The FTC won’t commit to giving a safe harbor to mobile-device apps that sign a privacy code of conduct, agency officials said Tuesday. Staffers attended the meeting of NTIA mobile privacy stakeholders to repeat their concerns (CD April 30 p6) about the short-form notice code of conduct being drafted (http://1.usa.gov/18aWeIh) and clarify that the FTC won’t grant safe-harbor status to apps that sign on to the code. During the meeting, stakeholders debated changes made to the code made in response to stakeholder input and FTC concerns brought up at the last meeting.

The federal government ended its partial suspension of the $100.6-million broadband stimulus grant to the EAGLE-Net Alliance, said Anthony Wilhelm, head of NTIA’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program. NTIA suspended the Colorado infrastructure grantee in December due to problems with its environmental review process (CD Dec 10 p6). EAGLE-Net, focused on connecting Colorado schools with advanced bandwidth, was scheduled to have its grant sunset this fall. The project was subject to a heated U.S. House oversight hearing in February.

President Barack Obama plans to nominate Tom Wheeler on Wednesday to become chairman of the FCC, a White House official confirmed Tuesday. Commissioner Mignon Clyburn will serve as interim chair until Wheeler is confirmed, the official said. Wheeler’s past leadership of CTIA and NCTA have drawn the scrutiny of public interest groups, which wrote Obama in March that Wheeler’s lobbying background could potentially disqualify him as a candidate. But a public-interest official told us Tuesday that Wheeler is unlikely to face much opposition from the Senate. The White House official would not say who will replace outgoing Republican FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell.

The long-term effect of FirstNet board member Sheriff Paul Fitzgerald’s attack last week on how the group is doing business still remains to be seen, said current and former government officials and public safety officials in interviews this week. Fitzgerald’s comments caught many by surprise and were downplayed by other members of the board representing public safety (CD April 24 p1). But the National Sheriffs’ Association issued a statement fully supporting Fitzgerald, the sheriff of Story County, Iowa.

The FCC required all Web browsers on mobile phones be made accessible for the visually impaired by Oct. 8, said an order Monday on implementing the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act. On circulation is an NPRM on implementing CVAA rules on accessibility requirements for video user interfaces and programming guides, said agency and public-interest officials. An order last month implemented CVAA rules on emergency video description (CD April 10 p6). While some groups representing disabled consumers have said they found the orders and the coming NPRM vague, they also praised the FCC for issuing them. “We've been generally very pleased with the FCC’s efforts to complete these rulemakings in a timely fashion,” said American Council for the Blind Governmental Affairs Director Eric Bridges.

The FCC has approved the transfer of control of Securus’s operating subsidiaries from one holding company to another, but not before Securus agreed to stop blocking inmate-initiated calls placed via “ConsCallHome.” In so doing, the FCC rejected a petition to deny filed by several public interest groups. VoIP provider Millicorp, which runs ConsCallHome, had supported that challenge, arguing Securus was illegally blocking calls to competitive VoIP providers in violation of Sections 201(b) and 202 of the Communications Act, and the FCC’s policy prohibiting call blocking. Millicorp withdrew its opposition after Securus agreed Friday to stop the call blocking.

FCC officials say they're seeing little lobbying on an rulemaking notice set for a vote at the May 9 commission meeting on improving access to broadband on commercial flights. The NPRM would establish an Air-Ground Mobile Broadband service as a secondary-use in the 14.0-14.5 GHz Band. With the NPRM set to go on the Sunshine Agenda late Thursday, cutting off further debate, there have been only two ex parte filings in the last 30 days in the main docket, RM-11640. Qualcomm had meetings at the FCC late last week, but has yet to make ex parte filings, agency officials said. The Satellite Industry Association has set up meetings with some of the offices for later this week.

Mobile privacy stakeholders drafting a voluntary code of conduct on how mobile apps use short-form notices to tell users about data collection and use are working to address potential FTC concerns, Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum and one of the draft’s authors, told us ahead of Tuesday’s stakeholder meeting. At the previous meeting of the process, being facilitated by NTIA, Chris Olsen, assistant director of the FTC’s Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, laid out potential concerns the agency might have with the draft code, including how the code requires apps to gain consent from users when making material retroactive changes and the extent to which the code deals with app platforms (CD April 5 p7).

U.S. radio stations face challenges improving their perception amid declines in on-air ads now versus before the Great Recession, and online and other initiatives with potential not fully realized, said some industry insiders we surveyed. They said an ongoing FCC auction of commercial FM-station construction permits points up the economic hardships of running stations in small markets, where many of the CPs are. Increasing competition in markets of all sizes from streaming media and online ad rates lower than stations charge per over-the-air listener are challenges, said executives and analysts. Some were optimistic that, between terrestrial and digital spots, ads will return to pre-recession levels. Others said that won’t happen.

The privacy and civil liberties protections being included in the White House’s Cybersecurity Framework are still in the early stages of development, but policy experts at leading privacy groups tell us they do not believe the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is likely to be a factor. Privacy groups criticized CISPA when the House passed it earlier this month because of what they saw as insufficient privacy protections (CD April 19 p6) . But those groups also see the Senate as unlikely to take up the bill, scuttling its chances of affecting the framework. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Tuesday that he views CISPA as a “sort of useless bill” that “can’t guide us at all” (CD April 24 p12) . The committee did not respond to a request for further comment. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are collaborating to lead development of the Cybersecurity Framework, a set of standards and best practices, in response to President Barack Obama’s February cybersecurity order (CD Feb 14 p1) .