Comcast's recent announcement that it would include set-top box functionality in some Samsung smart TVs (see 1604200047) validates the FCC set-top proposal, agency Chairman Tom Wheeler said at a news conference after the commission's open meeting Thursday. Comcast “is proving our point,” he said, since the arrangement involves a third-party device performing the function of a set-top. That comparison is specious, since Comcast and Samsung were able to privately negotiate that deal, and work out stipulations about respecting copyright and data and similar concerns, Commissioner Ajit Pai said in a subsequent news conference. Since there would be no such arrangements under the FCC proposal, it would be “like the wild West,” Pai said. Wheeler said the FCC proposal would allow all companies to accomplish what Samsung and Comcast did, and keep the deal from being withdrawn. Comcast has made similar arrangements in the past, but it didn't lead to change in the market, he said. “What Comcast giveth, Comcast can taketh away,” he said. “We’re glad that Chairman Wheeler has noticed that the marketplace is already producing real technology solutions” for watching pay TV without a set-top, emailed the Future of TV Coalition. “But these market-driven, app-based solutions bear no resemblance to the sweeping, Google-backed mandate he has proposed.” Comcast's deal with Samsung involves an app that is very different from what the FCC is proposing, a pay-TV industry official told us. The Samsung device won't have any ability to change Comcast's user interface or advertising, the official said. The “groundswell” of opposition should persuade Wheeler that the FCC to “take some time” instead of “barreling ahead,” Pai said. Comcast didn't comment.

House Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., said encryption isn't about picking sides, but assessing options. "Identifying a solution to this problem may involve trade-offs and compromise, on both sides, but ultimately it comes down to what society accepts as the appropriate balance between government access to encryption and the security of encrypted technologies,” he wrote on Medium, to which his office linked in a news release Wednesday. A House Commerce subcommittee last week held a hearing about the issue and included testimony from several law enforcement and technology experts (see 1604190002).

FCC critiques of Comcast's TV Everywhere offering were "unnecessary" and "uncalled for," CEO Brian Roberts said during the company's Q1 earnings call Wednesday. Numerous critics of the FCC set-top box proposal pointed to Comcast's plans to expand its TVE offering as proof the agency is headed in the wrong regulatory direction, while the agency said Comcast was offering "only a proprietary, Comcast-controlled user interface and seems to allow only Comcast content on different devices" (see 1604200047). Roberts said more than 40 companies have signed up for its Xfinity TV Partner Program, through which device makers can create products that work with the TV Partner app. During the call, Comcast also said it expected to have a carriage agreement signed soon with Dish Network.

Barriers remain to high-speed Internet access among 21 tribes interviewed, including high poverty rates and high costs to connecting remote tribal villages, GAO said in congressional testimony Wednesday that grew out of a January report. The GAO said FCC USF subsidy programs and the grant programs of the Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service "are interrelated," but the agencies "do not coordinate to develop joint outreach and training, which could result in inefficient use of federal resources and missed opportunities for resource leveraging." The FCC hasn't developed performance goals and measures for improving tribal broadband availability, said GAO, which suggested the commission "could establish baseline measures to track its progress by using, for example, the National Broadband Map," which has data on tribal Internet availability. "The FCC also lacks both reliable data on high-speed Internet access and performance goals and measures for high-speed Internet access by tribal institutions -- such as schools and libraries," the GAO said, saying the commission "has neither defined 'tribal' on its E-rate application nor set any performance goals for the program's impact on tribal institutions." Without such goals and measures, the FCC can't assess the impact of its efforts, it said. The FCC agreed with the recommendations, the GAO said.

SES Americom and Inmarsat Mobile Networks are partially on board with the joint AT&T/EchoStar proposal (see 1604070059) for sharing satellite spectrum with 5G. In a filing Wednesday in docket 14-177, the two said their support of the sharing proposal is conditional on rules ensuring individually licensed earth stations "have genuine access to the bands" via fair coordination and a safe harbor process that allows deployment of additional fixed satellite service (FSS) earth stations on a co-primary basis. That means there needs to be definitions of where upper microwave flexible use (UMFU) licensees can deploy their networks that look beyond just protecting satellite receivers and take into account existing FSS earth stations, plus "an intermediate area" where UMFU and earth station spectrum access is based on coordination and "safe harbor areas" where satellite operators can put earth stations freely, they said. SES/Inmarsat also said the AT&T/EchoStar proposal on when in its development a terrestrial system gets considered in the coordination process is "too open ended" and only terrestrial operations existing at the start of coordination should be considered. SES/Inmarsat also said the FCC, when looking at interference protection for satellites receiving in the 28 GHz band, should consider possible limits on UMFU deployment and means for UMFU licensees to coordinate among themselves to keep down aggregate emissions. The FCC should also look at rules for monitoring such satellite interference and ensuring aggregate interference never exceeds limits, they said. In an ex parte filing posted Tuesday in the docket, ViaSat recounted a meeting between its Senior Director-Regulatory Affairs Daryl Hunter and Chairman Tom Wheeler's staffers, Diane Cornell and Edward Smith, at which the satellite company discussed its own FSS/5G sharing proposal. The ViaSat proposal would have individually licensed earth stations deployed on a co-primary basis with 5G and blanket-licensed earth stations deployed on a secondary basis with 5G, while primary allocation for satellite downlinks would remain in the 37.5-40 GHz band. It was expected that the AT&T/EchoStar proposal would be followed by rival sharing proposals (see 1604140020).

Bringing affordable multigigabit Internet service to community anchor institutions must get renewed focus, said the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband (SHLB) Coalition, releasing a "Vision" paper Wednesday that kicked off an action plan for a Grow 2 Gig+ campaign. The paper said 63 percent of schools don't meet current high-speed connectivity goals, 42 percent of public libraries have Internet access of 10 Mbps or slower and rural health clinics often lag their urban counterparts in broadband capacity. “The National Broadband Plan called for gigabit speeds for all anchor institutions by the year 2020, but we are in grave danger of failing to meet that goal,” said SHLB Coalition Executive Director John Windhausen in a release. “Our anchor institutions hold communities together; they provide essential Internet connectivity to our children, the elderly, the poor, and everyone." In a preface to the Vision paper, he said, "The Action Plan will provide a series of policy papers, each of which addresses a barrier to achieving this envisioned future and recommends a range of steps that policymakers can take to make it a reality." The SHLB effort "puts 'meat on the bones' of Goal #4 in the National Broadband Plan, to bring gigabit connectivity to anchor institutions across the country," said Blair Levin, who spearheaded the NBP at the FCC, in a foreword to the paper. The SHLB coalition welcomed a scheduled FCC vote Thursday seeking to curb "excessive pricing" for business data services, "an action that could lower prices and speed the deployment of high speed broadband to millions of schools, libraries and health care providers."

The FCC issued the 224-page text of its Lifeline modernization order and commissioner statements Wednesday. The item was adopted 3-2 March 31 after an attempted bipartisan budget deal collapsed (see 1603310056). The order extends Lifeline low-income USF support to broadband service and updates program administration. It creates minimum service standards for broadband and mobile voice services while allowing "an exception in areas where fixed broadband providers do not meet the minimum standards." The FCC mandated a "five-and-one-half-year transition, during which we will gradually increase mobile voice and data requirements and gradually decrease voice support levels." It shifts responsibility for verifying consumer Lifeline eligibility from carriers to a national entity, creates a streamlined national Lifeline broadband provider designation process and requires participating providers to make Wi-Fi functionality available when providing devices for Lifeline use. The FCC established a $2.25 billion annual Lifeline budget that can be adjusted if spending reaches 90 percent of that level. Democratic commissioners issued their statements March 31 but the full statements of the dissenting Republicans weren't available until Wednesday's order. "I cannot support this Order," said Commissioner Ajit Pai in a 16-page statement. "It is not fiscally responsible. It does not clean up the waste, fraud, and abuse. And it consigns Lifeline consumers to second-class broadband services for the foreseeable future. On top of this, the Order does not comply with federal law." Pai said that the agency did "practically nothing" to fix Lifeline's "fiscal nightmare." He said the order didn't set a "meaningful," enforceable budget, doesn't target funding to households lacking broadband, doesn't curb excessive spending on urban tribal lands and doesn't address loopholes that invite carrier abuse, but does "cut state commissions out of the Lifeline designation process." He said Chairman Tom Wheeler worked to unwind a budget compromise between Pai and Commissioners Mike O'Rielly and Mignon Clyburn. O'Rielly said the most disappointing aspect was that the budget deal was "attacked for all the wrong reasons." The compromise budget "would not have harmed the program or recipients" but instead would have allowed support to reach "all eligible households that lack sufficient broadband while staying within reasonable fiscal limits," he said, noting he would have backed a $2 billion cap. Instead, the order adopted a "phony" budget mechanism, he said.

Three groups urged the FCC to closely scrutinize iconectiv's revised code of conduct and voting trust, and to ensure a "significantly more open and transparent process" in the review of a proposed master service agreement for the company as the next local number portability administrator. "We have serious concerns that the Code of Conduct is being watered down in such a way that iconectiv will not have the requisite impartiality, independence, and nonalignment that the Commission’s own rules require," said the LNP Alliance, New America's Open Technology Institute and Public Knowledge in a filing posted Tuesday in docket 09-109.

Dish Network and other multichannel video distribution and data service (MVDDS) spectrum licensees are petitioning the FCC for use of the 12.2-12.7 GHz spectrum for two-way mobile broadband. Calling themselves the MVDDS 5G Coalition, the group in its petition Tuesday said permitting sharing between mobile broadband and direct-to-home satellite service "will allow 500 MHz of underutilized MVDDS spectrum to be used as efficiently as possible [for] even faster speeds, enhanced connectivity ubiquity, and truly real-time services and applications." The MVDDS group said that spectrum meets FCC criteria for 5G suitability by offering 500 MHz of contiguous spectrum, a flexible regulatory framework, international harmonization and 5G sharing with incumbent uses. Dish et al. said the FCC should launch a rulemaking proposing adding a domestic mobile allocation to the 12.2-12.7 GHz band, updating MVDDS operation rules to let licensees provide two-way mobile broadband, updating MVDDS technical rules to enable 5G while protecting direct broadcast satellite from interference, deleting or designating as secondary the unused non-geostationary satellite orbit fixed satellite service allocation in the band and eliminating or modifying the MVDDS rules protecting non-geostationary satellite orbit fixed satellite service. "Consumers will not be impacted by losing a service that does not exist and that still would be able to use the 11.7-12.2 GHz band (and perhaps the 12.2-12.7 GHz band on a secondary basis) should it ever develop," they said. Seven coalition members -- Cass Cable TV, Go Long Wireless, MVD Number 53 Partners, Satellite Receivers, Story Communications, Vision Broadband and WCS Communications -- also have sought waivers of MVDDS technical rules (see 1510150050).

Federal transportation regulators need to define and document government's role and responsibilities to address cyberattacks on vehicles, especially as autonomous and connected-vehicle technologies are deployed, GAO said in a Monday report. It said the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investing more in cybersecurity research and is soon expected to release industry guidance to help decide when vulnerabilities should be considered safety defects in justifying recalls. NHTSA also is examining the need for cybersecurity standards and regulations, but such guidance won't be available for another two years at least, GAO said. Until NHTSA develops a plan defining its role, "the agency's response efforts could be slowed as agency staff may not be able to quickly identify the appropriate actions to take," GAO said. The report also said several industry led-efforts are underway to help automakers and parts suppliers to mitigate cybersecurity vulnerabilities, increase threat and vulnerability information sharing among companies and deploy better technologies such as message encryption and authentication.