The Internet Society’s June 8 World Internet Protocol version 6 Day will be a “global-scale test flight,” aimed at nudging the Internet sector to prepare for the new technology as IPv4 addresses run out, ISOC Technology Program Manager Phil Roberts said Friday. Major industry players will enable IPv6 on their main websites for 24 hours, he said in an email. IPv4 access will also be still be available, he said. “Minor technical glitches” may occur, but the trial run will allow participating organizations to work with operating system manufacturers, home route vendors and ISPs to tackle them, he said. Several more tests will likely be needed as IPv6 is rolled out, said Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf.

Whether ISPs have free-speech rights was debated late Thursday at an FCBA continuing education panel on net neutrality. Opponents of the FCC’s December net neutrality order, which they noted hasn’t taken effect because it hasn’t been published in the Federal Register, focused on the rights of cable operators, telcos and other network operators. Rule proponents said they see net neutrality rules as protecting the rights of broadband subscribers to free speech.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- Hopes for building a market for white-spaces devices rest in significant part on EU regulators’ following the expected lead of their U.K. counterparts with very flexible rules for use of vacant TV channels for broadband service, said a technology executive involved in wireless regulatory and standards work for about two decades. “I think the U.K. will come out with some very nice rules” soon, “and that will allow some very nice products,” said the executive, Jim Lansford, standards architect at CSR Technology of Cambridge, England. The company develops and sells platforms for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other technologies.

There’s need for state control over quality of retail and wholesale service regardless of technology platform, even though in some states incumbents have said the increased availability and types of service have made oversight unnecessary, state officials said during a conference call held by the National Regulatory Research Institute.

Montana Chief Information Office Dick Clark warned Thursday that in an era of state and federal government cutbacks, there’s no easy path to a nationwide public safety network in large states like his with small populations. Clark and New Jersey CTO Adel Ebeid elaborated on the challenges each of their states faces during discussion at the National Association of State Chief Information Officers’ midyear meeting.

Wireless companies are “doing an extraordinary job” of maximizing spectrum efficiency but are reaching the upper limits of their capacity, a CTIA-funded research paper said (CD May 5 p14). “By every relevant measure, the U.S. wireless industry uses this spectrum extremely efficiently, not only approaching the theoretical limits of what physics allows, but with what is practically achievable with respect to deployment,” study author Peter Rysavy said in his report, filed Thursday by CTIA in dockets 09-51, 10-235 and 10-237. Wireless companies have had to “bankroll new network technologies every three or four years, on average,” but have multiplied their networks’ capacity by a factor of 4,708 since 1985, Rysavy wrote: “Unfortunately, the continual advances in spectral efficiency the industry has been able to achieve will not be able to persist forever due to fundamental constraints of physics expressed in the Shannon Bound,” the “theoretical limit on the bps/Hz that can be achieved relative to noise.”

The Supreme Court has ruled different ways in First Amendment cases, depending partly on what issue is at stake, so court observers said at an FCBA panel on Thursday that they can’t generalize across all cases. In the five years under Chief Justice John Roberts, the court has accepted 19 free-speech cases that don’t have to do with religion, said First Amendment lawyer Robert Corn-Revere of Davis Wright. Of the 14 cases where the court has ruled, it decided in favor of free speech in six of them and eight times against it, he said. Roberts’ tenure hasn’t been “entirely promising,” but recent cases give free-speech proponents more to cheer about, said Corn-Revere, who moderated a panel on the First Amendment and the high court.

Cablevision is developing new TV Everywhere products and looking at leveraging its New York-area Wi-Fi network to deliver some video to subscribers’ electronic devices, Chief Operating Officer Tom Rutledge said during the company’s Q1 earnings teleconference Thursday. For now, the company’s iPad application delivers the company’s channel lineup to subscribers using it in the home. Expanding that outside the home would require additional content licenses from Cablevision’s programmers, he said. One area that represents kind of a middle ground between the open Internet and Cablevision subscribers’ home network is the Wi-Fi network the cable operator is building around New York. “The Wi-Fi network is an Internet service, but it’s controlled by us and for the benefit of our customers, so it creates another space for us to exploit,” he said.

President Barack Obama didn’t encourage the FCC to act on net neutrality, Chairman Julius Genachowski said at a hearing Thursday of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Internet. Genachowski and Commissioner Robert McDowell clashed over whether antitrust laws would have been enough to keep the Internet open. Internet Subcommittee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said he continues to explore legislation updating antitrust laws to reduce costs for those with net neutrality complaints.

As the federal government looks to develop a disaster information system, the service must be adapted to the way the public communicates through social media and on the mobile platform, witnesses said Thursday during testimony at the Senate Subcommittee on Disaster Recovery and Intergovernmental Affairs. While some emergency organizations and technology companies have implemented social media and other technologies into their recovery-related operations, open and interoperable standards across government systems can make the process more effective, they said.