Broadcasters and wireless carriers have substantially shifted their position on spectrum sharing in recent years, particularly after the AWS-3 auction process, industry executives said Thursday at an FCBA event. Executives compared their shift to the November 2013 joint agreement between the Department of Defense (DOD) and NAB on spectrum sharing, which they noted has been widely seen as a major shift in DOD’s attitude to spectrum sharing. The DOD-NAB agreement involved DOD's agreeing to partially vacate the 1755-1780 MHz band, relocate affected systems to the 2025-2110 MHz band and accommodate broadcasters’ needs on the 2025 MHz band (see report in the Nov. 26, 2013, issue).
Jimm Phillips
Jimm Phillips, Associate Editor, covers telecommunications policymaking in Congress for Communications Daily. He joined Warren Communications News in 2012 after stints at the Washington Post and the American Independent News Network. Phillips is a Maryland native who graduated from American University. You can follow him on Twitter: @JLPhillipsDC
China and India will remain among the 13 countries on the U.S. Trade Representative’s priority watch list this year for copyright and other IP rights violations, the USTR office said Thursday in its annual special 301 report. China and India have improved their IP policies, but other new policies have become a cause for concern, said Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Robert Holleyman on a conference call with reporters. Other nations on the priority watch list are Algeria, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Indonesia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine and Venezuela. The report placed another 24 countries on the USTR’s lower-tier watch list: Barbados, Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Greece, Guatemala, Jamaica, Lebanon, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Romania, Tajikistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. The 2014 special 301 report included 10 countries on the priority watch list and 27 on the regular watch list (see 1405020082).
Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante urged the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday to detach the Copyright Office from the Library of Congress and make it an independent agency, saying legislators should move this Congress to decide how to restructure the CO. Pallante has backed making the CO an independent agency and that suggestion received backing from many members of House Judiciary during a Feb. 26 committee hearing (see 1502260057). House Judiciary ranking member John Conyers, D-Mich., billed Wednesday's session as the committee's final hearing on its two-year-long Copyright Act review. House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said the committee will now reach out to all copyright stakeholders on the myriad issues the Copyright Act review identified.
A recent hacking of the FCBA’s website underscores the importance of lawyers improving their cybersecurity, said industry attorneys and security experts during an FCBA event Monday. Lerman Senter attorney Deborah Salons, a member of FCBA’s Privacy and Data Security Committee, said she discovered Thursday that FCBA’s website was hacked after a friend alerted her. FCBA’s standard website had been replaced by images and music indicative of a connection with the terrorist group ISIS, though there’s no official confirmation that ISIS or an affiliate was responsible for the incident, Salons said. It’s likely the attack isn’t attributable to ISIS but instead to a group “just spreading the word,” said Wade Woolwine, cybersecurity firm Rapid7 manager-strategic services.
The ICANN Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) stewardship cross-community working group’s (CWG-Stewardship) revised proposal for an IANA transition plan is an improvement over CWG-Stewardship’s original proposal, but several portions require additional work, industry stakeholders told us. The revised plan, released last week, recommends ICANN create a legally separate subsidiary, called the Post-Transition IANA (PTI), to handle the IANA transition. An ICANN-selected board would govern PTI, while the Customer Standing Committee and the IANA Function Review Team (IFRT) would handle current federal oversight functions, CWG-Stewardship said in the proposal. The IFRT could propose completely separating PTI from ICANN under extraordinary circumstances, the revised proposal said (see 1504270053). Stakeholders had said CWG-Stewardship’s earlier proposal was too bureaucratic and lacked sufficient clarity (see 1412240048).
The U.S. and four other nations -- France, Japan, South Korea and the U.K. -- are the leadership tier of nations across 52 indices included in the Media Institute’s new Net Vitality Index study, study author Stuart Brotman said during a Media Institute event Friday. The report released Friday discusses the rankings of only the five leadership tier countries, with the full Net Vitality Index rankings set to be published in June, said Brotman, a Harvard Law School professor and member of the Media Institute’s Global Internet Freedom Advisory Council.
The House passed the National Cybersecurity Protection Advancement Act (HR-1731) Thursday on a 355-63 vote, confirming industry lobbyists’ expectations that the Department of Homeland Security-centric bill would be the more popular of the two cybersecurity information sharing bills that faced -- and, as expected, passed -- House scrutiny this week (see 1504200047). The House passed the Protecting Cyber Networks Act (HR-1560) Wednesday 307-116 (see 1504220066).
The House passed the Protecting Cyber Networks Act (HR-1560) Wednesday on a 307-116 vote, the first of two cybersecurity information sharing bills the House was to consider this week. HR-1560 would offer liability protections for information sharing to many federal agencies except the Department of Defense and the NSA. The National Cybersecurity Protection Advancement Act (HR-1731), set for a House vote Thursday, would establish the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center as the main federal civilian hub for information sharing. Industry lobbyists said earlier this week that they believed both bills were likely to pass (see 1504200047).
Major tech companies reported mixed Q1 lobbying spending in filings due Monday -- Google and several other companies reported significant increases, while Facebook and Microsoft reported year-over-year spending declines. Industry groups generally reported year-over-year decreases in their lobbying spending, though some groups reported steady spending. Other telecom and tech sector stakeholders reported similarly mixed lobbying results, with both Sprint and T-Mobile saying in their filings that they spent less on lobbying during Q1 this year than the previous year (see 1504200042).
Prospects remain good for two cybersecurity information sharing bills to pass the House later this week, but there’s still potential for a contentious debate over privacy and liability protection aspects of the bills, industry lawyers and lobbyists told us. The House is expected to vote on the Protecting Cyber Networks Act (HR-1560) on Wednesday and the National Cybersecurity Protection Advancement Act (HR-1731) on Thursday, said the office of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. The House Intelligence Committee-passed HR-1560 focuses on private sector sharing with U.S. intelligence agencies, while the House Homeland Security Committee-passed HR-1731 would establish the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center as the main federal civilian hub for information sharing. Both bills contain liability protection for companies that participate in the sharing programs the bills would establish.