The House will overturn the FCC’s net neutrality order “shortly” and will use the Congressional Review Act and a formal bill to do it, said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. She blamed Congress in her Tuesday keynote at the Congressional Internet Caucus’s State of the Net Conference for the FCC’s “first-ever” regulation of the Internet. Neither Democrats nor Republicans set forth a national vision for technology policy, and “when Congress fails to move on an issue, the bureaucracy steps in,” Blackburn said. Legislators are focused on individual advances in technology, “an obsession with devices, and focus on the larger values driving innovation -- a free economy, protected property rights and free speech protections,” she said.
Net neutrality may no longer be a significant issue five or 10 years down the road, as long as broadband offerings are transparent and customers know what they're paying for, CEA President Gary Shapiro said during an episode scheduled to air over the weekend on C-SPAN’s The Communicators. “My view is if we have competition, and if get the spectrum … if you have as a consumer five different sources of competition, then net neutrality fades away as an issue.”
Frontier Communications, which took over Verizon’s lines in 14 states last July, is set to increase rates for its FiOS video products due to rising cost, executives said in an interview. Broadband deployment and other Verizon transaction obligations as well as access revamp will be Frontier’s priorities this year, they said.
Although Time Warner Cable and Sinclair extended their retransmission consent agreement by a day, the pact was still set to expire Saturday and the companies were bracing for a signal blackout. Sinclair wanted a longer extension, General Counsel Barry Faber said in an e-mail to reporters. “Time Warner has instead simply drawn an arbitrary line in the sand insisting that it will drop the stations if the agreement is not completed by midnight on Saturday,” he said. “Sinclair does not believe there is any realistic chance that this deadline … will be able to be met.” A Time Warner Cable spokeswoman said negotiations continue and the cable operator is working hard to reach an agreement. “We are still hoping to avoid a broadcaster blackout, but even if Sinclair pulls the plug on Saturday night, Time Warner Cable will continue to provide all available Big 4 network programming to its subscribers,” she said.
Level 3 has emerged has an unlikely -- and unwilling -- champion of Internet backbone carriers in its battle with Comcast, industry and public-interest officials told us. Level 3 was “certainly reluctant” to engage in a public battle, but “there is no way to route around Comcast,” said John Ryan, Level 3 chief legal officer. “It is not in our DNA to seek government assistance. Our strong preference is where markets exist, the markets should discipline behavior.”
New York City has made no progress putting together funding for a 700 MHz public safety network since its last quarterly report, the city said in a filing posted Friday by the FCC. The project did not receive an award from the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, “which was considered the primary funding source,” the city said. Other government bodies that didn’t get BTOP grants offered similar complaints in quarterly filings required by the commission.
Republican commissioners didn’t get some briefings by FCC staffers reviewing Comcast’s deal to buy control of NBC Universal, in the months leading up to Chairman Julius Genachowski’s sending a draft order to approve the agreement to his colleagues for a vote, commission officials said. Though Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Michael Copps got many substantive updates throughout the deal’s review, Commissioners Meredith Baker and Robert McDowell didn’t get them, though they did hear some more topical details such as about the review’s timing. They didn’t explicitly ask for such in-depth briefings, and they weren’t offered, some commission officials said, although all FCC members were kept updated on timing of the deal’s review.
LPTV advocates seeking to test a different broadcast technology that would let stations offer TV and broadband services simultaneously have been “blocked” from meeting with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski by Media Bureau Staff, SpectrumEvolution CEO Greg Herman wrote in an open letter to the chairman. The group’s application for an experimental license to test the technology in Portland, Ore., has been similarly blocked, he said. The application poses no interference to other licensees, he said. “Nothing could be more routine! Yet the Media and Wireless Bureaus and the Office of Engineering and Technology seem all to feel they must intercede.”
Officials at NTIA and the FCC indicated this week they're focusing on 1755-1780 MHz for possible reallocation for wireless broadband. The wireless industry has long sought the band for pairing with AWS-3 spectrum, for what would likely be one of the most-watched spectrum auctions since 2007’s 700 MHz auction.
International engagement is a central cybersecurity policy of the State Department’s Bureau of Economics, Energy and Business Affairs, said the agency’s senior advisor, James Ennis, at a meeting by the Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information Policy (ACICIP) Thursday. Meanwhile, interagency, intergovernmental and public-private cooperation is critical to improve security and address cybercrime and privacy challenges, State Department officials said.