Global mobile data traffic almost doubled in 2013, and 88 percent of Americans now watch TV on their phones, while 21 U.S. carriers offer 4G service, Mobile Future said in its year-in-review posted Thursday. “Tweet” was added to the dictionary in 2013, the group noted (http://bit.ly/1dtCGzX). It said “spectrum is now the hottest word in wireless” and tablets for the first time will outsell laptop and desktop computers.

The Georgia Public Service Commission should reverse a $5 fee imposed on about 785,000 state residents on the federal Lifeline program in late October (CD Oct 18 p18), consumer advocacy groups urged the PSC in a joint statement Thursday (http://bit.ly/condemningGAPSC). Consumer Action, the Community Action Partnership, League of United Latin American Citizens, Maryland Consumer Rights Coalition, National Consumers League and National Grange urged the PSC to “reverse this punitive, anti-consumer fee.” The new fee “flies in the face of the goals” of the Lifeline program, which was created to ensure that “qualifying Americans have the opportunities and security that phone service brings,” said the groups. The federal Lifeline program doesn’t use funds from the states, and any possible savings “from squeezing low-income consumers out of the program” wouldn’t impact state-level taxpayers, it said. No other state charges its Lifeline consumers this fee, and the monthly fee “of this sort” was rejected by the FCC when it was considered, said the groups. There’s no factual basis or evidence that this kind of fee will result in reduced fraud or less abuse of the program, or that it will result in better sales practice conduct on behalf of the Lifeline providers, said the letter. It said the National Lifeline Accountability Database is going online in five states this month to help carriers identify and resolve duplicate claims for Lifeline-supported service, and Georgia will begin participating in the database in January. The coalition urged other states to not follow Georgia in “attacking the pocketbooks of low-income Americans in this misguided fashion.” The Georgia PSC didn’t respond to request for comment.

Britain’s communications sector compares favorably with that of 16 other nations around the world, the Office of Communications (Ofcom) said in its 2012 international communications report (http://xrl.us/bqaaxs). The study benchmarks the U.K. communications sector against other countries to see how it’s doing -- France, Germany, Italy, the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Poland, Brazil, Russia, India and China. The survey found that the sector’s total global revenue, including telecom, TV, radio and post, was around $2 trillion last year, up 2.5 percent from 2011, it said. TV subscriptions generated the biggest and fastest-growing proportion of the total revenue, it said. Fixed-line connections continued to fall, but were most resilient in the U.K., where many customers still get broadband services over fixed lines, it said. Mobile takeup continued to exceed population size in all the countries surveyed except China, it said. Excluding Japan, which has a very high takeup of advanced feature phones not readily available in other countries, the U.S. was the only one to report a smartphone adoption level of less than 50 percent in Ofcom’s online survey, it said. People in the U.K. are most likely to trust online retailers than those in the other countries, it said. In the TV and audiovisual area, Brazil, Russia, India and China continued to have the largest annual growth, it said. The U.K. leads the way in digital conversion and was one of only three countries to have 100 percent of all main TV sets switched to digital in 2012, it said. U.K. consumers are embracing value-added services, with HDTV and digital video recording penetration the highest among the European nations included in the research, Ofcom said. British consumers are more likely to watch catch-up TV on smart TVs, mobile phones and tablets, but scheduled linear TV is also still popular, with Britons watching four hours per day, the regulator said. Other findings included: (1) U.K. residents are the most frequent online shoppers and the most likely to access TV content over the Internet. (2) Social networks are still among the most searched-for terms on the Internet, with Facebook the most searched-for term for 14 of the 17 comparison countries. (3) Mobile Internet users in the U.S. and U.K. are the most active social networkers. (4) Radio revenue was up for the third consecutive year in the 17 countries analyzed. (5) The U.K. had the second-lowest proportion of total telecom revenue generated by data services in 2012, with Japan leading the way.

The White House must issue an official response to a petition asking for stronger email privacy protections, after the petition hit the necessary 100,000 signatures needed by Thursday (http://1.usa.gov/1avKNbR). Digital 4th, an industry and advocacy coalition, filed the petition, attempting to restart debate over updating the 27-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CD Nov 14 p19). The group was formed in March to advocate for an ECPA modernization bill from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, which would protect electronic communications collected and maintained by third-party service providers (CD March 20 p10). The bill never made it out of committee. “Several bills in Congress would fix this by updating ECPA to require a warrant, but regulatory bodies are blocking reform in order to gain new powers of warrantless access,” said the petition. “We call on the Obama Administration to support ECPA reform and to reject any special rules that would force online service providers to disclose our email without a warrant."

Almost 90 percent of participants in a Commtouch webinar said their organizations had an IP address appear on a blacklist during the past 12 months, said the Internet security technology provider. The Dec. 4 poll, conducted during the webinar, found that outbound spam was the most common reason an IP address ended up on a blacklist. Blacklisting can have a significant business impact, up to and including damage to a business’s reputation, Commtouch said. Nearly half of the respondents said their organization’s operations department was able to get an IP address removed from a blacklist through phone calls and emails, while another 38 percent said they “make it up as we go along.” Another 13 percent use automated processes to request removal from a blacklist, Commtouch said (http://bit.ly/1iZIvvO).

The “the unacceptable number of senior level vacancies” currently within the Department of Homeland Security are a “serious threat” to the department’s ability to complete its mission on issues that include cybersecurity, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told the House Homeland Security Committee Thursday. More than 40 percent of DHS’s senior leadership positions are vacant or are being filled by a temporary replacement. Nominees for some positions, including Homeland Security Secretary nominee Jeh Johnson, await confirmation in the Senate. The Senate could vote on Johnson’s nomination this week. Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said during the hearing that these vacancies “have a negative impact on mission effectiveness and employee morale.” The Government Accountability Office has found that morale is low across the agency’s departments. Morale within the National Protection and Programs Directorate, which leads DHS’s cybersecurity efforts, scored below the government-wide average, said David Maurer, GAO director-Homeland Security and Justice Issues. Ridge said the White House needs to “better anticipate” vacancies within DHS and vet possible candidates in a “thorough but timely manner,” while the Senate needs to consider nominees “in a timely manner” and not use the confirmation process for “political gamesmanship.” The hearing was a day after McCaul and committee ranking member Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., introduced the National Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection Act (HR-3696), which would codify DHS’s existing collaboration efforts with the private sector, including information sharing regarding cyberthreats, but would not give the agency new powers. House Cybersecurity Subcommittee Chairman Pat Meehan, R-Pa., and subcommittee ranking member Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., were original cosponsors of the bill (http://1.usa.gov/1gthI9g).

The EU and media industry launched a pilot to enable more use of digital content, they said Thursday. The Rights Data Integration (RDI) project will implement work by the Linked Content Coalition on a technical framework to help copyright owners and users manage and trade rights for all kinds of usage of all types of content and protected works in all media, they said. That will move the content industry closer to figuring out how to assert ownership and communicate copyright terms and conditions in the digital arena in a way machines and people can understand, they said. RDI is an early pilot for the “copyright hub” strategy under development in the U.K. and under consideration in Europe and the U.S., they said. It will use a “hub and spoke” architecture that lets users find and access information from rightsholders via a central transformation hub, they said. The hub will transform the data into a common format and then into a format accepted by exchanges that provide the interface for users, they said. RDI doesn’t directly affect copyright laws and agreements but makes it possible to process the results of those contracts in a more highly automatable way, they said. The project will run for 27 months, they said. Media participants include Elsevier, Getty Images and the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations.

Industry welcomed two video proposals introduced in the House Thursday, both expected. House Communications Subcommittee ranking member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., introduced the Video Consumers Have Options In Choosing Entertainment Act, to address retransmission blackouts, with Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif. And Reps. Steve Scalise, R-La., and Cory Gardner, R-Colo., introduced the Next Generation Television Marketplace Act. American Cable Association President Matthew Polka released a statement saying the Eshoo bill “will provide relief to consumers harmed by outdated retransmission consent rules that broadcasters’ [sic] relentlessly abuse, highlighted by a record number of TV signal blackouts and escalating price demands well in excess of inflation.” Public Knowledge praised Eshoo’s bill because it “puts forward a number of creative ideas that, if implemented, would move the video marketplace in a good direction,” Senior Staff Attorney John Bergmayer said in a statement. “Under the provisions of this bill, not only would viewers be protected from the effects of corporate contract disputes that black out channels from their TV lineups, but they would get more choice in what channels they subscribe to, and could see their monthly fees go down.” The Western Telecommunications Alliance also welcomed Eshoo’s bill, in a statement citing the high video programming prices rural video distributors face. The American Television Alliance, Dish and CenturyLink praised both bills. “While the bills reflect different approaches to reform, they show the ever-growing bipartisan support for immediate action to fix retransmission consent,” ATVA said. CenturyLink supports the efforts of all members behind the bills “to reform the 1992 Cable Act and to make sure consumers aren’t caught in the middle of video retransmission consent disputes,” it said. Dish Deputy General Counsel Jeff Blum pointed to different virtues of the bills, in his statements. The Scalise bill “recognizes that the video laws passed in 1992 no longer reflect the marketplace and are in dire need of reform,” he said. The Eshoo bill “proposes concrete legislative ideas to give consumers greater choice over their programming, tackles the growing problem of bundling of cable channels with network channels, and empowers the FCC with significant authority to curtail blackouts."

The FCC prison calling order violates the Communication Act’s requirement that inmate calling service providers be fairly compensated, Pay Tel told an aide to Commissioner Mignon Clyburn Friday, said an ex parte filing (http://bit.ly/1cDGn7B). “The Order’s failure to account for the cost of providing ICS in jails will make the provision of ICS in jails economically unsustainable and many high cost small to medium size jail facilities will be left without a service provider.” For Pay Tel, 73 percent of its 160 client locations have at least one category of intrastate calls in which average revenue per minute is below cost, it said. “The total amount by which intrastate capped rates are below cost” is nearly $3 million, about 11 percent of Pay Tel’s revenue, it said. “In this regard, the FCC’s Order violates, on its face, Section 276’s command that the Commission ‘ensure that all [ICS] providers are fairly compensated for each and every completed intrastate and interstate call.'” Pay Tel asked that the commission stay the new rules.

Raytheon completed the integration of its second Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), which will fly on the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) spacecraft from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “The integrated sensor is now entering testing, on track for delivery in 2015,” Raytheon said in a press release (http://bit.ly/18G7RrK). The second VIIRS is scheduled to launch on board the JPSS-1 satellite mission in 2017, Raytheon said.