The National Public Safety Telecommunications Council said in a filing at the FCC posted Tuesday the costs of moving the public safety agencies with narrowband operations in spectrum that will be used for FirstNet’s wireless broadband network should be paid for by FirstNet. The NPSTC responded to a March 7 NPRM that asked broad questions about technical rules for the new public safety network.

Several major broadcasters sued online TV service Aereokiller in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, and requested a preliminary injunction barring the company from rebroadcasting Washington-area TV stations. The lawsuit is the latest in an ongoing battle between broadcasters and Aereokiller and competing service Aereo, which both use networks of tiny individual antennas to rebroadcast TV stations’ content. “A court in California has already enjoined Aereokiller from operating in nine western states, in the process recognizing that the commercial retransmission of our broadcasts without permission or compensation is a clear violation of the law and congressional intent,” said ABC, NBC, Fox and Allbritton Communications in a joint statement. “We believe that the DC court will uphold our copyright interests and further restrict Aereokiller’s operations.” Aereokiller did not comment.

The 600 MHz band plans proposed in a FCC Wireless Bureau public notice would promote competition among carriers and lead to more revenue for federal coffers than the plan endorsed by Commissioner Ajit Pai, NAB, AT&T and Verizon, representatives of several public interest groups said last week. Consumer Federation of America Research Director Mark Cooper and Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld told us the “down from 51” plan endorsed by Pai, and by NAB and the two carriers in a joint blog post Wednesday (CD May 22 p4), would require higher relocation costs and lead to a concentration of the best spectrum in the hands of a few large companies. That’s as compared to the plans outlined in the May 17 public notice, said Cooper and Feld.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) second workshop to develop the Cybersecurity Framework, set to begin Wednesday, will delve deeper into actually creating the framework, industry officials said. NIST and the Department of Homeland Security are working with industries considered to be components of the U.S.’s critical infrastructure to draft the voluntary framework as directed by President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity executive order (CD Feb 14 p1). Participants are expected to begin creating the initial set of standards, best practices and procedures that will be included in the draft version of the Framework that’s expected to go public in October (http://1.usa.gov/Z5zzJD).

While stakeholders are still working out some of the specifics, the work to create a Do Not Track (DNT) mechanism is moving forward, said Peter Swire, co-chairman of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Tracking Protection Group. The W3C group has a self-set deadline for a “Last Call” document outlining a DNT mechanism -- which will be open for public comment -- in July. The group agreed at its meeting earlier this month (CD May 6 p6) that there’s enough consensus to keep working toward the July deadline, Swire said on a Friday panel hosted by the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee.

A U.K. government request for input on a draft EU measure on network and information security sparked a warning Friday from a conservative think tank that failure by the information technology industry to respond could leave important Internet issues in the hands of the euroskeptic U.K. Independence Party (UKIP). The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) consultation document (http://bit.ly/Zi7eSG) seeks comment on a Feb. 7 European Commission legislative proposal (http://bit.ly/123IEH0) aimed at ensuring a “high common level of network and information security.” The directive would require EU countries to develop national cybersecurity strategies, establish computer emergency response teams, and share information with each other. It would mandate that public and private operators of critical infrastructures take steps to manage security risks and report incidents “that have a significant impact on the security of core services they provide” to national regulators.

Monday’s Supreme Court decision that the FCC is entitled to deference in interpreting ambiguous statutes about its jurisdiction (CD May 21 p1) bolsters the commission’s position in the net neutrality court battle, the FCC said in a letter filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Thursday. Attorneys and law professors we spoke to agree that the decision in the case, Arlington v. FCC, could help the commission -- but only if the court thinks the statutes in question are ambiguous in the first place. A Verizon spokesman said the company will file a response with the D.C. Circuit.

Old and new methods of distributing emergency alert system warnings need improvement, said a new GAO report. It recommended the FCC and Federal Emergency Management Agency work to get an Internet-based EAS message system rolled out by states. “Weaknesses” in the traditional broadcast-based method of distributing warnings from government agencies to radio listeners, TV viewers and multichannel video programming distributor customers persist after a GAO report found problems in 2009, said the study. It said the FCC and FEMA have taken limited steps to improve traditional EAS after a first-of-its-kind nationwide test of the system in 2011.

House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., said Thursday he believes Congress will pass a “clean” reauthorization of the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act (STELA), which is set to expire Dec. 31, 2014. “My hunch is that it ends up being a pretty clean act,” Walden said in an interview for C-SPAN’s The Communicators series scheduled to air this weekend. “I would prefer to do one thing at a time and not have all these other things hooked on,” he said. Walden said his subcommittee plans to hold a hearing on the video marketplace “fairly soon.” Industry sources recently told us the subcommittee was seeking to invite representatives from Time Warner Cable, DirecTV, NAB and Aereo to testify at a mid-June hearing (CD May 21 p13).

Satellite companies and in-flight broadband and entertainment providers urged the FCC to approve rules granting earth stations aboard aircraft (ESAA) primary status as an application of the fixed satellite service in the Ku band. ViaSat, Boeing, the Satellite Industry Association and other entities supported the NPRM in comments due this week. The status change would put ESAA on equal footing with the earth stations on vessels (ESV) and vehicle-mounted earth stations (VMES) allocations, they said. The commenters also highlighted the FCC’s acknowledgment that ESAA networks operated in the conventional Ku band with no reported interference to other users.