A draft order to approve a proposed service agreement for Telcordia/iconectiv as the next local number portability administrator (LNPA) circulated at the FCC last week, according to the agency's circulation list updated Friday and an agency official. The agreement was negotiated with North American Portability Management, the industry consortium the FCC tasked with overseeing the planned LNPA transition from Neustar to Telcordia. The FCC also circulated a draft order that an agency official said would require outage reporting for undersea cables, growing out of an NPRM adopted in September (see 1509170047).

FTC will host a one-day conference June 15 in Chicago to help companies, especially startups and small- and medium-sized ones, get a leg up on securing their products, services and networks, the commission said in a news release Thursday. It's the FTC's fourth such Start with Security event, with other workshops hosted in Austin, San Francisco and Seattle (see 1602090057). Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen will open the event, which is co-sponsored by the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. No agenda was released.

The European Commission should reject the trans-Atlantic data transfer proposal since it doesn't adequately protect people's fundamental privacy and data protection rights, urged Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue, (TACD), a forum of 78 U.S. and EU consumer organizations, Thursday. In a resolution, the group said "Privacy Shield does not provide the necessary basis for a decision that the U.S. offers effective and meaningful data protection." The lack of an overarching U.S. data protection law means privacy of its own consumers "creates a barrier to any serious consideration on adequacy," said TACD, which counts the Center for Digital Democracy, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse among 26 U.S. members. The proposed Privacy Shield agreed to in February is expected to be legally challenged once the EC approves it (see 1602290003). The national data protection authorities and EU member states will comment on the proposal (see 1602100026) before it can be adopted (see 1604050065). In its resolution, TACD recommended that the EU delay proposal's adoption until the U.S. guarantees data protection that's essentially equivalent to the level in Europe, publish a detailed legal review of Privacy Shield, enforce current rules to stop unlawful information transfers to the U.S, and approve the proposed General Data Protection Regulation without delay (see 1512160001). TACD also urged the U.S. to approve a comprehensive privacy and data protection framework, support strong encryption, end mass surveillance, give rulemaking authority to the FTC to adopt privacy and data marketing and collection safeguards and update the 1974 Privacy Act of 1974. TACD also wants authorities on both sides to hold an annual and open privacy summit to improve the level of data protection.

ICANN engagement with China “does not suggest any level of support for the nation’s government or its policies,” ICANN Chairman Stephen Crocker said in a letter Thursday to GOP presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and two other Republican senators. Sens. James Lankford, R-Okla., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, joined Cruz in increasing the pressure Monday on Crocker and former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé to fully answer the senators' questions about ICANN's relationship with the Chinese government. The senators had earlier raised concerns about Chehadé's involvement with the Chinese government-led World Internet Conference (see 1602040061, 1603030067 and 1604040056). Crocker compared ICANN's involvement in China with that of top U.S. tech companies like Cisco, LinkedIn and Microsoft. “These firms, like ICANN, do not endorse the policies, laws, and regulations of China simply by operating there,” Crocker said in his letter. “As long as the U.S. Government has a policy of engagement with China, U.S. firms operate there without the insinuation that doing so makes them complicit in China’s censorship.” The Chinese government and its citizens “have an understandable desire to participate at ICANN,” Crocker said: “They have done so constructively,” including the China tech community's role in introducing non-Latin Internationalized Domain Names. ICANN's involvement with China “will continue in the same way we engage with other countries,” he said. Chehadé's coming role as co-chairman of a high-level WIC advisory committee “is not coterminous with his position at ICANN” because he won't join the committee until “later this year,” Crocker said. Chehadé left ICANN in March. The ICANN board “is not aware of any conflicts of interest relating to his activities during his tenure that would require additional steps to be taken in order to remain consistent with ICANN’s policies in effect relating to conflicts,” Crocker said.

Progress is being made on a plan to test coexistence between Wi-Fi devices and LTE-unlicensed devices, Edgar Figueroa, president of the Wi-Fi Alliance, and Wi-Fi advocates told the FCC. The alliance reported on meetings with Edward Smith, aide to Chairman Tom Wheeler, and Ira Keltz, deputy chief of the Office of Engineering and Technology. “The Wi-Fi Alliance process is working, and Wi-Fi Alliance met its target of releasing an alpha version of the draft test plan on April 1, which reflected changes to account for recent requests made by LTE-U stakeholders as part of the process,” said a filing posted Thursday in docket 15-105. The “Wi-Fi Alliance has been responsive to the requests of LTE-U interests," it added. "Validation of this alpha version of the test plan has already begun and LTE-U stakeholders are free today to perform test plan validation exercises.” Some makers of LTE-U devices may prefer to exercise the alpha test plan against their equipment internally first, the alliance said. “The process is moving forward rapidly with the goal of delivering a final coexistence test plan (which can then be used to test devices) during the summer of 2016.” Also attending the meetings were representatives of Comcast, Google, Microsoft and NCTA.

A week after the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation heard oral argument on motions to transfer 16 of the 20 class-action complaints against the Inscape viewer-tracking feature on Vizio smart TVs to the U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, California, and "centralize" them there into one case (see 1602260059), the 21st such complaint was filed against Vizio by a Brooklyn man, Isaac Altman, who, like the earlier plaintiffs, alleged his rights were violated under the federal Video Privacy Protection Act. Since buying his Vizio E500 smart TV in September, Altman has connected the set “to personal wireless networks and has used his television to watch shows and movies, including via connected applications,” said his complaint, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, the first of the 21 actions to be filed in New York. At no time did Altman consent to having his TV viewing activity “-- or any additional activity related to the use of WiFi in his home -- tracked by Vizio,” the complaint said. Had Altman known Vizio “employed such tracking functionality, he would not have purchased his Smart TV,” it says. Vizio representatives didn’t comment.

The federal USF had more than $8 billion in financial assets as of Dec. 31, said the 2015 annual report of Universal Service Administrative Co., which oversees the fund for the FCC. The USF, which had assets of $4.5 billion in 2006, paid out $8.4 billion in 2015 but collected more than that, further increasing its cash and other assets, said industry consultant Billy Jack Gregg in an email Wednesday summarizing findings from his analysis of the annual report (see 1603310052). A portion of the assets was used to offset USF funding commitments in 2015, such as model-based Connect America Fund Phase II support, Gregg said. "These assets also provide the reserve funds which the FCC will use to mitigate the $1.5 billion annual increase in the Schools and Libraries Fund, and to underwrite CAF Phase II competitive bidding support." The assets include $6.8 billion in investments, the report said.

NTIA postponed Friday's meeting of stakeholders continuing their work to develop a best practices privacy guide aimed at commercial and private drone users, possibly until May. John Verdi, NTIA director of privacy initiatives, said Tuesday in an email to participants that a group of stakeholders has been making "excellent progress" on a revised draft, but that draft just won't be ready before the meeting. He said the participants expect to circulate the draft to the full group by April 22. Verdi said the plan is to reschedule the meeting to early May. "We recognize that the next meeting will be more constructive for everyone if stakeholders are able to review and consider a revised best practices document," he wrote. The multistakeholder meetings have been ongoing since summer to produce a nonbinding guide for drone users. Progress appears to have been made over several meetings, but participants haven't been able to reach consensus partly due to the level of detail that some want included in the document (see 1602240048).

Whether the FCC's look into independent and diverse programming issues leads to rules or a policy statement remains to be seen, "but this is a great first step," Public Knowledge Policy Fellow John Gasparini said in a PK-organized media conference call Tuesday discussing the notice of inquiry (see 1602180044). PK in a filing in the indie programming NOI docket singled out most-favored-nation (MFN) and alternative distribution means (ADM) contractual clauses as particularly stifling video marketplace diversity (see 1603310044) and echoed that sentiment Tuesday. "Why is so much video still held hostage by the legacy pay-TV model?” PK Government Affairs Associate Counsel Kate Forscey asked, contrasting the digital video market with the digital music and literature markets. MVPD incumbents hold back competition through limits on over-the-top competitors and those limits disproportionately disadvantage indie and niche programmers, she said. Forscey also said the FCC would have authority under Title VI of the Telecom Act to tackle such issues. ISwop Networks CEO Broderick Byers said the job search advice-centric Employment Channel he created, while popular, couldn't get MVPD carriage because of concerns that unemployed viewers who might be unable to pay cable bills are undesirable viewers. “Corporate was out of touch," Byers said. "Having a few people decide what mass audiences would be interested in is absurd. You should let the consumer decide.” Independence in the linear market is at an all-time low, with 5 percent of original scripted contents on broadcast networks in prime time during the 2014-15 season being independently produced, compared with 12 percent of all scripted series on basic cable/pay-TV, said Garrett Schneider, research and policy analyst at the Writers Guild of America, West. Meanwhile, indie producers accounted for 49 percent of TV-length scripted shows released digitally in that same season, he said. "We hope to see an effort to reopen the market." NOI replies are due April 19.

The FTC will host a second PrivacyCon event Jan. 12, and it issued a call for presentations for consumer privacy and data security research from academia, industry and other sectors. In a Monday news release, the commission outlined the scope of research, selection criteria, review process and other information regarding the event. The FTC said it hopes to expand on previous research by focusing on areas such as harms from privacy violations, how attackers are compromising privacy, consumer use of ad blocking tools and cost of malware to consumers and businesses. Deadline for submissions is Oct. 3. “Bringing together leading thinkers and new voices from the academic, tech, and policy arenas is crucial as we seek to better address the challenges in protecting consumer privacy,” Chairwoman Edith Ramirez said. The first PrivacyCon was held in January and featured 19 presentations from academic, industry and other researchers (see 1508280046, 1601140062 and 1601140029).