The FCC ought to move on several proceedings that have been pending for years on limiting the amount of commercials children see on cable and broadcast TV, and curbing interactive ads televised to them, children’s advocates told us. Two groups last week asked FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski to act on rulemakings and inquiries started as early as 2008, and also act on requests made in 2004 to deny license renewals to TV stations that broke children’s ad rules.
House lawmakers will hit the ground running with two cybersecurity markups upon their return from the congressional spring recess. Both the House Homeland Security and Oversight committees plan to mark up cybersecurity bills Wednesday as GOP leaders gin up support for its upcoming “cyberweek,” committee aides told us Friday. Meanwhile, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., will delay the introduction of his legislation to update and reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a Judiciary Committee aide told us.
Two months after the FCC’s declaratory ruling to “remind” carriers about the longstanding prohibition on traffic restriction, call completion problems aren’t getting any better, several rural carriers and state public utility commissioners told us. Call completion will remain a problem until the FCC actively enforces rules already on the books, they said, stressing the inability of state commissions to deal with problems that cross state lines. According to a survey by network and infrastructure company Anpi Zone presented Thursday at the “IP Solutions” conference in Indianapolis, more than 60 percent of ILEC and CLEC respondents said call-quality problems have either not improved or gotten worse since the declaratory ruling.
A minor wave of investment in the last two years has funded social TV technology and companies that use automatic content recognition (ACR) software to handle interactive TV applications on TV sets, smartphones and tablets. Though the price tag for getting in on this nascent industry has been relatively low, few major media companies have invested in the technology. Add up all the disclosed investments in the space and the total is less than $150 million, according to data compiled by Sharp’s social TV chief Anne-Marie Roussel on her personal blog: http://xrl.us/bm3k2h. She counted more than 30 new companies in the sector. Some haven’t disclosed their funding, so the total that’s been invested in the cohort is presumably higher.
There was strong audience interest in last month’s Supreme Court oral arguments on healthcare reform law, broadcast executives told us. During the three days the case was heard and covered extensively, Fox News saw an average daytime audience of 1.2 million viewers and 213,000 in the core demographic of ages 25 to 54. Primetime drew 2.4 million viewers, among whom 613,000 were ages 25-54 on average, according to Nielsen Media Research numbers provided by Fox News. The court provided same-day audio recordings and transcripts of the arguments and didn’t allow the hearings to be aired live, something executives hope will change but aren’t optimistic will anytime soon.
The 9th U.S. Appeals Court struck down the FCC’s ban on political ads that run on public radio and TV stations. A panel of judges in the San Francisco-based court decided 2-1 Thursday that the ban on public issue and political ads is unconstitutional and violates the First Amendment. The ruling could alter the dynamic and character of noncommercial stations, some noncommercial broadcasters and analysts said. The court also upheld a ban on airing on noncommercial stations ads for goods and services of commercial entities.
NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling said reallocating the 1755-1850 MHz band for wireless broadband would cost “too much” and take “too long,” in an episode of C-SPAN’s the Communicators set to be shown this weekend. Meanwhile, NTIA has suspended, at least temporarily, funding for the 700 MHz waiver recipients seeking to build out early public safety networks in the 700 MHz band, government officials confirmed.
The U.S. “very much wants to push back” against efforts by some nations and some organizations such as the ITU to bring the Internet under “top-down government control through treaty organizations and such,” said NTIA Administrator Lawrence Strickling. “We find that quite threatening to the success of the Internet,” he said in an interview for C-SPAN’s Communicators (See related story). This is an issue that has been “emerging for some period of time but is coming to a head here over the next year or two due to some activities of other nations as well as some international conferences,” such as those by the ITU, he said. Strickling was asked about his talks with House Commerce Manufacturing Subcommittee Chairman Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., about the “U.N. and control of the Internet."
A Massachusetts legislative committee is drafting recommendations to address the issue of double poles -- utilities putting up new utility poles beside old ones and leaving the old poles in place indefinitely. Currently there are a dozen bills in the state that, in various ways, attempt to encourage utilities to remove double poles in a timely fashion.
NTIA has no interest in pushing a particular view of privacy rules for the private sector in the multistakeholder meetings it plans to convene around the Obama administration’s Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights (CD April 4 p4), NTIA Administrator Lawrence Strickling told a Hudson Institute gathering Wednesday. NTIA will have to “resist the impulse” to lead the discussion, even at the prompting of participants, he said: “People are going to be looking for those handholds” -- what the government thinks should happen.