antitrust enforcement. “Beware Comcast unleashed,” said American Cable Association Senior Vice President Ross Lieberman.
Call it a distributed denial of service, a "bot swarm" or "something hammering" the FCC electronic comment filing system application programming interface, it's clear "something odd" occurred in May 2017, former Chief Information Officer David Bray wrote Tuesday. He responded to a report based on a Freedom of Information Act request that the agency misled media about a possible DDoS attack on its commenting system (see 1806050046). The thousand-plus pages of emails in that FOIA from American Oversight, which we reviewed, show executives from at least four software and cybersecurity firms effectively pitched their services to the agency in the days after the 2017 DDoS incident.
Commissioner Mignon Clyburn's “closing statement” Wednesday summed up her accomplishments at the FCC and her regrets. Though Clyburn announced she was leaving, sat out the May meeting and held a farewell ceremony last month, she has continued to vote on some things, attend events as a commissioner (see 1805180042) and issued a call for ISP data for low-income broadband package subscriber information earlier in the day. Though the statement is labeled a closing one, and reads like a farewell, it doesn’t expressly say Clyburn is now officially stepping down. Her office didn’t comment.