During Tuesday’s meeting mobile privacy stakeholders are scheduled to hear three proposals from a recently formed working group (CD May 24 p7) regarding the format of short form privacy policies that must be presented to users by apps that sign on to the voluntary code, said members of the working group. In an email to stakeholders sent prior to Tuesday’s meeting, NTIA Director-Privacy Initiatives John Verdi said he had scheduled another meeting for the group on July 9.
Reform of the nation’s electronic privacy laws will move forward this Congress while lawmakers wrestle with recent reports of broad government surveillance of Americans’ telephone and computer activity, said senior aides to the House and Senate Judiciary committees, during a Monday panel at the NCTA Cable Show. Last week the Guardian newspaper published an order by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that gave the National Security Agency authority to collect phone data from millions of Verizon subscribers (CD June 7 p1). Aides to lawmakers on the House and Senate Commerce committees on a separate panel also said the FCC’s management of the spectrum incentive auctions will continue to be a major focus for their committees.
The FCC needs to work more with the states, recommended the NARUC Telecom Task Force in a preliminary document. It also clarified that “states” refers not only to public utility commissions but also as shorthand for governors, legislatures and state agencies in general. The task force released its latest draft paper (http://bit.ly/164BVdG) Monday, opening it for comments through June 20. It outlined the principles that state commissioners may codify as well as issued tentative recommendations. The Internet Protocol transition is under way and states’ regulatory roles are changing, often for the lesser, but state input remains vital for many reasons, the group said.
A declaratory order saying information stored on mobile phones is subject to the FCC’s rules for protecting customer proprietary network information (CPNI) could be the first major item under acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn that proves controversial enough to split the three-member commission. Commissioner Ajit Pai has reservations about the order, as circulated originally by former Chairman Julius Genachowski May 17, and is looking for changes, industry and FCC officials said. While it’s too early in negotiations to know whether Pai will dissent, a no vote is possible, officials said.
Giving consumers mobile access to cable content is a necessary reality, despite the difficulty of monetizing such TV Everywhere, executives from Comcast, Fox Networks, Turner Broadcasting and Univision told an NCTA conference. Though TV Everywhere presents difficulties for authentication and mobilization across a multitude of platforms, moving forward with the technology is the only option, they said.
Big data helps cable providers give the most comprehensive service to their customers, engineers said at an NCTA panel and in followup interviews Monday. They said through adaptive delivery technologies and cloud computing, engineers are able to meet their clients’ needs most effectively. While the companies have the technology to accrue massive amounts of data, they need to find ways to review it that will be most useful to companies and consumers, said engineers from Cisco, Comcast, CableLabs, Cablevision and Guavus.
Several technology companies see themselves as complements to cable, not competitors, their executives said at NCTA’s annual show Monday. Jawbone, Roku, Twitter and Vox Media executives said their products can expand TV viewing, and some have deals with operators. Charter Communications CEO Tom Rutledge was among panelists who said the cable industry needs to innovate more quickly, while a Twitter executive reaffirmed the company’s commitment to users as some websites have reportedly worked with the National Security Agency on the Prism surveillance program (CD June 10 p5) .
U.S. cable operators, which spent $200 billion since the mid-1990s on infrastructure, have boosted speeds by 1,500 percent in a decade and want to make further improvements, NCTA CEO Michael Powell told the opening of his group’s annual show. “The cable industry has always believed in an open Internet, and we will continue to embrace it,” he said, “competing aggressively but always fairly” with spending that came amid “a light government touch.” The “adoption gap” of the quarter of Americans with access to broadband that don’t subscribe is something “we want to help fix,” he said Monday at Washington’s convention center. Powell cited (http://bit.ly/19i4JmJ) Comcast’s Internet Essentials and other operators’ Connect2Compete (C2C) programs selling inexpensive service to poor families with kids.
As some large retail ISPs move to carrier-grade network address translation (CGN) -- a ramped-up version of the network address translation (NAT) that has been in use for some time to cope with exhaustion of IPv4 addresses -- there are growing concerns about its impact on investigation of online and offline crimes and on traffic data storage requirements, said representatives from the law enforcement, cybersecurity, ISP and other sectors.
Roughly three years after LG, Samsung and Sony introduced their first 3D TVs into the U.S. market with great fanfare and a blitz of national advertising, sale of 3D TVs as a business has experienced little year-to-year growth and may well be regressing, said DisplaySearch. It estimated TV makers shipped 3.93 million LCD TVs with the 3D feature in North America last year.