The FCC National Broadband Plan calls for more transparency in broadband advertising, better personal data protection and consumer access to accurate information, said Chief Joel Gurin of the Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau. The agency meanwhile is expected to work more closely with the Federal Trade Commission, he told a conference hosted by the Association of National Advertisers. “We always look for opportunities to work with FTC."

Viacom is portrayed as a jilted lover, and Google a serial obfuscator, in the companies’ filings for summary judgment unsealed Thursday in the long-running copyright infringement lawsuit in U.S. District Court in New York. Each unleashed a torrent of documents, from internal e-mails to acquisition proposals, to show the other was at fault to varying degrees for the prevalence of copyrighted content on YouTube.

The National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates asked the FCC to approve a request by Maine’s Public Utilities Commission that incumbent carriers be required to offer competitive local exchange carriers access to dark fiber and line sharing. The carriers that have led the opposition, including AT&T, Verizon and Fairpoint, kept it up in reply comments. The Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance said Maine’s request would work against the extension of high-speed access sought by the National Broadband Plan. At issue in the proceeding is whether Section 271(c)(2)(B) of the Telecom Act requires incumbent carriers to provide access to elements including dark fiber loops, dark fiber transport and dark fiber entrance facilities.

A commission once so unpopular in Congress that it lost half its funding is well aware of having overreached and can be trusted now with broader rulemaking authority, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz told the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) conference Thursday in Washington. He sought to dispel advertisers’ fears that expanded commission authority, provided for in a bill passed by the House to create a financial regulatory agency, would produce an agency “on steroids,” in the words of former Chairman Jim Miller, that goes after a broad range of online practices. One of the industry’s biggest fears is apparently off the table: regulation of behavioral advertising.

Broadcasters are becoming more interested in mobile DTV opportunities and seem keen to use their spectrum to offer new services, rather than sell it in a voluntary auction like the one proposed in the FCC National Broadband Plan, said Open Mobile Video Coalition President Brandon Burgess. “We have gotten some surprisingly amazing support from our members encouraging us to do what we're doing,” Burgess, also Ion Media CEO, said Thursday. “We have members joining us in real-time.”

BERKELEY, Calif. -- Capitol Hill committees are being asked to hold hearings on the risks and shortcomings of U.S. strategy for carrying out cyberattacks, said the director of an expert study for one of the congressionally chartered National Academies. Chief Scientist Herbert Lin of the National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board told us that participants in the board’s Committee on Offensive Information War have made inquiries about hearings in the Foreign Relations committees or preferably the Intelligence committees. “We're working to the issue,” Lin said at the University of California campus. “We don’t know that there will be hearings."

BERLIN -- “Achieving a standard for broadcast 3D is our objective,” CEO Ferdinand Kayser of SES Astra satellite broadcasting of Luxembourg told reporters Wednesday. “We recognize the need for this, or users will be lost,” Kayser said: “The lack of a standard is not an advantage for broadcasters, it’s not an advantage for viewers and it’s not an advantage for the industry. We have already said that we will issue a communique on this in 2010 and we now expect to have something positive to say over the next few weeks, or months."

The FCC Public Safety Bureau faced tough questions from public safety groups Wednesday on a key element of its proposal for a 700 MHz wireless broadband network serving first responders: How public safety would get “priority access” to public safety networks. FCC officials said Wednesday that research done for the National Broadband Plan found that a fee of less that $1 a month, similar to the E-911 surcharge, if imposed on broadband subscriber bills, would be enough to pay for the operating cost of this public safety network. The agency hosted a technical panel Wednesday on the proposal for a 700 MHz Nationwide Interoperable Public Safety Wireless Broadband Network, a day after the release of the broadband plan (CD March 17 p1).

The FCC National Broadband Plan recognizes the value of mobile satellite services (MSS) but calls out the ancillary terrestrial component (ATC) license holders for failing to deploy a functional service, said Iridium CEO Matt Desch Wednesday on a panel at the Satellite 2010 conference. Significant investment has been made in ATC, but nobody has made money from the terrestrial side, he said. Globalstar Chairman Jay Monroe disagreed, citing revenue that its ATC license brings in through an agreement with a wireless broadband provider, Open Range. Desch said he’s glad some companies will be able to recoup some of their investments in ATC while raising the value of Iridium’s spectrum: “This is about repurposing spectrum.” Monroe said the commission is right to try to make spectrum use as efficient as possible.

The National Broadband Plan proposes significant changes in the FCC’s rural health-care program, Mohit Kaushal, the commission’s digital health care director, said on a panel Wednesday held by the Health IT Now Coalition.