The European Commission is preparing human rights guidelines for the information and communication technologies sector, said Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes Monday in a lecture at Humboldt University in Berlin. Part of the EU plan to secure human rights online and offline includes allowing nongovernmental organizations to trial censorship-evading tools on Europe’s large-scale Internet testbed and mesh networks, she said. But sometimes those tools are used by repressive regimes instead of by activists, she said. Making human rights part of a telco’s corporate responsibility is common sense, Kroes said. An EU company supplying surveillance systems to a despotic government “is more than just an image problem, it is a major ethical problem,” Kroes said. The EC is working on human rights guidance for the ICT industry, she said.

Congress should be increasing the opportunity for Americans to pursue the American dream through technology-focused legislation, said Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., during Tuesday’s State of the Net conference hosted by the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus. Entrepreneurship is the best way to grow the American economy, and Congress should make sure it kills any policies that harm those entrepreneurs, Moran said. Despite the success of last year’s protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act, “the threat is not yet over” to an open, pro-innovation Internet, he said.

AT&T and CLECs traded barbs at the FCC over the precise definition of “end-office switching,” and whether that’s what CLECs and their VoIP partners are doing when they route calls between the public switched telephone network and over-the-top VoIP providers. Level 3 and Bandwidth.com have argued they're entitled to assess end-office switching charges. But AT&T said in an ex parte filing Thursday that courts, the industry and the commission have long established that the defining characteristic of an end-office switch is the physical connection of subscriber lines and trunks. A Level 3 executive told us there is a “significant” amount of money at stake.

Every state should have at least one community that provides gigabit broadband speeds by 2015, said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski at the U.S. Conference of Mayors winter meeting. The FCC cited a Fiber-to-the-Home Council report that 42 communities in 14 states have access to “ultra-high-speed” fiber Internet providers that reach a gigabit. The chairman echoed his call to the mayors in an op-ed for Forbes (http://xrl.us/bobdpu) published the same morning. To complete the challenge, 36 states would need to acquire a gigabit community within the next three years.

Searching the FCC’s Universal Licensing System (ULS) to mine carrier data is too cumbersome and takes too long, Public Knowledge said in a filing. Other industry officials told us Friday they have shared PK’s pain trying to use the ULS.

Industry and FCC attorneys are still figuring out how a D.C. Circuit ruling last week that overturned a commission order on cable set-top boxes will affect industry and policy, industry attorneys said. In granting Dish Network’s challenge (CD Jan 17 p12), a panel of three judges threw out the FCC’s 2003 plug-and-play order, saying the commission lacked ancillary authority to require certain encoding practices by satellite TV providers. The 2003 order laid out several technical CableCARD rules and encoding requirements, and was one of a series of three CableCARD orders the commission has adopted since 1998. The other two were untouched by the court. Lawyers we spoke to had a variety of views about how the decision fits with other judicial tests of FCC authority and how it affects industry obligations under FCC’s remaining CableCARD rules.

Friday marked the one-year anniversary of the Internet-based protest that stopped two anti-piracy bills -- the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate -- and members of the Internet advocacy community used the occasion to celebrate the victory and remind Internet users of looming policy issues.

The U.S. will need to make global engagement a priority as it makes its case for its vision on Internet and telecom governance issues following last month’s World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), said Terry Kramer, head of the U.S.’s WCIT delegation, during a news conference Thursday. Kramer has been in Washington, holding a series of final briefings with government officials and members of the telecom industry on the outcome of WCIT and the revised International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) produced at the conference in Dubai, which ended Dec. 14. Those briefings are Kramer’s last acts as head of the delegation; he said his appointment to the position ends Friday.

Spectrum availability and ensuring that a regulatory framework supports use of broadband will continue to take top priority at the FCC, said commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Ajit Pai Thursday at the Minority Media & Telecom Council conference. They said FCC action from last year helped advance the goal of fostering broadband availability. In 2012, the commission took up universal service reform, Clyburn said, and everyone recognized that the communications ecosystem continues to change at exponential speed and that “we needed a framework that had the capacity to keep up with the times,” she said. Clyburn said she’s proudest of having moved that along on a bipartisan basis.

Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee members are having difficulty wrapping up reports on spectrum sharing, as they continue to encounter difficulty getting the data they need from the Department of Defense and other parts of the federal government, they said. Meanwhile, NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling said the CSMAC will be reauthorized by the administration for another two years and current members will be asked to stick around for at least another year.