Commerce Committee leaders on Capitol Hill seem at loggerheads over the right approach to building a public safety network. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., on Thursday night introduced a bill to give the D-block to public safety, as expected (CD Aug 6 p9). The measure clashes with legislation being drafted by House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who wants to codify the National Broadband Plan’s recommendation to commercially auction the 700 MHz spectrum. Public safety has vocally criticized the FCC and Waxman’s approach.

The FCC should formally deny states’ regulatory authority over entry, rates and other conditions of VoIP services, said a group of 12 Internet, telecom and VoIP companies, Thursday. Google, AT&T, Verizon, Skype, Microsoft and eight other companies and associations asked the FCC to “exercise caution” as it considered a petition filed by the Kansas and Nebraska commissions to require interconnected VoIP providers to pay state universal service fees.

SAN FRANCISCO -- AT&T is grappling with how to handle intellectual property rights to technologies that emerge from Innovation Centers it’s setting up, a patent lawyer for the carrier said Friday. “There’s a lot of legal complexity” in sorting out who will own the rights to broadband device, applications and network-equipment innovations that outside developers bring to AT&T and vendors at the centers, Susan McGahan said at the American Bar Association annual meeting. She said the company plans to work closely at the centers, which are “in the infancy stage,” with suppliers such as Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson.

Inmarsat will buy three Ka-band satellites from Boeing as part of a $1.2 billion investment to develop a global network in the band, the companies said Friday. The new satellites are a major change from Inmarsat’s legacy as an L-band provider and is seen as an effort to take back mobile satellite market share lost in recent years to fixed satellite services operators in the Ku-band, such as Intelsat and SES, said industry executives. The FCC and other countries’ regulators are expected to take on new proceedings to define rules for mobile satellite services in the band, which is largely used by fixed satellite services, said an executive.

BEVERLY HILLS -- PBS CEO Paula Kerger said the ruling by the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals that struck down FCC’s indecency policy has removed a burden of uncertainty for affiliates. “The ruling obviously was helpful to us because we've operated under the uncertainty of putting content out there and not being a hundred percent clear on whether our stations would then be vulnerable to potential fines,” she said at the summer TV critics press tour. Public broadcast stations and lawyers have said the ruling points out the chilling effect on programmers of censuring a show for having a single curse (PBR July 16 p2).

The FCC asked Congress for $4.5 million of unused funds from previous years to pay for two proceedings, required by statute, in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. It seeks $3.5 million to continue working on the National Broadband Plan (NBP) and $1 million for the 2010 media ownership review. The money would be used to hire staffers to implement the plan and to run additional workshops on media ownership and pay for studies on the issue. The request points up the overarching focus of delivering on the March broadband plan at the FCC, though it’s been overshadowed recently by net neutrality and reclassification talks, and on trying to improve on data collected for previous ownership reviews, communications lawyers said.

U.S. talks on net neutrality are being closely monitored by European players and regulators, several said Friday. The collapse of FCC talks and the reported Google-Verizon agreement (CD Aug 6 p1) come in the middle of important consultations in the EU and U.K. on net neutrality. Meanwhile, Germany’s incumbent provider is said to be aiming for a similar agreement with Google. The widely reported Google-Verizon agreement, which the companies have yet to confirm, calls for Verizon to treat all traffic on its wireline network without discrimination and to be more open about how it manages wireless traffic. Google told us Friday it had “no announcement to make at this point.”

The FCC approved 5-0 Thursday a notice of proposed rulemaking and notice of inquiry aimed at spurring investments in wireless backhaul, a recommendation of the National Broadband Plan. Neither was particularly controversial. The FCC also unanimously approved an order aimed at increasing the number of wireless handsets available to the deaf and hard of hearing. The monthly meeting was over in less than an hour, and most of the questions in a press conference afterwards by Chairman Julius Genachowski focused on negotiations over net neutrality and broadband reclassification (see related story this issue).

News that online companies often track and collect data about the online patterns of users raised the ire of two prominent members of Congress, who sent a letter Thursday demanding answers from more than a dozen companies. Congress probably lacks the time to pass major privacy legislation this year, said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who considering a bill and didn’t co-sign the letter. A series of Wall Street Journal articles starting Saturday said online companies often install consumer-tracking technologies on personal computers when users visit their sites. That spurred Reps. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Joe Barton, R-Texas, to write 15 companies identified in the series, demanding they answer a slew of questions on their data collection practices. http://markey.house.gov/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=4079&Itemid=125

Cable operators are working on plans to provide more IPTV services to new devices such as laptops and iPads when they're used in a subscriber’s home, executives told investors Thursday on earnings calls. Time Warner Cable and Cablevision are both at work on new products along those lines. Eventually, that could drive down the need for traditional set-top boxes in the home, TWC CEO Glenn Britt said. “Over the next few years we will gradually have fewer set tops,” as new devices with Wi-Fi and home networking standards such as Multimedia over Coax are introduced, he said.