Failure to reauthorize the U.S. SAFE WEB Act of 2006 would have severe, negative implications for Internet commerce, Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., warned Thursday during a hearing of the House Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade, which she chairs. Mack said she will introduce legislation this week reauthorizing the act for another seven years. Without action, the act is set to expire Dec. 22, 2013. An FTC official also urged Congress to reauthorize the law.

TV broadcasters and some program suppliers asked a federal appeals court to review a lower court’s decision that will let Aereo continue offering its services while its legality is litigated, a court filing shows. WNET, Fox TV stations, Twentieth Century Fox, WPIX, Univision and PBS said they appealed U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan’s ruling denying their motion for an injunction and called Nathan’s decision “a loss for the entire creative community.” Comcast’s NBCUniversal also said it plans to appeal the ruling. “Importantly, the court determined that Aereo’s business is irreparably harming broadcasters and content creators,” a spokesman for NBCU said. The decision “represents only a preliminary finding and we remain confident that the courts will ultimately find in our favor and block Aereo from infringing our copyrighted broadcasts."

EU Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes issued a policy statement Thursday on broadband investment in high-speed pipes. She outlined the conclusions of an extensive debate on the role of regulation in promoting competition and investment, and the regulations she’s planning. Network and cable operators backed the proposals, but alternative telcos accused Kroes of turning her back on them.

The FCC Media Bureau is monitoring the blackout of 15 Hearst Television stations on Time Warner Cable, without taking sides in the dispute over retransmission consent fees that entered a third full day Thursday (CD July 12 p10), industry officials said. The agency’s sticking to the standard practice that it used in some but not all retrans disputes in recent years, agency and industry officials noted. They said that means the office of Chairman Julius Genachowski and his colleagues aren’t getting updates from either side and are instead letting career commission staff monitor the blackout.

Public Knowledge, Free Press and the Diogenes Telecommunications Project filed separate petitions asking the FCC to reject the proposed Verizon/T-Mobile spectrum swap, in which the companies propose the purchase and exchange of AWS licenses in 218 markets. RTG also filed a petition to deny (CD July 11 p14). But whether the petitions will have much effect remains to be seen, especially since the FCC seems well on the way to approving deals linked to the swaps, in which Verizon will buy AWS licenses from SpectrumCo, Cox and Leap Wireless.

There’s no consensus on the level of transparency there should be for ITU procedures. At an ITU Council meeting in Geneva, member countries only agreed to publish the draft version of the future International Telecommunication Regulations. An initiative heavily pushed by Sweden to grant open access to all contributions to the World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT) was not accepted, confirmed Anders Jonsson, head of the Swedish delegation.

The FTC and Department of Justice took to Congress Wednesday to express concern about technology companies with standard essential patents (SEPs) running to the International Trade Commission for exclusion orders. An exclusion order directs U.S. Customs and Border Protection to bar infringing articles from entry into the country. The DOJ Antitrust Division is particularly concerned with SEPs involving mobile devices, because wireless devices depend on many standards for interoperability, Acting Assistant Attorney General Joseph Wayland said. Speaking at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the impact of exclusion orders on competition, he and FTC Commissioner Edith Ramirez argued exclusion orders are generally inappropriate remedies for companies that own patents used in industry standards.

SILICON VALLEY -- Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., promised to keep fighting to make spectrum available for unlicensed broadband uses. In a brief recorded message to a conference Wednesday at Stanford University about unlicensed, Eshoo took credit for provisions in the recently enacted spectrum law allowing “the FCC to preserve existing white spaces” and to use for unlicensed purposes some frequencies to be given up by broadcasters. The “future of unlicensed spectrum” had been “called in question” in the legislation’s creation, she said.

Of the dozens of comments filed this week in response to the FCC’s rulemaking on USF contribution reform, there was little agreement about whether to stick with a revenue-based system for assessing contribution fees, to move to a system that uses connections or numbers, or even whether to assess fees on broadband service. The only universal sentiment that might be teased out of the plethora of comments filed is that, as AT&T put it, the current system is “dysfunctional.” Carriers differed, but generally supported a modified revenue-based system, while VoIP providers preferred a connections-based system.

Expanding relationships with other enterprises and federal agencies and providing cutting-edge services can help small, minority and women-owned businesses obtain procurement agreements with large companies and agencies, telecom and government executives said. Working groups and training and mentoring programs were developed at some corporations and in the government to support small businesses and entrepreneurs and to produce a diverse list of prospective vendors for entities to do business with, they said Tuesday at a supplier diversity conference at the FCC.