The recent Time Warner Cable-CBS retransmission consent dispute worried lawmakers as they questioned witnesses Tuesday. House Judiciary Intellectual Property Subcommittee members debated whether the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act should be tweaked to address such retrans disputes and other looming questions, as witnesses’ advance testimony showed Monday (CD Sept 10 p6). “There are reasonable zones of expansion, if you will,” in reauthorizing STELA, said Dish General Counsel Stanton Dodge in an interview. He pointed to what he called a “broken” retrans process. Portions of STELA expire at the end of 2014.

Apple is clearly trying to win back some of the market share it lost to Android smartphones in the past year through the iPhone 5c it introduced Tuesday, said NPD analyst Stephen Baker. The iPhone 5c will ship Sept. 20 in the U.S., Apple said, at the most affordable launch pricing to date among any of its smartphones. A 16-GB model will cost $99 and Apple also will field a 32-GB version at $199, it said. The company will ship the new model in the most colors of any iPhone, in blue, green, pink, yellow and white SKUs, it said.

Iowa stakeholders remained focused on Internet Protocol-based service regulation and lowering retail tariffs, they said at an Iowa Utilities Board workshop on reforming IUB regulatory procedures. The IUB received comments in July on how to reform the state’s telecom policy. Chairwoman Elizabeth Jacobs said the commission wants to draft two pieces of legislation: One cleaning up the language of the state’s regulatory code and the other dealing with issues that could be more difficult to resolve. “A lot of the statues are outdated and we need to get rid of the outdated statues to make progress,” said IUB board member Sheila Tipton.

Wireless technology and falling costs are making a technological transformation in schools not just possible but likely, officials said Tuesday at an education summit sponsored by the Annenberg Retreat, the Leading Education by Advancing Digital (LEAD) Commission and others. “We're at that inflection point where we no longer have to have big shrink-wrapped equipment shipped off to every school,” said FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. “We no longer have to tear down walls.” With wireless technology that’s decreasing in cost, “we can do this, at scale, nationwide,” she said.

Mobile payment services have the potential to become more widespread in a few years, but industry standards may be needed to assuage consumers’ concerns about data security and other issues, said Jamie Barnett, co-chair of Venable’s telecom law practice, at a Law Seminars International event Tuesday. Barnett previously was the FCC’s Public Safety Bureau chief. A recent Federal Reserve study found that 42 percent of surveyed consumers said concerns about data security were the main reason they didn’t use mobile payment services -- the top reason given in the survey, Barnett said. Other barriers to adoption include network security, consumer privacy, liability, dispute resolution and a lack of uniform standards, he said. There’s no single legal framework that deals with mobile payment services, though 19 federal agencies have some regulatory interest in the sector (CD Sept 10 p9).

NIST is reopening the public comment period on its latest standards publication, said Director Patrick Gallagher. He said that’s in light of recent revelations that the National Security Agency introduced vulnerabilities into NIST standards to advantage NSA eavesdropping (CD Sept 9 p8). Gallagher said NSA’s work appeared to attack NIST’s integrity, which he said was the “the most troubling” aspect of the revelations, speaking at an Amazon Web Services event Tuesday.

Establishing a mutual agreement between payer and payee is “much more cumbersome” without anything physical taking place, said FCC Chief Technology Officer Henning Schulzrinne. He said there are many challenges of both comfort level and technology in adopting mobile payments. Schulzrinne tied the burgeoning trend to several FCC proceedings and working groups, speaking Monday at a Law Seminars International mobile payments seminar.

The FCC faced tough questioning Monday as judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit asked if the open Internet order afforded ISPs enough flexibility to escape being treated as common carriers. Judge David Tatel suggested FCC General Counsel Sean Lev had conflated the agency’s own theories, and not defending the rules as they are actually written. By the end of the two-hour oral argument in Verizon v. FCC, two of the three judges said they couldn’t see how the antidiscrimination provision of the net neutrality rules was anything other than an impermissible common carriage restriction.

High-speed broadband networks can work through retail and open access methods when communities decide they want to control their own digital futures, said community broadband network leaders during a NATOA webinar Monday. Communities need to look at all of the costs of building a broadband network, with costs of $5,000 to $20,000 per institution to interconnect buildings, performance guarantees and redundancy costs adding up, said Thomas Asp, Concurrent Technologies technology and energy principal analyst.

A draft FCC rulemaking notice proposing eliminating the UHF discount is being changed and may contain a softer stance on grandfathering pending transactions, said FCC officials in interviews. Earlier, when the NPRM was on circulation but before it was placed on the Sept. 26 meeting’s tentative agenda last week, it proposed letting existing ownership groups in under the old rule but applying a new nationwide ownership limit calculation to any deals pending between the rulemaking’s issuance and when an order is adopted (CD Aug 6 p1). Tribune’s deal to buy Local TV is pending, and would give the new company an ownership cap number of 42.7 percent without the UHF discount (CD Aug 14 p1). The FCC caps ownership at 39 percent of viewers nationwide.