The FCC likely would again be hit hard in any government shutdown, though it’s escaped some of the continuing impact of the budget sequester, said agency and industry officials in interviews this week and last. They said that as a fee-funded agency with a large amount of its $300 million-plus annual budget spent on labor, the commission continues to avoid furloughs. That’s unlike some other parts of the government, where employees have been forced to take days off during the ongoing sequester.

The FTC should reject a company’s request for what would be the agency’s first approval under a new Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act rule, which became effective this summer (CD July 1 p1), for a way to verify that kids under 13 received parental permission to register for websites, said two privacy advocacy groups. The Center for Digital Democracy and Electronic Privacy Information Center opposed the June 28 COPPA request (http://1.usa.gov/19y5qE2) by AssertID, that the agency find its verifiable parental consent method is acceptable, on privacy and other grounds. CDD and EPIC said the company would make some parents achieve a so-called trust score before viewing disclosure and privacy policies of the websites the child wants to access.

Small cable operators continue to remain open to disruptive technologies, Aereo included, said the head of their association and a member. The streaming-video service that faces lawsuits from broadcasters over carrying their signals without paying for them holds both promise and potential threat to operators, said President Matt Polka of the American Cable Association. ACA members may have initially seen Aereo as a potential threat, “and maybe [it] still is, to some degree,” he said in a videotaped interview scheduled to be shown over the weekend on C-SPAN. As retransmission consent prices increase annually, “our members look at a company like Aereo as a company that is breaking the mold, which is really trying to provide a new technology for consumers” at “competitive prices,” Polka added.

Acting FCC Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn wants media companies to “accept shared responsibility for putting their audience’s interests above other interests,” she said Monday evening as a weeks-long retransmission consent blackout between CBS and Time Warner Cable was ending. Media companies should “do all they can to avoid these kinds of disputes in the future,” Clyburn said in a written statement less than an hour after CBS and Time Warner Cable each said they reached a new deal. Programming will be restored to subscribers of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks within 24 hours, said TWC in a news release, while CBS said programming was resuming at 6 p.m. EST, about an hour after the deal was disclosed.

Telecom and other companies should retrain workers whose jobs are affected by technological change, much as AT&T has done for nearly 30 years, said the president emeritus of a telecom industry union. The job training alliance begun in 1986 between the telco and the Communications Workers of America has been fruitful in paying for employees to get extra education at both the secondary and university level, and benefitted companies too with increased staff loyalty, said Morton Bahr. In answering our question at a speech at a Washington temple and a follow-up interview, Bahr also said he supports changing the E-rate program to provide faster broadband to schools as a good use of USF money.

Any perceived conflicts of interest between The Washington Post’s news coverage and financial interests of Jeff Bezos, Amazon and his other investments can most readily be remedied by the soon-to-be-new-owner himself, said journalism experts we surveyed Tuesday. The day before, the Washington Post Co. agreed to sell the newspaper and some related operations to Bezos for $250 million (http://bit.ly/1985mR0). Former print and TV journalists said they're taking him at his word he'll mainly leave the operation of the newsroom to current editorial executives. That’s the best way to ensure that the views on Bezos and Amazon, of which he is CEO, on immigration legislation, intellectual property, online sales taxes and other high-technology policies don’t influence the paper’s reporting.

"The CBS network has upped the ante with a consumer scare campaign” about the potential retransmission consent blackout with Time Warner Cable, said two groups. Consumer Action and the League of United Latin American Citizens cited on-screen crawls on CBS stations about the blackout, which may start as soon as Thursday morning (CD July 24 p21). “CBS is putting consumers in the middle of a fight they shouldn’t have to worry about,” said the two groups in a news release Wednesday. “While the current dispute affects only Time Warner Cable customers, the situation is likely to spread to other pay TV providers as retrans consent agreements expire and the scrapping begins all over again.” A CBS spokeswoman had no response to the groups’ statement. Citing the American Television Alliance of Time Warner Cable and other multichannel video programming distributors and some public interest groups seeking to change retrans rules, Consumer Action and LULAC said retrans fees are projected to more than double to more than $6 billion by 2018 from recent levels. Time Warner Cable was “among a number of companies that supported” Consumer Action’s 41st anniversary event in October, and the company may have backed the previous anniversary event as well, said Linda Sherry, director-national priorities for the group. Other “benefactors” for October’s event included AT&T and DirecTV, which like Time Warner Cable are members of the American Television Alliance. Google and Microsoft were among other sponsors of the event, according to its website, which Sherry referred us to (http://bit.ly/15gkNl8). She said the benefactor level is $5,000, in an email responding to our questions. Time Warner Cable is one among many MVPDs and broadcasters that contribute to LULAC, said Executive Director Brent Wilkes. “We publicly get support from all sides in this debate” on retrans, he said in response to our questions about financial ties between the group and companies affected by retrans. “We've had both sides present to us on the issue,” and LULAC isn’t “trying to pick a side on who should pay what” and doesn’t want blackouts, said Wilkes. “We represent the Latino consumer. And from the Latino consumer perspective, we believe they should have uninterrupted service they believe they're paying for when they subscribe” to an MVPD service, said Wilkes. He said Comcast, which owns both broadcast and cable properties, and ABC, Telemundo and Univision are among other contributors to LULAC.

The proposed design of research into the critical information needs (CIN) raised concerns among all three commenters on the CIN work on new and old media alike. A dozen nonprofits including the umbrella organization Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, NAB and five communications academics from Howard University raised different issues with the research design. Comments on a May public notice from the FCC Office of Communications Business Opportunities were posted Tuesday and Wednesday in docket 12-30 (http://bit.ly/14IvBuD). The possible barriers-to-entry studies OCBO asked about, which would cost about $1 million (CD May 29 p2), could be used for making decisions about media ownership rules and some said would be required under the Adarand Supreme Court precedent if the commission ever targets relief to women, minority and/or other groups.

Legislators and regulators are sticking mostly to the sidelines so far in a brewing dispute over how much CBS is paid for carriage of 14 stations by two cable operators, said agency and industry officials in interviews Friday. They said commission officials are starting to pay more attention to the possibility of a blackout of the CBS-owned stations affiliated with its namesake network and the CW, plus two cable channels. Interest on Capitol Hill was largely dormant, though that will change quickly if CBS can’t agree with Time Warner Cable on a new deal that would also cover Bright House Networks, said FCC and industry officials.

Areas of general agreement among industry and state officials on cybersecurity included that the Department of Homeland Security should continue to emphasize cooperation between various companies and agencies in updating its framework, and a risk-based approach should be used, said some filings posted Tuesday. In addition to the Telecommunications Industry Association, which urged such cooperation (CD July 9 p12), the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) and National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO) sought coordination among various stakeholders. Under President Barack Obama’s February directive on cybersecurity, which accompanied his executive order, DHS has until later this year to update the 2009 National Infrastructure Protection Plan, the department said in a June request for comment (http://1.usa.gov/13JMGUz).