FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen will deliver opening remarks at the FTC’s June 9 workshop on issues raised by the "sharing economy," a news release said Thursday. California Public Utilities Commissioner Catherine Sandoval will make a presentation in the afternoon, it said. “Panels will explore sharing economy platforms, mechanisms for trust in the sharing economy, and various perspectives on the interplay between competition, consumer protection, and regulatory issues,” the release said. “Panelists and speakers will include academics from a number of leading universities, representatives from sharing economy businesses including Uber and Airbnb and self-regulation organizations, and former and current state and local government officials.” The full agenda is on the workshop’s Web page. The workshop begins at 8:45 a.m. at the FTC’s Constitution Center offices in the A, B and C conference rooms located at 400 7th St. SW.
Google representatives, including former FCC General Counsel Austin Schlick, discussed the importance of providing adequate spectrum for unlicensed in the TV band, following the TV incentive auction, in calls with FCC Chief of Staff Ruth Milkman and Renee Gregory, aide to Chairman Tom Wheeler. Google reported on the calls in a filing posted Wednesday in docket 12-268. “We discussed the importance of consumers having reliable access to three or more channels that permit the use of unlicensed devices,” the filing said.
The FCC is likely to lose an appeal of its net neutrality rules on First Amendment grounds because the rules are a violation of the rights of ISPs to function as a free press, argued Fred Campbell, executive director of the Center for Boundless Innovation in Technology, in a new paper. “If the FCC had admitted the Internet offers communications capabilities that are functionally equivalent to the printing press, mail carriage, newspaper publishing, over-the-air broadcasting, and cable television combined, it would have been too obvious that classifying broadband Internet service providers as common carriers is unconstitutional,” said Campbell, former chief of the FCC Wireless Bureau. “Like all other means of disseminating mass communications, broadband Internet access is a part of the ‘press’ that the First Amendment protects from common carriage regulation.” The FCC argued in the order that ISPs aren't entitled to freedom of expression, “but its declaration does not meet the straight face test,” Campbell said. To uphold the order, an appeals court would have to hold that “there is no constitutional right to access mass media communications,” Campbell said. “That would make the [FCC declaratory ruling] Second Internet Order a landmark First Amendment case that would be almost certain to garner Supreme Court review. Given the strong preference of lower courts for following Supreme Court precedent when deciding constitutional issues, the FCC is very likely to lose on First Amendment grounds in an initial appeal of the Second Internet Order.”
Verizon has already given almost 500 public safety answering points the capacity to receive emergency texts- to-911, company officials said in a meeting with staff from the FCC Public Safety Bureau, including Chief David Simpson. Deployment to 160 additional PSAPs is in progress, Verizon said in a Tuesday filing posted in docket 11-60 on Wednesday. “Verizon also discussed the challenges to extending text-to-911 service to its multimedia messaging service (MMS) platform without multimedia attachments or delivery to multiple recipients,” the filing said. “Verizon described ongoing industry efforts to address these issues through standards bodies and multimedia messaging service center (MMSC) vendors.”
NTIA missed an opportunity in not assessing which approaches to broadband adoption were the most effective while various Broadband Technologies Opportunities Program projects were in progress, GAO said in a report released Tuesday. “NTIA and FCC have limited information about the performance of their broadband adoption efforts and have not established goals articulating the outcomes these efforts should achieve,” GAO said. “Because BTOP has concluded, NTIA missed an opportunity to evaluate which grantees’ approaches were the most effective.” The FCC and NTIA both have programs to address broadband adoption barriers, “but it is unclear what outcomes they intend to achieve with these efforts because FCC’s strategic plan and NTIA’s performance plan do not clearly communicate the agencies’ desired outcomes for their efforts to address broadband adoption barriers,” GAO said. NTIA said in response it would “seek to develop outcome-based measures if it received funding for broadband adoption grants,” GAO said. The FCC also responded. “FCC states that to the extent that its strategic plan is unclear on the role of broadband adoption in FCC’s efforts, it is prepared to implement revisions that will help clarify this issue,” GAO said.
Bidders that can cover the most terrain should win out in the FCC’s Connect America Fund Phase II bidding, the American Cable Association said. The industry group’s Monday ex parte filing in docket 10-90, posted Tuesday, said association executives met last week with FCC officials to talk over the ACA’s proposal for how the competitive bidding should go for the buildout of improved broadband coverage across rural parts of the country. Giving extra weight to applicants that can serve the widest area of a region “will avoid the situation where a single bid for a single census block can prevail over a bid to build a great many census blocks throughout an entire area,” ACA said. Under the ACA proposal, a single round of bidding would be conducted in four consecutive stages, starting with networks capable of offering 1 Gbps/500 Mbps capacity, with the three subsequent stages offering less capacity to remaining census blocks. Applicants wouldn't include prices in their bids, with the expenses calculated by a price model and winning bids awarded based on maximum coverage in a county, ACA said.
Free Press, New America's Open Technology Institute and Public Knowledge again urged the FCC to impose various requirements on AT&T's planned buy of DirecTV as conditions for approving the deal, said an ex parte filing posted Friday in docket 14-90 of a meeting their representatives had with staffers for Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. The groups' advocates repeated concerns about the "transaction’s impact on consumers and competition in the broadband and pay-TV markets -- particularly AT&T’s increased incentives to discriminate against over-the-top ('OTT') video marketplace rivals to AT&T’s legacy video services." While the groups believe the deal should be blocked, they urged the FCC to impose conditions in numerous areas: stand-alone broadband, net neutrality, interconnection and zero-rating of video services for data cap purposes. They also said the FCC should (1) be skeptical of -- and verify -- AT&T/DirecTV claims that the deal would deliver public-interest benefits, (2) ensure the deal does no harm to the agency's IP transition efforts and (3) require AT&T to maintain existing DirecTV video service tiers and pricing plans for seven years in order to address horizontal concentration in the multichannel video programming distribution market. AT&T recently filed a lengthy response disputing the arguments of public-interest groups and others seeking conditions on interconnection, data caps and other issues (see 1505270049).
The Wi-Fi Alliance is pushing back at assertions that terrestrial low-power service (TLPS) for broadband will alleviate traffic congestion for Wi-Fi users, calling such claims “inaccurate and misleading.” In a filing posted Wednesday in RM-11685, Alliance CEO Edgar Figueroa said the claim that using the 2473-2495 MHz band in TLPS would widen the Wi-Fi highway doesn't fly because there are no FCC-approved devices that would work on the proposed TLPS network. “There is no evidence that TLPS will be anything but a private, stand-alone, low-power network,” Figueroa said. “Unless Wi-Fi users pay for the privilege of accessing TLPS, they will have no additional spectrum on which to operate their Wi-Fi devices.” In fact, Figueroa said, TLPS could cause interference to Wi-Fi devices: “The very limited technical evaluation that has occurred to date has been rushed and constrained, and the results are inconclusive.” Globalstar has been lobbying for rules that would let it use its TLPS for broadband, arguing that it would ease Wi-Fi congestion. The Wi-Fi Alliance is among an array of industry groups that have raised concerns about TLPS, including the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, CEA, the Entertainment Software Association, NCTA, New America’s Open Technology Institute, Public Knowledge and the Wireless ISP Association (see 1505220048). In a statement Friday, Globalstar said those concerns "are rooted solely by anti-competitive motivations." The company in March said it "agreed to demonstrate the ability for TLPS to peacefully coexist with incumbent unlicensed operations and the opposition groups were also given a platform to showcase their results, followed by characterization testing at an FCC laboratory. The opposition was given the chance to demonstrate any technical basis for their concerns in a real-world environment. The results from this demonstration were clear and fully supportive of Globalstar’s contentions. Even the opposition’s own results, with an extreme and unrealistic network that was constructed with the sole purpose of trying to somehow show interference, failed to support their purported concerns. As there is no sound engineering support for the other side’s expressed concerns, in a process that has been open for public comment for over two and a half years, it is clear that the opposition is working only to suppress new and innovative entrants like Globalstar and TLPS."
Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council President Kim Keenan said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposal to revamp the Lifeline program (see 1505280037) is a positive move. “Americans are increasingly relying on broadband to access education, jobs, healthcare, and other essential services, but a disproportionate number of minorities and economically vulnerable consumers rely on their smartphones to access these services,” Keenan said in a news release Thursday. “Closing the digital divide and getting everyone connected is critical and the Chairman’s actions today are a major step in the right direction.” MMTC was part of a 36-member coalition that recently called for modernization of the Lifeline program (see 1505150049). NTCA CEO Shirley Bloomfield said Lifeline support is only part of the answer for increased adoption. “In high-cost areas, the Lifeline program and other USF programs can only be effective to the extent that a network for consumer use is there in the first instance and if the services offered on that network are reasonably comparable in price and quality to those in urban areas,” Bloomfield said. "If we don’t tackle and overcome these threshold issues in high-cost areas -- if we don’t set up a sufficiently funded and predictable high-cost mechanism that is updated for a broadband world -- consumers of all kinds in rural America, low-income and otherwise, could be left behind notwithstanding any Lifeline changes that might follow."
Adtran joined Hughes Network Systems and ViaSat in lobbying the FCC to back a proposal that eligibility for receiving Connect America Fund Phase II money for broadband not favor any particular platform. The telecom networking company went a step further Wednesday in a filing posted in docket 10-90, spelling out a minimum threshold R-Factor standard of low latency it thinks would be acceptable. R-Factor measures VoIP call quality. Neither Hughes nor ViaSat specified any minimum value. Adtran said that minimum should be an R-value “of at least 80 (as) anything else and some increasing percentage of users express dissatisfaction with the quality of a voice call.” Adtran also raised some red flags with Hughes’ proposal for the methodology for testing the broadband service's usefulness in VoIP. Hughes declined to comment Friday.