FCC Keeps Eye on Broadband, FTC Focused on Privacy in 2012
It will be “more of the same” for the FCC in 2012, Chief of Staff Eddie Lazarus told the Practising Law Institute conference Friday. The FCC still has significant work left expanding broadband adoption and addressing the country’s spectrum deficiencies, he said. Privacy experts on a separate panel said they expect the FTC and FCC to increase their focus on online privacy and cybersecurity issues in the coming year.
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The FCC finished a major USF order this year but still needs to update the Lifeline/Link-Up and E-Rate programs, Lazarus said. The programs address adoption by low-income households and schools but have not yet been transitioned to broadband. Also, the FCC is working with industry on the Connected to Compete initiative to improve adoption, Lazarus said. While the FCC must wait for congressional authorization before moving ahead with voluntary incentive auctions, the agency plans next year to look for ways to increase spectral efficiency, Lazarus said. The agency will also have to deal with appeals of its USF overhaul order. Lazarus said crafting the order involved many difficult decisions and tradeoffs, but he believes the end result was sound policy.
The 1996 Telecom Act is starting to show its age and Congress should consider an update, but the FCC is still able to do its work under the existing statute, Lazarus said. The FCC’s “bureau structure is not ideal for a converged world,” he said. But the FCC has worked around the issue by setting up task forces that bridge the silos, he said. The FCC is staffing up to improve its knowledge on cybersecurity and privacy. It hopes to contribute its expertise on networks to the group of federal agencies working on cyber issues, he said. Communication among the agencies involved is “crucially important” to addressing those issues, he said.
The FCC will focus on areas where it sees market failure, said Office of Strategic Policy Chief Paul de Sa said at the conference. He agreed the agency still has more work to do on USF and intercarrier compensation.
In 2012 the FTC will likely keep a close eye on facial recognition technologies and behavioral tracking, said Justin Brookman, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s project on consumer privacy. Researchers and companies are making “radical advances” in facial recognition technologies, Brookman said. “You can find real time information on people” based on facial recognition signatures, and “there is no privacy framework to protect against that.” Companies aren’t properly informing their customers about how much their online and mobile behaviors are being tracked, Brookman said: “I understand that advertising fuels a lot of the Internet but consumers don’t understand that they are being tracked. … The threat value proposition needs to be made a lot more clear."
Paul Gallant, a former aide to ex-FCC Chairman Michael Powell, also questioned whether federal regulators will begin tightening privacy standards for technology and telecommunications firms. Gallant, now an analyst with Guggenheim, said a large-scale privacy breach could be the “catalyzing event that changes the two steps forward, one step back regulatory approach we are seeing right now.”
Mobile app privacy, or the lack thereof, will continue to be a big issue for the FTC, said Maureen Cooney, Sprint deputy chief privacy officer. This year the commission finalized four settlements with application developers over children’s privacy violations and other misrepresentations. Cooney also noted that in 2011 the FTC created its first investigation unit for applications: “There can be great value as a regulator who understands the business models and the innovations as they are happening.”
The FCC is consistently hiring cybersecurity experts to “beef up” the agency’s role in securing U.S. networks, said James Barnett, chief of the FCC Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau. Barnett’s department is primarily focused on cybersecurity threats to the network core, threats that emanate from the edge of the network, botnet attacks, and route hijacking.
Right now the Web’s core routing protocol, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is “set up with no security,” said Barnett. “It is susceptible to route hijacking and we are interested in preventing that.” The agency is also working to develop a volunteer ISP cybersecurity code of conduct, which Barnett said he expects to be released in March of 2012.