The Obama administration is hopeful that “cooler heads” will prevail to pass a White House-backed Senate cybersecurity bill as lawmakers see “the national security implications” of some provisions of the measure. The “small regulatory regime” for core critical infrastructure that’s contained in the Cybersecurity Act (S-2105) is “very narrowly crafted” and built on “best practices” for corporations, many of which are already implementing them for “their own business purposes,” said Howard Schmidt, White House cybersecurity coordinator. “We don’t see that being asking too much of anybody,” he said in an interview on the C-SPAN program The Communicators scheduled to air Saturday.
Congressional investigators are looking into allegations of loan fraud raised by cable operators against a county government in Minnesota that accepted about $66 million in funds from the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) to build a fiber broadband network there. Mediacom Communications, which serves some of the less sparsely populated parts of Lake County, Minn., complained last year to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s office of the inspector general that Lake County’s Broadband Initiatives Project (BIP) loan application appeared to be fraudulent, designed to set the county up for financial failure and allow outside consultants hand-picked by local officials to buy the fiber-to-the-home systems at a discount (CD March 17/11 p6). More recently it has been taking its case to nearly anyone else who might listen, including federal prosecutors in D.C. and investigators with the House Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, and apparently gaining some traction.
Comcast is getting the most scrutiny for the way it delivers Internet Protocol video to connected devices, but is far from the only U.S. multichannel video programming distributor streaming video content to Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and other Web-connected devices. A growing number of other MVPDs stream IP video to the videogame console, connected TVs, computers, smartphones, tablets and other consumer electronics. Some MVPDs say they are looking to do much more IP streaming. But net neutrality advocates criticize Comcast for not counting the cable channels it delivers to subscribers’ Xboxes by IP, instead of the traditional quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) distribution that sends shows to TVs connected to set-top boxes, under its broadband data caps.
An interconnection agreement between T-Mobile and the Puerto Rico Telephone Company wasn’t discriminatory, because Section 252(i) of the Communications Act allows other entities to opt into an interconnection agreement under certain conditions, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday. The dispute concerned $2 million in fees (http://xrl.us/bm558j). It’s the first time the 1st Circuit articulated a standard of review for determining when an interconnection agreement (ICA) is discriminatory in violation of Sections 251-252, the Boston court said.
The U.S. supports an initiative at the ITU calling for studies to spur common, worldwide allocations and identification of spectrum suitable for mobile broadband, even if the bands identified are at 5 MHz or higher, said Decker Anstrom, U.S. ambassador to the 2012 World Radiocommunication Conference. Anstrom told an FCBA luncheon on Thursday it’s impossible to say what bands may eventually spark commercial interest as technology continues to evolve.
NAB is dropping its legal challenge to the FCC’s 2008 white spaces order, which it filed in the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in February 2009. NAB filed a motion with the court Thursday, saying its concerns had subsequently been addressed by the FCC in an order this April 5 on petitions for reconsideration of the white spaces rules (http://xrl.us/bm552d). The move by NAB is seen clearing one of the remaining hurdles to full-scale use of the TV white spaces to access the Internet.
The major U.S. tower companies, most of which had a solid Q1, are expected to continue the growth in Q2 and the rest of the year, analysts told us. They cited LTE deployments, potential tower transactions and an improved credit market. American Tower more than doubled its Q1 earnings from the year-ago period and raised its full-year earnings estimate.
FCC members probably won’t overturn a Media Bureau order that may require Comcast to move Bloomberg TV’s channel placement on some of its cable systems, industry and public interest attorneys told us. The bureau late Wednesday gave Comcast 60 days to comply with the order, in which it found Comcast to be in violation of the news neighborhood condition of the commission order approving Comcast’s purchase of control in NBCUniversal. Comcast promised it would appeal that order to the full commission (CD May 3 p6).
Comcast won a stay of an FCC administrative judge’s decision (CD Dec 28 p2) that it move the Tennis Channel to the same programming package as the cable operator’s own sports networks. The Office of General Counsel’s stay may be short-lived, because commissioners have a draft order before them on the case. The Media Bureau Wednesday separately backed a complaint Comcast isn’t living up to the conditions of last year’s order letting it buy control of NBCUniversal, because Bloomberg TV isn’t near the channel positions of other news networks. (See separate report in this issue.)
Communications and electronic groups increased campaign contributions to GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney in Q1, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. But industry groups vastly favored President Barack Obama, giving his reelection campaign $4.75 million in the 2012 election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission data current as of April 21.