Senate legislation to streamline spectrum relocation for federal users makes minor tweaks to a House bill by Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash. The bipartisan Senate bill (S-3490) was introduced late Tuesday by Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Roger Wicker, R-Miss. Both bills aim to establish a more orderly process for transitioning federal users off bands that would be reviewed by a three-member technical panel reporting to the FCC and NTIA.
The FCC left the door open to further action on complaints of a dysfunctional fixed-satellite services (FSS) marketplace, in its report to Congress on the Open-Market Reorganization for the Betterment of International Telecommunications (ORBIT) Act. The report referenced Globecomm, Artel, CapRock, and Spacenet’s filings saying the FSS market is flawed and Intelsat uses anticompetitive behavior to win contracts and dictate leasing prices, but the report doesn’t propose any specific action. The ORBIT Act requires the FCC to provide annual reports to the House and Senate Commerce and Foreign Relations committees on the effect of the privatization of Intelsat and Inmarsat.
An FCC white paper released Tuesday builds a case against giving public safety direct access to the 10 MHz D-block, which the National Broadband Plan proposes be sold in an upcoming auction. Public safety groups have waged a ferocious battle against the NBP’s recommendations.
The Rural Utilities Service is anticipating that investment for round two of the Broadband Initiatives Program “is going to be more than double what we invested in the first round,” Administrator Jonathan Adelstein said at the Broadband Breakfast. The agency planned to have three rounds, but “folded the second and third rounds into the second one.” Adjusting the “remote” definition, increasing the grant component and other changes in the eligibility process encouraged more applications, he said. Most of the awards will be announced in July and August, he said.
A TV spectrum paper by FCC broadband staffers released Monday to little fanfare drew mixed reviews from broadcast lawyers who closely read it and engineers just beginning to parse it. Consumer electronics and wireless groups, seeking spectrum repurposed from broadcasting to wireless broadband, praised the paper, which is at http://xrl.us/bhor2p. The 60-page paper was posted Monday on the website of the National Broadband Plan but no news release accompanied it, so lawyers and engineers still were studying it Tuesday.
Anti-porn advocates urged more vigorous enforcement of federal obscenity laws, saying Congress and the Department of Justice should ensure that aggressive prosecution of laws already on the books is a priority, they said at a briefing hosted by the Coalition for the War Against Illegal Pornography on the Hill Tuesday.
The Rural Cellular Association (RCA), the Rural Telecommunications Group (RTG), T-Mobile, Sprint Nextel and many small and midsized carriers said the FCC should use its authority under Title III of the Communications Act to impose a data roaming obligation on carriers like the one for voice approved in 2007. But AT&T and Verizon Wireless countered that requiring roaming for data would violate the Communications Act. The commission sought comment on data roaming when it dropped the in-market exception for voice roaming (CD April 22 p4).
FTC officials took issue Tuesday with media descriptions of how the agency works. It had come under fire from some bloggers and industry executives for including in a discussion draft for a Tuesday workshop proposals to change copyright law and to tax some CE devices to help subsidize the ailing newspaper industry (CD June 10 p17). “The authors of those articles and blogs don’t know the agency, and they've misdescribed what the agency has done and what the workshop is about,” Commissioner Thomas Rosch said at a workshop about journalism’s future.
News Corp. is in talks with British Sky Broadcasting to acquire the 60.9 percent of BSkyB stock it doesn’t already own, the companies said Tuesday. News Corp. has already made two informal offers for the public shares, both of which were declined by BSkyB, they said. While the companies haven’t agreed on a price, they agreed to proceed with the regulatory process to “facilitate a proposed transaction,” said News Corp. BSkyB’s independent directors said it would back a higher offer. “It is the unanimous view from the independent directors that there is a significant gap between the proposal from News Corp. and the value of the company,” said BSkyB. The purchase likely will require regulatory approval from the European Union and other regulators, said News Corp.
Recent Supreme Court cases haven’t displaced antitrust law in telecom and other highly regulated industries, Verizon Senior Vice President John Thorne said at a hearing Tuesday of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy. But an FTC official and others urged Congress to use legislation to clarify the meaning of the high court’s 2003 Trinko and 2007 Credit Suisse decisions. Democratic and Republican subcommittee members said they were troubled by the rulings, but Republicans seemed hesitant to back legislative action. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., told us a legislative fix is unlikely.