Disney executives defended the amount of money they charge distributors to carry ESPN and other pay-TV networks, during investor conferences Wednesday. Asked how Disney reconciles the need to preserve a pay-TV industry that’s affordable for 90 percent of U.S. households while also maximizing the value of its products, Chairman Bob Iger criticized distributors for complaining about the price of ESPN. “Distributors complain about the cost of the product and they do that more than selling the value of the product to their customers,” he told a Sanford Bernstein conference. “Usually if you have a distributor out there that has a pretty solid business model, they're out their extolling the virtues of what they're selling and not complaining about the cost."

Work on preparing for longer Internet Protocol addresses can guide energy-reduction and efficiency efforts, executives from the cable, content and consumer electronics industries said on a Brookings Institution panel. They said cable operators’ preparations that began several years ago for IPv6 are bearing fruit now that shorter IPv4 addresses are being exhausted. The IPv6 efforts can be a guide to all those industries’ work at an early stage to cut energy consumption and use power more efficiently, speakers said. Rivals will have to work together, and companies with their vendors, for the energy effort to be a success, executives at Intel, Comcast and its NBCUniversal business said.

A process of cybersecurity industry collaboration that started last fall bore fruit Wednesday at a White House event, with the Industry Botnet Group (IBG) as expected (CD May 29 p9) releasing a set of principles for mitigating the effects of botnet infections. FCC, Department of Homeland Security and Commerce Department leaders also spoke at the event. “Combating botnets is not a new phenomenon” but a “broader base” of organizations is now working together, Liesyl Franz, TechAmerica vice president-cybersecurity policy, told reporters on a conference call after the event.

Top U.S. policy makers are unified in their opposition to any proposed international governance of the Internet by the ITU, said FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell and Richard Beaird, State Department senior deputy U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy. Beaird said the U.S. position has “considerable support” in the Asia-Pacific region, Africa, and in some European countries. Google and Public Knowledge representatives said at the Free State Foundation event that Internet stakeholders should lobby the other ITU member nations to oppose any proposals that would create international rules for the Internet during the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in December.

SILICON VALLEY -- The Patriot Act and U.S. trade embargoes are blocking promising opportunities for American cloud-services companies to grab business overseas, an official of the Commerce Department working to encourage small and midsized providers to venture abroad said Wednesday. “Our foreign competitors are really playing” up the point that U.S. companies are covered by the Patriot Act, which has “a very unfortunate name,” said Aileen Nandi, a commercial officer working out of San Jose, Calif., for the department’s Commercial Service. She said at the Cloud Slam conference that she hears foreign cloud providers making pitches at conferences that governments and companies outside the U.S. shouldn’t use U.S. vendors for that reason.

The European Commission Monday will propose measures to boost online trust and convenience by making electronic identification (eID) and e-signature rules more uniform across Europe, EC sources said Wednesday. The two-part plan would extend existing national eID systems for public services that require formal electronic identification across Europe, and will standardize e-signature and e-authentication rules, they told reporters at a briefing where they spoke on the condition they not be named. Competitiveness ministers Wednesday urged the EC to submit the proposal by June. Despite that, the sources said, they expect some concerns from governments worried about the potential burden of accepting eID services from other countries, and from some EU lawmakers who might be troubled by perceived privacy issues.

Despite the protestations of the NCTA and USTelecom, the FCC plans to publicly release flawed ISP speed data collected by a commission contractor in March. The report will be accompanied by a disclaimer that server issues in New York and Los Angeles “distorted test results for a significant number of panelists across various ISPs participating in the study” and was “unreliable and flawed,” said an ex parte filing the FCC itself made. The commission will say it won’t use the data to compare the performance of different ISPs in the 2012 report. “Anomalies” in the network affected some of the measurement locations toward the end of March, so the monthlong data collection phase was restarted in April (CD May 7 p8).

The FCC is asking about the security practices of carriers with respect to customer information stored on customer devices and the application of existing privacy and security requirements to that information. The Wireline and Wireless bureaus and General Counsel’s Office jointly made the request in a public notice. It follows a series of questions from Capitol Hill about Carrier IQ software, raised by Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., and others in Congress (CD Dec 5 p12).

House Communications Subcommittee Republicans seek to oppose any international effort to impose regulations on the Internet, according to a majority staff memo that circulated among lobbyists this week. The Subcommittee has a hearing Thursday that will feature testimony from FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, among others. The GOP memo said there’s bipartisan agreement that the U.S. should “stand firm” and oppose any treaty provisions that expand the jurisdiction of the ITU over the Internet.

There are enough problems with consumers gaining full Internet access “to warrant strong and targeted action” to safeguard users, although not necessarily more regulation, EU Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes said Tuesday. She responded to a European Commission-ordered report by the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) into potential net neutrality problems. Internet access works well most of the time for Europeans, but survey findings showed a need for more regulatory certainty and better consumer choice, she said. In addition to its report on traffic management practices, BEREC launched consultations on several issues in the context of net neutrality: Quality of service guidelines (http://xrl.us/bm9pti); differentiation practices and related competition issues (http://xrl.us/bm9ptk); and Internet Protocol interconnection (http://xrl.us/bm9ptp).