While MetroPCS intends to launch its LTE handsets in the second half of the year, Sprint claimed it’s free to offer potential LTE iPhones if Apple has such a device planned, their executives said during the Barclays Capital, High Yield Bond and Syndicated Loan Conference Tuesday.
TV stations’ public-inspection files won’t need to be standardized or searchable when the FCC requires they go online (CD March 19 p6), industry officials said. Media Bureau staff are continuing to work on drafting an order to make broadcasters put most of what’s now in paper files, including information on political spots, on the Internet, commission and industry officials told us. Some FCC staff appear to be targeting a forthcoming order that tracks with an October rulemaking notice in that stations won’t need to convert paperwork to an electronic format right away (http://xrl.us/bmzmqp), industry officials said. The commission may decide on searchability and standardization later, agency and industry officials said.
The government needs to deregulate information technology industry areas, panelists said at an American Consumer Institute event Wednesday. ACI Wednesday released a series of essays (http://xrl.us/bmzmmr) titled “The Information Technology Revolution and the Transformation of the Small Business Economy,” written by industry experts about technology’s effect on the small business economy. “When you get government out of the way and provide certainty in the marketplace, small business owners will come in, and that will create jobs,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. and a House Communications Subcommittee member, told the event. The FCC regulates one-sixth of the American economy, and it needs to be reigned in, she said, urging lawmakers to pass the FCC reform bill (HR-3309).
Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member John McCain, R-Ariz., was displeased that Gen. Keith Alexander, National Security Agency director and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, said the Department of Homeland Security should have the “lead role” in securing the nation’s domestic infrastructure from cyberattacks. At a Senate Armed Services Committee appropriations hearing Tuesday, McCain said that industry members do not need additional regulations from “the most inefficient bureaucracy” he has ever encountered.
New carrier obligations in the Lifeline order show that the FCC has “not taken seriously” its Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) obligations, lawyers for General Communication Inc. wrote the Office of Management and Budget (http://xrl.us/bmzhgs). The FCC told OMB the new regulations will increase the annual time burden from 60,000 hours to over 1.5 million, excluding the commission’s new estimate of 22 million hours to account for an increase in the estimated number of Lifeline subscribers (http://xrl.us/bmzi68). Chris Nierman, director-federal regulatory affairs at GCI, said that others feel similarly to the telco and are likely filing their own comments.
Verizon’s proposed purchase of AWS licenses from SpectrumCo and Cox, and associated market agreements, are raising objections from various civic leaders in Albany, N.Y., Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo and Syracuse who made their displeasure known in a series of filings at the FCC. The letters charge that to date Verizon has made no major investments in broadband in any of the five cities. The FCC Wireless Bureau is closely examining the proposed transactions, which were announced in December (CD Dec 5 p1).
TiVo fired back at Motorola Mobility, claiming the set-top box supplier along with its customer Time Warner Cable infringed three patents, including the so-called time-warp patent that’s been at the heart of recent multimillion-dollar settlements. Google has agreed to buy Motorola. TiVo on Monday filed counterclaims in U.S. District Court, Tyler, Texas, in response to a patent infringement suit Motorola filed against it in February 2011. TiVo also asked to have Motorola’s three DVR-related patents found invalid. Motorola sued TiVo alleging it infringed three patents, including those covering a DVR with archival storage and a method for implementing playback features for compressed video that were originally issued in 2001 and 1999 to Imedia Corp.
T-Mobile won a victory in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals which held that the Newport News, Va., Planning Department violated the Communications Act in denying the carrier’s application to construct a cell tower at an elementary school. The Richmond-based court upheld a lower court decision in the company’s favor.
FCC process reform legislation could be dead on arrival in the Senate, even with House passage seen likely. The House plans to vote Tuesday on HR-3309 by Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore. But the Senate Commerce Committee majority said it has no plans to take up the bill. Former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, a Democrat, said the bill “appears likely to [inflict] upon the FCC the unfortunate obstacles to sensible bipartisan decision-making that plague the Congress.”
The FTC unveiled its much-anticipated privacy report Monday, urging data companies to give consumers more choice and transparency over their information, and spurring lawmakers to pass laws that hold data companies to account (http://xrl.us/bmzh4v). FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz made good on his promise not to impose any regulatory rules but he demanded that industry offer “more and better protections for consumers."