NTIA opened a public comment period on the commercial and private use of unmanned aircraft (see 1503040035) said a Federal Register notice Thursday. President Barack Obama directed NTIA to develop best practices for unmanned aircraft privacy issues in a Feb. 15 memorandum on the same subject, it said. Comments are due April 20, the notice said.

TV manufacturers intend to make caption display settings accessible “through several methods including a button on the remote or access through the first level of a menu,” CEA said in an ex parte letter in docket 12-108 reporting the results of an informal poll it did of TV manufacturers on the interface used for accessibility features such as closed captions. No TV manufacturers that responded plan to provide access to closed captions and video description via only voice or gesture control, CEA said. Manufacturers are instead using buttons and icons to provide access to those features, and some are incorporating voice or gesture commands as “additional access mechanisms,” CEA said.

The FCC seeks comments on EchoStar’s petition for a waiver of over-the-air analog tuner requirements, the Media Bureau said in a public notice Thursday in docket number 15-47. EchoStar wants the waiver to market “a new model of SlingLoaded HD, Internet-enabled, digital video recorder” that doesn’t include analog tuners, said its waiver petition filed Thursday. The bureau and the Office of Engineering and Technology previously said the "all channels" provision meant any TV receiver that includes over-the-air digital tuners must include over-the-air analog tuners, EchoStar said. Comments are due March 12, replies March 19.

The FCC's open Internet order won't be sufficient for safeguarding the Internet if the Comcast/Time Warner Cable deal is approved, said a campaign opposing the merger headed by Comptel, NTCA and The Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance. "The merger would give Comcast far too much control over our nation's video and broadband markets and more power and incentive to harm competition and choice in a range of ways that are not restricted by the Open Internet rules,” said the campaign called Don't Comcast the Internet, in a statement Thursday. That includes limiting competitor access to programming, limiting set-top box innovation, and creating barriers to new entrants, the group said. Comcast didn't comment.

Allowing unlicensed operations to use the TV guard bands after the TV incentive auction, as proposed by the FCC, is a doubly bad idea, Brattle said in a report filed Wednesday and paid for by Qualcomm. The policy will be ineffective because operations in the guard bands won’t attract investment, Brattle said. “Their limited bandwidth makes the 600 MHz guard bands inferior to the unlicensed bands at 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz for Wi-Fi-type applications, and the necessarily limited transmit power precludes use of 600 MHz unlicensed devices altogether for long-range applications such as rural broadband.” All use of the spectrum would yield is “Wi-Fi on tranquilizers,” the report said. The potential interference will also mean carriers are less likely to buy spectrum in the incentive auction, Brattle said. “Our analysis of an LTE network in a band similar to 600 MHz shows that a 5 percent loss of capacity due to interference from unlicensed operations in the guard bands will lower the value of the affected spectrum by 9 percent; a 20 percent loss of capacity will lower its value by 43 percent; and a 35 percent loss of capacity will eliminate most (93 percent) of its value.” Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Project at New America’s Open Technology Institute, told us he's not surprised by the report because Qualcomm has long opposed unlicensed use of TV spectrum, including the TV white spaces. "It simply reemphasizes our concern that Qualcomm is attempting to kill Wi-Fi in everything but the 2.4 GHz band," said Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld.

Comments are now being accepted regarding the Federal Aviation Administration’s proposed rules on the operation of small unmanned aircraft systems, or drones, in the National Airspace System (see 1502160003). Comments are due April 24 and can be made on the regulations.gov website, after the FAA NPRM appeared in Monday's Federal Register.

The FCC Media Bureau is seeking comment by March 10, replies by March 17, on Funai’s petition for a waiver of over-the-air tuner requirements, the bureau said in a public notice Tuesday in docket 15-42. Funai seeks a waiver in order to make, distribute and sell in the U.S. its hard disk drive/digital video disk recorders that do not include analog tuners.

CEA and NCTA urged the FCC not to add some rules on user interface accessibility, filings in docket 12-107 show. With a Further NPRM having been issued on the subject, CEA said the agency should stick to the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act in that CVAA doesn't allow any restrictions on how closed captioning display settings are accessed. Requiring makers of consumer electronics to post online information about display accessibility "could be reasonable," but the FCC shouldn't start a labeling requirement for equipment makers, CEA said its in-house and outside lawyers told staffers in the Consumer and Governmental Affairs and Media bureaus. NCTA members have made "significant progress" on CVAA, association attorneys told staffers in those two bureaus. New rules on accessing enhanced captioning display and navigation features beyond turning them on and off could "contravene" Section 205, NCTA said. The agency should "maintain a flexible approach as to what is considered a compliant mechanism for activating closed captioning," NCTA said. "Any requirement to integrate specific data about public, educational, and governmental (PEG) access programming in program guides would impose significant burdens on the industry."

AgeCheq is making its ActionScript software development kit (SDK) available immediately as part of Adobe’s AIR software development tools, an AgeCheq news release said Monday. The software is designed to help desktop and mobile app developers comply with requirements under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). It does this by optimizing parental-publisher interaction and “accurately delivering” notices and approvals required by COPPA regulation. AIR is used by more than 3 million developers who create applications on desktop computers, netbooks, tablets and smartphones. Of the top 25 games on Facebook, 24 were built with AIR, said AgeCheq. It said AIR developers can “easily add COPPA compliance elements to their games.” It's "widely known that millions of children under 13 have Facebook accounts under a falsified age, in violation of Facebook's terms of service,” said AgeCheq CEO Roy Smith. “Game developers with child audiences cannot simply rely on Facebook's [terms of service] TOS to isolate them from their responsibility to protect child privacy." AgeCheq will also offer developers eight distinct SDKs that ease COPPA compliance, including for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, HTML5 and SDKs for the Unity and Corona game engines.

The State Department is putting into force control guidelines for exports of unmanned aerial systems (UAS), known commonly as drones, the agency said Monday. State didn’t say when it would publish regulations on the guidelines, but said end users will have to meet the following criteria: Recipients are to use these systems in accordance with international law, including international humanitarian law and international human rights law, as applicable; armed and other advanced UAS are to be used in operations involving the use of force only when there is a lawful basis for use of force under international law, such as national self-defense; recipients are not to use military UAS to conduct unlawful surveillance or use unlawful force against their domestic populations. Also this week, the White House released a memo on drone privacy, and the Federal Aviation Administration released a draft of proposed rules for commercial drone operations (see 1502170038 and 1502160003).