A proposal to allow the U.K. Home Secretary to order the storage of any kind of communications data “is too sweeping, and goes further than it need or should,” the Joint Committee on the Draft Communications Data Bill said in a report published Tuesday. While there’s a case for giving law enforcement authorities some further access to communications data, the current version must be “significantly amended” to deliver only necessary data, Lords and Commons members said. Their scathing report (http://xrl.us/bn5u5q) brought cheers from ISPs and privacy advocates.

A new FCC task force will provide recommendations on ways to modernize and coordinate the commission’s policies on Internet Protocol interconnection, the resiliency of modern communications networks, business broadband competition and consumer protection on voice services, officials said. Recommendations for the proper focus of the Technology Transitions Policy Task Force were divided. Large telcos and anti-regulation think tanks encouraged deregulation; CLECs, special access purchasers and smaller providers encouraged adoption of IP interconnection policies. All told us their recommended policies would maximize consumer welfare, competition and innovation.

The American Legislative Exchange Council wants to keep states away from VoIP and cautions against municipally owned telecom networks. It’s eyeing a strong mix of state priorities for 2013, its telecom leaders told us, some controversial and attracting dissent. The 40-year-old organization of conservative state legislators unites industry -- including major telcos -- and public officials for discussion and to craft model legislation that states sometimes adopt. ALEC members include AT&T, CenturyLink, CTIA, Charter, NCTA, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, Time Warner and Verizon, with member fees funding much of the organization. ALEC held its 2012 States & Nation Policy Summit Nov. 28-30 in Washington and unveiled 25 pieces of model state legislation in a report Monday (http://xrl.us/bn5pjb).

The FCC’s Technological Advisory Council will recommend creation of a multistakeholder group to oversee voluntary receiver standards and interference limits, Dennis Roberson, chairman of a TAC working group said Monday. Some of the TAC’s recommendations have led to action by the FCC, including Monday’s launch of a Technology Transitions Policy Task Force. (See related story in this issue). FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski spent about an hour at the TAC meeting to get an update on the group’s ongoing work. The working group is preparing a 60-page white paper set to be released early next year. “We believe we need to get under way and begin to test out this idea,” Roberson said.

An FTC survey of children’s apps “paint[s] a disappointing picture of the privacy protections provided by apps for children” (http://xrl.us/bn5qda). The survey, a followup to a report on the same topic from February (http://xrl.us/bn5qdc), said mobile apps don’t give parents information about what information the apps will collect from children or who that information will be shared with. The “study shows that kids’ apps siphon an alarming amount of information from mobile devices without disclosing this fact to parents,” FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said in a statement.

DUBAI -- After a full week of negotiations at the World Conference on International Telecommunication with little progress, “delegations are frustrated,” conference Chairman Mohamed Nasser Al Ghanim told us Monday. “This is the night,” one delegate said after Al Ghanim announced a late Monday night session.

It’s time for government agencies to “think very seriously” about patent assertion entities’ (PAEs) activities and how they impact society, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said Monday during a joint FTC/Department of Justice workshop. The agencies held the workshop as part of an ongoing effort to determine the effect of PAEs and determine whether the government needs to employ new methods to minimize what they see as harm caused by PAEs. High-quality intellectual property rights are crucial to U.S. innovation, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) chief economist said. PAE-generated lawsuits are eating up a growing chunk of some technology companies’ legal budgets, several high-tech executives said, as a PAE executive said the model helps some patent developers get paid.

A United Arab Emirates-led proposal for a “new” version of the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) threw a further wrench into talks Friday at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai, even as debate over existing proposals had led to little progress. The UAE said during a plenary meeting that its proposal was borne out of its own frustrations over the lack of progress at the conference toward revising the existing ITRs, which have not been revised since 1988. WCIT began Dec. 3 and runs through this Friday. Discussions during the conference have thus far remained stuck on whether to change the scope of the treaty-level document from applying only to “recognized” operating agencies to applying to all operating agencies. The U.S. opposes any change in scope because it would make the ITRs apply to Internet providers, which would in turn allow the ITRs to stray into Internet governance issues (CD Dec 7 p18).

The federal government suspended construction by one of its largest stimulus grant recipients last week. It ordered the $100.6 million EAGLE-Net Alliance to cease construction immediately, in a letter dated Thursday. The infrastructure grant is part of the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) and is the fifth-largest grant out of more than 200 total awarded in 2010. EAGLE-Net spent $74.3 million as of 2012’s third quarter, with $64.4 million of those funds coming from the federal government, its latest report shows (http://xrl.us/bn5b5h).

The “billion dollar question” facing the pay-TV industry is figuring out how to handle rising content rights fees without pricing services too high for customers, NCTA CEO Michael Powell said on an episode of C-SPAN’s The Communicators that was set to air Saturday. “The operator has very little choice to either absorb [the costs], which they have been doing to some degree, or pass them on to consumers who are still recovering from a recession,” Powell said when asked about rising sports rights fees.