The FCC asked if it should stick to what has become an indecency policy of sorts of not fining broadcasters for airing single instances of cursewords or nudity and instead pursuing only what it deems to be more significant cases. A public notice Monday asked whether it should stick with its recent policy of restrained enforcement or instead return to an earlier policy of censuring radio and TV stations for fleeting indecency. The agency has taken the restrained approach under outgoing Chairman Julius Genachowski. FCC officials had said that tack was buttressed by June’s Supreme Court ruling dismissing fines against affiliates of Disney’s ABC for airing in 2003 seven seconds of nudity on NYPD Blue and censuring News Corp.’s Fox for unscripted cursing by Cher and other celebrities on the 2002 and 2003 Billboard Music Awards (CD June 22 p1).

Requirements for video descriptions from emergency on-screen crawls haven’t changed much from what was in an FCC draft that has been circulating for a month (CD March 11 p3), said agency and industry officials. They said in interviews Thursday that the draft Media Bureau order and further NPRM hasn’t been controversial among the agency’s members, and a public-interest official said it may be approved largely intact. He said he hopes the further notice on Internet Protocol programming sent by MVPDs to connected devices in a pay-TV household gets a section added on accessibility of emergency crawls to those with both sight and hearing impairments.

There may be room for compromise on how much spectrum is available for unlicensed use after the FCC auction of frequencies of TV stations that participate in exchange for a slice of the proceeds, said NAB’s auction pointman. Further fleshing out his stance against the voluntary incentive auction occurring next year (CD Jan 28 p1), NAB Executive Vice President-Strategic Planning Rick Kaplan told executives and regulatory staffers that he thinks there’s a “sweet spot” for how much is licensed versus unlicensed. The commission shouldn’t make guard bands or the gap between carriers’ licensed frequencies used for uplink versus downlink operations “one megahertz larger than they need to be for interference purposes,” Kaplan said at a Media Institute lunch. Some high-technology companies want larger guard bands than do carriers, and the issue of how big they're to be may be controversial when the FCC prepares to adopt an order on auction rules (CD Jan 29 p1).

WealthTV lost a challenge to the FCC’s denial of the independent network’s program carriage complaint against four cable operators, exactly a week after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral argument on the case. Thursday’s five-page decision from the three-judge panel said even if it had found some of the arguments correct that the agency erred on technical matters, they wouldn’t have changed the outcome. Judge Paul Watford asked mostly skeptical questions of the channel during oral argument, while Leslie Kobayashi’s one question also was skeptical and the third jurist, Richard Paez, asked no questions (CD March 11 p4).

With the U.S. “barreling toward” all-Internet Protocol networks, Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., said he worries that infrastructure isn’t up to the IP challenge. Networks may be insufficient to accommodate huge increases in video-content streaming and other changes, he said at an American Cable Association conference. That the FCC hasn’t closed its docket to apply Title II common-carrier telecom rules to broadband means “a proposed rulemaking is hanging over your heads,” which “alone slows down progress,” Heller told executives of small- and mid-size cable operators in Washington Wednesday.

Some newer video products would need to be capable of passing on to users video descriptions from TV stations and multichannel video programming distributors’ emergency on-screen crawls within two years of a draft FCC order taking effect, agency officials said. They said the draft Media Bureau order would require mobile DTV products and DVR and Blu-ray players to be able to pass on audio narratives of warnings originally rendered on the screens of TV station and MVPD programming viewers. The TV licensees would be responsible for converting what’s in the crawls into secondary audio programming channels, and the SAP content would need to be available to users of the consumer electronics, agency officials said. CEA, NAB and members have sought exclusions or more time for mobile DTV equipment (CD Feb 14 p18).

Two of three judges asked skeptical questions of WealthTV’s lawyer, in the independent programmer’s attempt (CD March 13 p5) to get the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn an FCC denial of the indie’s program carriage complaint against four cable operators. At the oral argument Thursday in Pasadena, Calif., Judge Paul Watford asked almost all the questions of attorneys for WealthTV, the commission and the four operators. He also homed in on the FCC’s lawyer over whether there was a violation when the FCC administrative law judge, whose recommendation against the indie’s case was upheld by the full commission in 2011, didn’t consider some testimony as evidence.

The Department of Energy took what it called “a step in this process” toward regulating how much energy set-top boxes can use, with Thursday’s release of data tables estimating the impact on such rules. Based partly on the government regulatory impact model, DOE issued tables that “assess the economic impact of potential standards on set-top box manufacturers and multichannel video programming distributors.” After negotiations between nonprofits that seek lower energy use and representatives of MVPDs and makers of consumer electronics ended in the fall, “DOE has since moved forward with the regulatory process,” a notice in Thursday’s Federal Register said. It pointed to January’s notice of proposed rulemaking, or NOPR in DOE nomenclature (CD Jan 23 p14), on standards to test the power consumption of set-tops.

Cybersecurity measures are needed from government agencies originating emergency alert system messages in a newer Web format, and from all participants in the EAS system, after last month’s unauthorized access sparked fake warnings, a Federal Emergency Management Agency official said. Manny Centeno from FEMA’s integrated public alert and warning system office showed participants in the agency’s webinar on IPAWS and that new format, Common Alerting Protocol, the FCC’s Feb. 13 “urgent advisory” to EAS participants. That warning on CAP was issued privately by commission staffers to associations that distributed them to EAS participants -- which include all radio and TV stations and multichannel video programming distributors (CD Feb 14 p8) . State and other officials involved in CAP recommended counterparts in other states start testing that format, and said shorter wireless emergency alerts on mobile devices won’t supplant EAS but complement it.

The Internal Revenue Service should change the outdated way it considers whether media get tax-exempt status, a group of journalists, foundations and news websites said in a report that was partly backed by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. Rules dating from the 1970s that require organizations seeking 501(c)(3) status to primarily engage in education have led to months- and sometimes years-long delays in websites obtaining such status, said the study. Written under the auspices of the Council on Foundations and led by Steve Waldman, who wrote the commission’s study on the future of media when he was an aide to Genachowski, Monday’s report said some news websites have folded while their applications were pending. “Unnecessary obstacles seem to be getting placed in the way of nonprofit news outlets attempting to educate their communities,” Genachowski said.