The FCC declined to conclude for the third consecutive Mobile Wireless Competition Report that the wireless industry is effectively competitive. The report to Congress did say even in rural areas 65.4 percent of the population has access to at least three carriers. In non-rural areas, 92.4 percent can choose from four or more carriers and 81.3 percent from five or more.

Broadband is the fastest-growing segment of Comcast’s business, but innovation will change Comcast’s traditional cable base “more in the next five years than it has in the past 50,” Comcast CEO Brian Roberts told the Washington Economic Club Thursday. When Microsoft invested $1 billion in Comcast in 1997, Roberts said Bill Gates told him then that Comcast’s business would expand far beyond delivering TV service. That prediction has held true, Roberts said. Comcast has about 22 million video customers and 20 million broadband customers, he said. “Those lines will cross some time in the next couple of years and we will have just as many -- if not more -- broadband customers than we have video customers,” he said. Comcast faces a “different broadband every year,” he said. “We change the speeds, the nature of it, so Wi-Fi is now … part of our definition of broadband. So we want to have the fastest Wi-Fi as well as the fastest pipe. We want to offer you access outside of your home."

Regulators need to be patient as the burgeoning real-time IP-to-IP communication markets sort themselves out, FCC commissioners and telco executives said Thursday at the Free State Foundation conference. Outgoing Commissioner Robert McDowell threw his support behind AT&T’s proposed deregulatory trials in some wire centers, and cautioned against well-intentioned regulations that stop innovation in its tracks. Pai denounced the Open Internet order, questioning the commission’s legal authority to act.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a presumptive candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2016, said Internet freedom will be one of his top issues as a new member of the Senate Commerce Committee. Rubio also emphasized the importance of spectrum, in a luncheon speech to the conservative Free State Foundation.

Representatives of the retail industry debated the Marketplace Fairness Act, HR-684 and S-336, during a Thursday congressional briefing hosted by the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus. The bills would require online retailers to collect sales tax from interstate online sales and remit those taxes to the states where the customers are located.

The “next great copyright act” will require “a few years of solid drafting and revision” to get right, Maria Pallante, U.S. Register of Copyrights, told the House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property during a hearing Wednesday. Pallante urged members of the subcommittee to write the law in a way that allows it to be flexible so the Copyright Office can adapt the law to keep up with changing technology. Debates over copyright law should “get out of Washington,” Pallante said. She suggested the debate’s participants “go somewhere like Nashville, where people make a living writing songs from their kitchen tables."

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, reintroduced legislation Thursday aimed at clarifying the legal rules concerning how citizens’ geolocation data can be used by companies and law enforcement agencies. The Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act (HR-1312) would require law enforcement officials to obtain a warrant based on probable cause in order to track an individual by using cellphone location data or a GPS device. The new GPS Act proposal contains no changes from the bill Chaffetz introduced last Congress, his spokesman confirmed Thursday. The legislation previously faced stiff opposition from law enforcement officials and failed to advance (CD May 18 p8).

The issues of orphan works, illegal streaming and public performance rights for sound recordings are the three biggest issues calling for revised copyright law, said Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante during a Wednesday hearing of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property. “I think orphan works is ripe” for a revised law, she said. “I think the public is so frustrated by the long copyright term,” which may keep individuals from using copyrighted works, even when the copyright holder can’t be located.

States should increase their role as a partner with the federal government to address Internet privacy issues, said Steve Ruckman, Maryland assistant attorney general and director of the Maryland Office of the Attorney General’s Internet Privacy Unit, at a joint FCBA-American Bar Association Forum on Communications Law event Wednesday. Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler has made Internet privacy protections a priority -- both in his in-state work and in his role as president of the National Association of Attorneys General NAAG), Ruckman said. Gansler was originally scheduled to speak at the FCBA event, but needed to testify at a Maryland General Assembly hearing.

Major mobile satellite services companies expect to expand end-user services over the next several years, said executives from Iridium, Orbcomm and other companies. The MSS companies are looking beyond service offerings and moving into delivering solutions, said Marc Eisenberg, Orbcomm CEO. “We're transitioning to solutions and solving end-to-end user issues,” he said Wednesday at the Satellite 2013 conference in Washington. “I think we're going to continue to move in that direction,” he said. “Whether we produce the solutions or the solutions are produced around you, [these] are two different ways of getting to the same thing,” said Matt Desch, Iridium CEO.