FirstNet doesn’t have to cost states all the taxpayer dollars people fear, a telecom consultant argued. He said that’s despite an established belief that the $7 billion in federal money devoted to building the federal public safety broadband network is not sufficient and will hurt the project. Private equity can and should cover the brunt of what will be enormous costs, said Michael Myers, a consultant speaking on a state planning panel Friday afternoon. The FirstNet Oklahoma Panhandle Region Coordination Element (FORCE) has begun holding a series of talks since its formation earlier this year. Its Friday talk centered on how to bring utilities into the picture and emphasized Myers’ plan.

Stakeholders disagreed over how to move forward on mobile privacy at a Friday NTIA meeting, the sixth in the multistakeholder discussion process to develop industry standards for mobile privacy. The meeting included presentations on short form notice prototypes and discussion of two drafts of mobile privacy codes of conduct.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Friday he went to New York in the wake of Sandy to observe first hand the effects of the storm and the work of FCC staff there. Genachowski provided a brief update on the storm at the end of the FCC meeting, in which he said many questions remain.

Hurdles to updating the Telecom Act include an increase in partisanship in Congress since the 1996 legislation passed on a bipartisan basis, said industry officials aligned with minority broadcasters Friday. Those and other speakers at a Rainbow/Push Coalition telecom conference who represented a broader array of companies said a “do-no-harm” approach is needed, without statutory micromanagement of what the FCC and other agencies can do. The commission is likely to again recommend Congress reinstate tax certificates for communications assets sold to firms of a type that could include those owned by minorities when it releases a triennial report on eliminating market-entry barriers, said an agency staffer working on the document due to Congress Dec. 31.

The FCC Wireless Bureau said continued certification of 25 kHz equipment for use in the T-band is permissible, granting a request for clarity sought by the Telecommunications Industry Association. In May, TIA asked the FCC to clarify its order waiving the Jan. 1 deadline for private land mobile radio licensees in the 470-512 MHz band (T-band) to migrate to narrowband technology. TIA specifically asked the agency to clarify it’s waiving a ban on 25 kHz technologies in radios for use in the T-Band portion of the Part 90 VHF/UHF in certification applications filed on or after Jan. 1, 2011.

Commissioners are scheduled to see the latest draft of the FCC’s long-awaited special access order Friday morning, agency officials said. The three Democratic commissioners voted over a month ago to approve the order, which would provide guidance to the Wireline Bureau on what a data collection request on the special access market should say (CD Oct 26 p3). Republican Commissioners Robert McDowell and Ajit Pai have not voted on the order.

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. -- Entertainment content providers see apps as potentially powerful tools for disseminating content and interacting with consumers, executives said. Speakers at the Entertainment APPS Conference said figuring out how to best use the technology is still a work in progress. It depends on the device, said John Penney, Starz executive vice president-strategy. “The smaller the device, the harder it is to create an impression.”

The U.S. should formally seek to “dismantle” the ITU, said former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer Andrew McLaughlin Thursday. “Sometimes you need some destruction; you need to burn the forest in order to grow the new pine trees,” he said during a Future Tense forum on Internet governance. Future Tense is a program of the New America Foundation. “In the case of the ITU, I think it’s very much the case that its day is gone. The U.S. should formally commit itself to hastening” its demise. The ITU was set up to coordinate regulation of international telecommunications, but it has become outdated in the Internet age, McLaughlin said. “For an Internet way of doing policy coordination, you have to accept that there will be lots of conversations happening in lots of different places, and no one body is the place where this is all going to happen efficiently."

The FCC clarified that one-time, confirmatory, opt-out text messages don’t violate the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) or the FCC’s rules. The clarification came in a declaratory ruling issued Thursday by the full commission in response to a petition by SoundBite, a technology company.

The FCC had no jurisdiction to change intercarrier compensation rates to zero in its 2011 USF/intercarrier compensation order, and it violated the 10th Amendment by treating states as administrative agents of the federal government. That’s the main argument of the state members of the Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service, who submitted a 9,000-word amicus brief this week recounting what they called the FCC’s violation of dual-sovereignty; its “convoluted” and over-expansive interpretation of Section 251(b)(5) of the Telecom Act; and its reliance on “11th hour ex parte communications” without adequate notice, in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had asked for 810 words.