Comments on a petition for rulemaking from the Alabama Educational Television Commission to change the channel of WBIQ Birmingham are due Jan. 10. Replies are due Jan. 27, the FCC Media Bureau said in a Federal Register notice Wednesday (http://1.usa.gov/18V8BvJ). AETC seeks a waiver of the FCC’s freeze on filing petitions by TV stations seeking a channel substitution (CD Nov 7 p16). AETC, licensed to Channel 39, wants to return to its previously allotted Channel 10.

AT&T is now offering its U-verse with GigaPower service to all Austin, Texas, residents, said the company in a news release Wednesday (http://soc.att.com/18Uw7Jf). The all-fiber Internet network has initial speeds of up to 300 Mbps and is available starting at $70 a month. AT&T said it plans to increase speeds to one gigabit in 2014. Customers will also have access to the company’s TV services including a 1 TB of storage DVR and the ability to schedule DVR recordings and watch both live and on-demand TV shows on more than 30 smartphones and tablets, said the company. Customers who sign up for the 300 Mbps service will be upgraded to one gigabit speeds in 2014 at no extra cost, said AT&T. Google Fiber also plans to offer gigabit service to Austin residents starting in 2014 (CD April 10 p10).

The FCC has “broad authority” to address public interest harms and resolve disputes that stem from the current retransmission consent regime, said a joint ex parte letter from Public Knowledge, the New America Foundation, American Cable Association, Time Warner Cable, DirecTV, Charter Communications and Dish Network. Statutory language from Congress on the commission’s oversight of retrans “not only permits the Commission to adopt rules designed to ameliorate the demonstrated consumer harms associated with unreasonable fee demands and programming blackouts, but affirmatively requires the Commission to do so,” said the letter. Broadcaster tactics in retrans negotiations, including sharing arrangements, “cannot be squared with the outcomes that would occur in a genuinely competitive marketplace,” said the letter. Along with retrans rules, the commission’s authority over such negotiations also comes from the FCC’s responsibility to ensure that broadcast licensees act to further the public interest, the letter said. This means the commission is empowered to adopt new rules for retrans negotiations and obligated to “protect consumers from broadcasters’ unreasonable fee demands, tying practices, and programming blackouts,” said the filing. It said the commission also has the authority “to require interim carriage pending the resolution of a retransmission consent dispute,” and should “promptly exercise that authority to protect consumers and restore congressional intent."

Several public interest groups asked the FCC to clarify that Section 222 of the Communications Act forbids selling “anonymized” but “non-aggregate” call records, as those constitute customer proprietary network information (CPNI). “Phone carriers regularly share -- or reserve the right to share -- customers’ records in an ‘anonymized’ form with third parties,” wrote Public Knowledge, the Center for Digital Democracy, Common Cause and others (http://bit.ly/1gZTGQw). All four major wireless carriers say they may share the information with third parties, the petition said, citing New York Times reports that AT&T has been selling call records to the CIA. “Even when carriers have ‘anonymized’ or ‘de-identified’ call records by removing personal identifiers from them they still constitute individually identifiable CPNI,” the petition said. That’s because under Section 222, all CPNI that’s not aggregate is individually identifiable, “as such records can be linked to a single person,” it said. It said what carriers refer to as “anonymized” records might still be vulnerable to “re-identification.” Carriers will say they're not violating the law, but they are, said Public Knowledge staff attorney Laura Moy in a blog post explaining the petition (http://bit.ly/1gZYIN6). “Even if anonymizing records before sharing them were enough under Section 222, masking a few digits of some phone numbers is just not enough to truly render records anonymous.” An AT&T spokesman told us that “in all cases, whenever any governmental entity in any country seeks customer information from us, we ensure that the request and our response are completely lawful and proper in that country.” AT&T has rejected government requests for customer information many times, the spokesman said. “Wherever we serve our customers, we maintain those customers’ data and information in compliance with the laws that apply in the country where that service is provided. It has been our experience that, no matter the country, laws related to government requests for customer information apply equally to all privately owned telecom providers. Like all telecom providers, we routinely charge governments for producing the information provided.” The spokesman declined to comment more specifically: “We do not comment on questions concerning the national security of any country.” A T-Mobile spokesman said the carrier “appreciates the concerns expressed by Public Knowledge in its petition.” T-Mobile “follows all laws” governing CPNI, “and provides annual reports to the FCC regarding regulatory compliance in this area,” the spokesman said. “We do not sell personally identifiable CPNI data to third parties except in three cases: 1) we obtain the user’s consent; 2) we provide it in aggregate form; or 3) we anonymize the data.” Sprint, Verizon and CTIA had no comment.

Global Eagle Entertainment and Southwest Airlines began a messaging service designed to work in all stages of flight. It allows passengers with Apple devices operating on iOS 5 or later “to iMessage gate-to-gate for the introductory price of $2 per day,” said Global Eagle in a news release Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1f7DnQk). On-board, customers can access the service while their device is in airplane mode, it said. For customers that prefer to do more than text, Wi-Fi is still available for $8 all day per device, “and texting is included in that price automatically,” said Global Eagle, owner of inflight broadband connectivity and entertainment company Row 44. “Android-friendly messaging apps will be added early in 2014,” the release said.

A free public Wi-Fi network will be available to Harlem residents in May, said New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg Tuesday (http://on.nyc.gov/1iX2uen). The Harlem Wi-Fi network will extend 95 city blocks and will be rolled out in three phases to increase digital access for about 80,000 Harlem residents, including 13,000 in public housing, he said. The first phase from 110th to 120th streets between Madison Avenue and Frederick Douglas Boulevard is under way, he said. The New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications and the Technology Development Corp. are overseeing the implementation of the network, and they are working closely with technology provider Sky-Packets, said Bloomberg. The network will be available 24/7 in outdoor locations with unlimited access, he said.

Broadcasters’ legal attacks against Aereo are “the first battleground” for “control of the cloud,” said CEO Chet Kanojia at a Computer & Communications Industry Association’s event Tuesday. The Cablevision decision -- which established the legal precedent behind Aereo’s arguments that it doesn’t need broadcasters’ permission to stream their content -- also created the legal window for cloud computing services like Google Drive, said Kanojia. Broadcaster repudiations of Cablevision in their arguments against Aereo are an attack on the “commonsense” principle that consumers who buy information and content still own it when it’s stored in the cloud, he said. Kanojia said consumers are entitled to view their broadcast content streaming over the Internet if they choose. “The things I buy belong to me,” said Kanojia. He said the idea for Aereo was born out of one of his previous companies, which gathered information from customer’s cable boxes. Kanojia said he noticed that though customers paid to receive hundreds of channels, they typically only watched the same eight or 10. That showed “an imbalance between value and price,” and led to Aereo being created to address that imbalance, he said. “Bringing choice to the marketplace is absolutely critical for moving the marketplace forward.”

Google’s YouTube will gross $5.6 billion in global ad revenue in 2013, netting $1.96 billion, estimated digital marketing researcher eMarketer Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1f6YSB4). YouTube will have a 1.7 percent share of all global ad revenue, which includes non-video related ads, and a 21 percent share of the U.S. video ad market, worth $4.15 billion overall, it said. YouTube’s net revenue will be up 66 percent from 2012, it said. YouTube’s global ad revenue share will be larger than that of Twitter, AOL, Amazon, Pandora and LinkedIn, it said.

Sorenson began rolling out a change in its Telecommunications Relay Services that it says will prevent unregistered softphones from dialing 911, the company told the FCC Monday (http://bit.ly/1jJ2g8C). A softphone is computer software that allows VoIP calls. The ability to dial 911 will be activated as soon as the user registers the softphone, Sorenson said.

Data stored in cloud services need stronger protection against government surveillance, the European Parliament said in a nonbinding resolution approved Tuesday. The adopted text wasn’t available at our deadline. The resolution stressed that EU rules apply to all cloud computing services operating in the EU, even if a client in a third country directs otherwise, Parliament said in a news release. Lawmakers acknowledged that the cloud opens opportunities for new jobs, lower costs and less red tape, but said the EU needs safeguards to counteract foreign laws that might lead to massive, illegal transfers of their data, it said. Members asked the European Commission to ensure that consumers get better information about cloud services, saying that users of services that fall under non-EU law should be given “clear and distinguishable warnings” that foreign intelligence agencies may survey their personal data. Parliament members (MEPs) also asked the EC to make sure that consumer devices don’t make use of cloud services by default and aren’t restricted to specific cloud providers. They also want a minimum level of consumer rights relating to privacy, data storage in non-EU countries and liability for data losses. While the market should be open to all law-abiding providers, the more server farms there are in Europe, the better for European companies and the more sovereignty the EU has over those servers, MEPs said. BSA/The Software Alliance said it has “mixed views” on the resolution. While lawmakers recognized the significant potential of cloud computing, they approved “worrying and contradictory proposals that could undermine Europe’s participation in the global cloud network,” it said. Saddling European services with market-specific rules relating to procurement, standards and content stored in the cloud must be considered in a global context or they'll limit the economies of scale cloud computing is designed to deliver, said Government Relations Director-Europe, Middle East and Africa Thomas Boué.