A broadcaster agreement to pay $110,000, train employees and take other compliance actions to settle an Enforcement Bureau indecency investigation is the first FCC action on such content in several years and a rare instance of the commission’s acting against non-English programming, said experts we interviewed Friday. The night before, the bureau released a consent decree where Liberman Broadcasting agreed to develop an indecency manual, name a compliance officer, train staff, report future noncompliance and file four reports over the three-year term of the settlement. Notably, said one of the indecency experts, broadcast lawyer John Crigler of Garvey Schubert, the licensee admitted it violated indecency rules for the now-discontinued talk show-type program that complaints said featured scantily-clad women with almost no obscurance of sexual parts and much unfiltered cursing in Spanish.

It’s up to broadcasters to embrace the nascent rollout of mobile DTV, with the expense of adding equipment to transmit to portable consumer electronics using that standard being minor compared with the opportunity cost of not “lighting up,” said advocates of the technology. One backer told us he’s frustrated at the pace of adoption, while others said in interviews last week and at an NAB event that they expect more stations to adopt the technology. “Mobile TV is already available in nearly 40 markets serving approximately 60 percent of the U.S. population,” said NAB incentive auction pointman Rick Kaplan at the event Wednesday. “This is all before mobile TV proponents have ever launched a large-scale coordinated promotional campaign.”

Look for cable operators to further improve user interfaces to better integrate a wider array of apps, including those from other companies, devices from many makers of consumer electronics and video ranging from what the operators provide through encrypted delivery to what’s available publicly online. Those are among the forecasts from CE, cable R&D and operator executives informally surveyed by Communications Daily this summer and fall. Some top cable operators including Comcast portrayed at NCTA’s Cable Show (CD June 11 p11; June 12 p14) and in other forums their firms as high-technology and software companies when describing their tech improvements. Executives told us later that those improvements are aimed at making it easier for customers to navigate the plethora of content from multiple sources many now can access.

A draft FCC declaratory ruling that could lead to increased foreign ownership of broadcasters has support from all three commissioners and is likely to arrive for a vote at the Nov. 14 open meeting without alterations to its basic thrust, said an FCC official and several broadcast attorneys in interviews Friday. The declaratory ruling would clarify the commission’s rules that transactions that would result in foreign ownership of more than 25 percent of a broadcaster would be approved on a case-by-case basis. Though this was always the case under the Communications Act, industry officials told us it’s been long understood that such waivers would not be granted (CD Oct 25 p5), and the proposed ruling would explicitly reverse that. The ruling “is really a matter of the FCC exercising the authority they already have,” said Davis Wright broadcast attorney David Silverman, who represents Alaskan broadcasters who support the clarification.

Foreigners could own more than 25 percent of U.S. broadcasters if the FCC grants a licensee’s petition for declaratory ruling, clarified a draft that circulated for a vote at the agency’s next meeting, said commission and industry officials in interviews Thursday, the day the item described as concise and straightforward circulated for the Nov. 14 meeting. The declaratory ruling would clarify what some in the industry and at the agency said they had considered a de facto ban on such ownership. The item said there’s not such a ban, said agency and industry officials.

Many federal agencies have more work left to do to make good on administration goals of being forthcoming in responding to Freedom of Information Act requests and being transparent with the public and communicative with media, said experts in interviews Thursday. They said leaks of information on National Security Agency activities and other surveillance operations appear to have had the biggest effect on transparency by spurring an administration clampdown on NSA and other security agencies’ dealings with reporters. Accessibility of experts at non-national security agencies specializing in science, including the Food and Drug Administration, NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, also has been curtailed under this administration, said the experts. They said regulatory agencies including the FCC, FTC and SEC generally do better at making experts available and responding to FOIA requests, though there’s room for improvement there, too.

Public attention to uneven application of Web content policies may help bring about change so conservative religious and political views aren’t blocked on the likes of Apple, Facebook and Google, said experts who read a National Religious Broadcasters report (CD Oct 3 p4) on what NRB called censorship. Those opposing what they contend are unfair applications of policies against hate and other speech may need to better publicize those cases and stop using social media that block their views, said some panelists at an NRB event Thursday and experts in follow-up interviews. They said ISPs may not be engaging in such blocking because they face less liability for illegal content than do websites, plus such filtering is much less technically feasible for broadband providers than for sites.

Ongoing censorship of online content that major websites deem unpalatable could stop if Apple, Facebook, Google and other major companies voluntarily adopt the same free-speech principles that the Supreme Court has enshrined in decisions, a group of religious broadcasters plans to say Thursday. “A continuation of this oppressive pattern” of blocking content often aligned with politically conservative causes or views, as shown by the National Religious Broadcasters in previous studies (CD Sept 13/12 p10), was found in NRB’s new report (http://bit.ly/15M7GXn). Based on news stories and other anecdotal evidence, it said, Apple, Facebook and Google are stifling speech.

A company that asked the FTC to find its parental verification technology falls under the agency’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act rule rebutted two privacy groups’ criticism. The reasons the Center for Digital Democracy and Electronic Privacy Information Center give for wanting the commission to reject the COPPA request “are based on invalid assumptions and faulty analysis,” wrote AssertID President Keith Dennis in a blog post on the company’s website Friday (http://bit.ly/14PEbq9). Using Facebook to verify that someone’s a parent, and therefore can give a kid under 13 permission to register with a website or mobile app, is based on “extensive academic research,” he wrote. “Our method also requires a parent to divulge less information than other approved” parental verification methods, Dennis wrote. CDD and EPIC make “some valid points,” and it’s correct that the company only lets parents verify their identity using a credit card for “premium” services, he said. The website or mobile app operator should be able to choose to bypass credit-card verification, which costs more than other sorts of identification checks, Dennis said. “The alternative is for AssertID to raise the pricing of our basic service offering thereby forcing all Operators to incur the costs of the alternate verification methods.” Dennis had no comment about criticism of AssertID’s plan by other COPPA participants (CD Sept 26 p20). CDD and EPIC will meet with FTC officials about the groups’ concerns, CDD Executive Director Jeff Chester told us. “We look forward to the FTC’s investigation, and addressing the objections” from the two groups, he said. “Companies can’t expect that they'll get a free pass to help children be targeted online.”

Two percent of the FCC’s staff and 21 percent of the FTC’s workforce could keep working during any government shutdown, according to updated contingency plans those agencies released Friday. That the FTC gets more of its funding from user fees and not congressional appropriations, even though both agencies are largely funded by such money, appears to be the reason that agency wouldn’t be hit as hard as the FCC, said several experts in interviews last week. As many as 38 of the FCC’s 1,754 employees could stay on the job, that agency said (http://bit.ly/15zE9A2), while 248 of the FTC’s 1,178 workers would be exempt from furloughs, it said (http://1.usa.gov/1946pki).