U.S. officials are continuing to plan for the upcoming World Telecommunication Development Conference, although the ITU hasn’t announced a new locale for the conference. The WTDC, held every four years, sets the agenda and guidelines for the ITU’s Development Sector for the following four years. The WTDC had been set for March 31-April 11 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, but the ITU decided to move the conference because of continuing political instability in the country, an industry observer told us.

BlackBerry will focus its North American cellular handset efforts on the enterprise market, abandoning the consumer business for the “foreseeable future” as it moves product design and manufacturing to Foxconn, CEO John Chen said Friday on an earnings call.

Stakeholders were split Thursday on whether industry or a third party, rather than the federal government, should retain phone metadata. That was one of the 46 surveillance review group recommendations released Wednesday. The five-member independent panel, convened by the White House in early fall, proposed a wide range of changes, including targeted phone searches, data held by companies or a third party rather than government and a public advocate for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (CD Dec 19 p4).

Time Warner Cable will pay a $1.9 million civil penalty as part of a settlement with the FTC for violating the FTC’s Risk Based Pricing Rule, the agency said in a news release Thursday (http://1.usa.gov/19VOsQS). The rule requires companies that give less favorable pricing terms to customers based on negative credit reports to notify customers when there’s something wrong with their credit history. “Getting this notice gives you a right to a free copy of your report, so you can make sure everything on it is correct,” said FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Jessica Rich in the release. “Some of Time Warner Cable’s customers were missing out on this important right.” TWC’s case is the first brought under the 2011 rule, said the FTC.

"The Kingsbury Commitment is not a model to be emulated,” FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai told a TechFreedom audience Thursday. The event focused on what a new Kingsbury commitment should look like, but Pai rejected the premise. The 1913 commitment -- in which AT&T agreed to divest its Western Union stock, stop buying up independent competitors, and allow interconnection on its long-distance network -- is best seen as “a cautionary tale about the dangers of regulatory capture and the folly of attempting to manage competition,” Pai said (http://bit.ly/1jmSZFw).

Verizon plans to publish an online report on the number of law enforcement requests for customer information the company received in 2013 in the U.S. and internationally, the carrier said Thursday. That report will come in early 2014 and will be updated twice a year, Verizon said in a blog post (http://vz.to/1fq4KFC). Some Internet companies, including Google and Facebook, publish similar reports, but Verizon is the first U.S. telco to say it will do so.

Data brokers can be more transparent. It’s the one theme consumer advocates, industry associations, lawmakers, federal agencies and data brokers have agreed on in studies, recommendations, hearings and interviews. The problem is in the details. FTC Commissioner Julie Brill suggests a self-regulatory initiative she calls “Reclaim Your Name.” Consumers should have the right -- and a user-friendly online portal -- to access data collected about them, she has said in speeches, op-eds and interviews.

The scope of the FTC’s proposed study of patent assertion entities is “far broader than necessary to serve the proper performance of the functions of the FTC,” said InterDigital in a filing to the FTC released Wednesday (http://1.usa.gov/1ho7tkd). The FTC voted in September to begin exploring a proposed PAE study, which it would launch using its authority under Section 6(b) of the FTC Act (CD Sept 30 p15). InterDigital said it doesn’t believe it’s a PAE as the FTC defined it in its study proposal, though many of the company’s critics have defined it as one. The FTC defined PAEs as “firms with a business model based primarily on purchasing patents and then attempting to generate revenue” by asserting their intellectual property rights “against persons who are already practicing the patented technologies.” Intellectual property groups and other companies often defined as PAEs also expressed significant concerns with the proposed study.

The FCC Media Bureau will approve the proposed Tribune/Local and Gannett/Belo broadcast deals this week, said agency officials in interviews Wednesday. The $2.73 billion Tribune/Local transaction will be approved without any additional conditions or divestitures, and the bureau won’t impose additional conditions on the $2.2 billion Gannett/Belo deal beyond the single station divestiture handed down by the Department of Justice earlier this week (CD Dec 17 p6), said the officials. Both deals will be approved on the bureau’s delegated authority, the officials said. Public interest groups had argued that because both deals involve sharing arrangements between stations, they should be handled by the full commission. Bureau staff found that the deals were “within the zone of existing precedent,” and so didn’t require a vote by the full commission, said an FCC official.

Wireless cramming problems may soon disappear from the telecom landscape since all four major national carriers have said they will end premium SMS billing programs for their subscribers, CTIA told the FCC in reply comments on an Aug. 27 public notice. In July, the FTC urged the FCC to impose anti-cramming rules on wireless carriers, arguing that voluntary industry efforts aren’t enough to protect consumers (CD July 24 p1).