Acceptance of cable industry arguments that the FCC should avoid adopting digital cable performance testing requirements could hurt customers, NATOA and some municipal governments told the commission last week, in reply comments on a rulemaking that would set up digital cable signal leakage and quality rules (CD Aug 6 p10). Distributors continued to push in their replies against such testing requirements and for a certification process instead.

The FCC should impose a relatively early deadline on all interconnected text message providers to send bounce-back messages to their customers when text-to-911 isn’t available, not just the nation’s four biggest carriers, AT&T said in comments filed at the FCC. The National Emergency Number Association said the deadline for all should be “generous, but firm.” Under an agreement last year with the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials and NENA, the top four providers said they would implement systems for transmitting bounce-back messages by June 30. T-Mobile warned that meeting the deadline won’t be easy.

The Communications Workers of America formally asked the FCC to reject a proposal by Japan’s Softbank to buy Sprint Nextel. CWA filed a petition to deny at the commission, a step it did not take in November when it raised job-related concerns over Deutsche Telekom’s proposed combination of T Mobile USA with MetroPCS. The Consortium for Public Education, and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Erie, Pa., also filed a petition to deny Sprint’s takeover, as did a group of CLECs.

The telecom industry was sharply divided on AT&T’s petition to eliminate legacy interconnection rules, as the U.S. telecom infrastructure moves toward all-Internet Protocol services. ILEC comments supported the petition, which would start with deregulatory “experiments” in various wire centers to gauge the technological and competitive effects of eliminating several ILEC obligations. Carriers and cable companies cautioned against eliminating interconnection requirements in the Telecom Act that they say protect consumers and competitors. The CLECs were split on a competing proposal by NTCA, which seeks an omnibus proceeding the association said would retain consumer-friendly regulations and incentivize IP interconnection. State associations and commissions worried about ensuring consumer protections as well as maintaining their own authority. Public interest groups were wary of AT&T’s petition, but several minority groups encouraged the idea of limited deregulatory trials to determine the effect on minority customers.

Groups representing media and entertainment companies are considering developing a series of public service announcements (PSAs) aimed at addressing issues related to gun violence, industry officials told us this week. The preliminary discussions follow recent scrutiny from the legislative and executive branches into the effects that media violence could have on children, after December’s elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn. Videogame industry executives didn’t take part in the discussions, media industry officials said.

State regulators came out swinging against AT&T’s proposal to eliminate legacy interconnection rules as the nation’s telecom infrastructure moves toward all-Internet Protocol services. AT&T represents its petition as promoting the interests of American consumers, but it’s really just “a transparent attempt to impose the business plan of a single corporation” on “the entire nation,” said the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates Monday (http://xrl.us/boc4os). Individual state commissions and associations supported NTCA’s petition, which they said would be a more tempered approach that retains some existing rules to protect consumers. In a blog post Monday, AT&T’s Bob Quinn urged the commission to let it do “trials” of deregulation in various wire centers so the FCC could “capture and address the operational, technical and policy issues that necessarily will arise” as the industry transitions away from time-division multiplexing (TDM) technology.

FirstNet still raises a lot of questions, stakeholders said at a three-hour Monday roundtable in Washington. Several stakeholders criticized the FirstNet board for opaqueness, a perception a board member disputed, as well as getting ahead of itself with public safety network designs that may not be ideal. The focus and nature of the $7-billion interoperable network effort is still unclear, five months after the board was set up and nearly a year since the law including FirstNet provisions passed, several panelists said. They called for greater managerial focus and outreach to the public safety community and beyond. Textron Systems, an aerospace and defense development and manufacturing firm, hosted the meeting and hopes to hold future gatherings.

The Consumer Electronics Association laid out a set of principles it said would help the FCC hold a successful incentive auction of broadcast TV spectrum. Google and Microsoft stressed the importance of maintaining a healthy chunk of the spectrum for unlicensed use. AT&T and Verizon countered small carrier arguments over who should be allowed to participate in the auction.

State attorneys general “are really the Internet police,” said Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler, who took over the National Association of Attorneys General in June, during a keynote at a Microsoft event on Monday. With their enforcement powers, attorneys general have had to protect consumers online, even as federal agencies -- such as the FTC -- work on their own rules and enforcement actions, he said. Gansler pointed to his own office and that of California Attorney General Kamala Harris for maintaining privacy departments. The state level is where “we think ... a lot of the action is,” he said. Gansler said when elected NAAG president his 2012-2013 term initiative would be “Privacy in the Digital Age” (http://xrl.us/boc4um).

There will not be a rewrite of the 1996 Telecom Act “this year or next year,” said Roger Sherman, the House Commerce Committee Democratic chief counsel, during an event Monday hosted by the Practising Law Institute. He said partisan divisions are a chief hurdle to achieving broad telecom reform: “Nothing is going to happen that is not bipartisan,” he said. The 2014 reauthorization of the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act (STELA) could present “some opportunities” for piecemeal legislative fixes to current telecom law, he said. “But that is dangerous and could become bogged down. We don’t want to bog something down that can get through.”