FTC Chairman Edith Ramirez defended the agency’s settlement with Google and recent use of its authority under Section 5 of the FTC Act during a Tuesday hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust.

The authors of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act are disappointed the White House issued a veto threat on CISPA Tuesday despite their offering several amendments aimed at strengthening the bill’s privacy provisions. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., the ranking member, argued for the need to pass the bill, which they said would permit the private and public sectors to share cyberthreat information, ahead of the House’s scheduled consideration of the bill Wednesday and Thursday. The House overwhelmingly passed three cybersecurity bills Tuesday and heard from the administration’s top cybersecurity officials during a closed cybersecurity briefing Tuesday afternoon. Attending the briefing were Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, FBI Director Robert Mueller and Gen. Keith Alexander, commander of the U.S. Cyber Command.

Former FCC Chairman Richard Wiley said current rulemaking procedures have to speed up to address the many regulatory challenges facing the commission. The new FCC chairman “has to make decisions; the commission has to set deadlines,” said Wiley at an American University law school symposium on broadcast regulation. “The commission has to move to a more effective manner of getting things done,” said Wiley.

All companies and groups commenting backed a broadcast coalition’s clarification request (http://bit.ly/11eis79) (CD Feb 27 p14) for the FCC to allow on a case-by-case basis foreign investments in U.S. broadcasters exceeding 25 percent. Some individuals opposed the change. Many of the initial comments posted this week in docket 13-50 (http://bit.ly/10bzk2S) cited competition from new and other media not subject to the same rules. The commission hasn’t waived the 25 percent threshold for radio and TV-station ownership, though it has such procedures for telecom investments, said Nexstar (http://bit.ly/YQFt2C) and others. Cybersecurity and other concerns that may face wireless and wireline investments held by those outside the U.S. don’t apply to stations, said NAB (http://bit.ly/11nLv98).

The FCC did not act within its discretion when it determined InterCall’s services were “telecommunications” service and required the company to pay into the USF, Arent Fox attorney Ross Buntrock argued for The Conference Group. The agency also did not act properly in issuing the order through adjudication, rather than through the notice-and-comment rulemaking procedures it must follow under the Administrative Procedure Act, Buntrock said.

Dish Network’s $25.5 billion bid to buy Sprint Nextel, proposed Monday, offers $17.3 billion in cash and $8.2 billion in stock. The FCC would seemingly have no more reason to reject that than a Softbank bid, agency and industry officials said Monday. However, they said that unlike SoftBank, Dish holds spectrum in U.S. markets, so that will require a competitive analysis not triggered by the SoftBank deal. FCC officials said they had expected an order approving the SoftBank/Sprint transaction to circulate as early as this week.

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. -- Facebook and 19 attorneys general have teamed up to create a new online safety campaign, Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler said during the annual National Association of Attorneys General Presidential Initiative Summit. Gansler leads NAAG. The summit included panels featuring former and current FTC officials, consumer privacy advocates and members of the online consumer data industry.

There were failures among many types of emergency alert system participants and at many levels in the so-called daisy chain distributing EAS warnings, the FCC said sixteen months after the first nationwide simulation. There’s a “Need for Additional Rulemakings” and other steps by the commission and Federal Emergency Management Agency before another test is held, said one subsection heading of the Public Safety Bureau report. The study sought a “re-examination” of FCC state EAS plan rules, with some plans not providing enough details about alert propagation, said the report. EAS stakeholders we spoke with said they generally backed its recommendations and found it a useful document even so long after the Nov. 9, 2011, test. Members of Congress were among those who had scrutinized the results and sought such an autopsy (CD Nov 18/11 p1).

Efforts to head off an FCC vote in favor of giving Vonage direct access to numbers in a few pilot markets appear to have fallen flat despite a big push last week by NARUC, consumer and public interest groups (CD April 15 p1). FCC and industry officials said Monday that Chairman Julius Genachowski appears to have lined up at least three votes for the Vonage trials, with commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel ready to vote yes.

A week after CBS and Fox talked about moving to a subscription model if retransmission-consent fees are threatened by a victory in court for online-TV service Aereo, some in the industry are divided over whether such a huge shift could really happen. “We're going to use all of our legal options to protect this business model that has sustained our industry,” said an NAB spokesman, echoing Fox Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey, who raised the spectre of a move to subscription at the NAB Show last week (CD April 9 p14). Several industry observers said Carey’s comments were posturing aimed at influencing legislators or investors, because removing content from broadcast would be very disruptive to network affiliates.