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).

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.

AT&T’s backing of “fair” rules in the upcoming incentive auction “points to the likelihood that the FCC will adopt some new limits on carriers, but a fight remains over the specifics,” said Stifel Nicolaus analyst Christopher King Wednesday in an email to investors. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said Tuesday that he was in favor of some limits on bidding in the incentive auction, but only if they applied to all parties (CD Dec 11 p6). Joan Marsh, AT&T vice president-regulatory affairs, said at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing Tuesday that the carrier would prefer an unrestricted auction but that any rules should apply equally to all parties (CD Dec 11 p3). “We suspect the FCC might prohibit any carrier from buying more than one-quarter or one-third of the converted broadcast spectrum, perhaps with wrinkles,” King wrote. “A 10x2 pair would fit within either limit if the FCC is able to sell off 84 MHz of licensed spectrum, but would only fit within the one-third limit if it sells off just 60 [megahertz]. … We would expect Sprint, T-Mobile, and others to continue arguing for a broader limit on spectrum below 1 GHz that restricts AT&T and Verizon more than others because the Bells already have about 80 percent of that spectrum."

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."

"Robust competition” in the communications sector has changed how the FCC should act as a regulatory agency, but it “does not obviate the need for consumer-welfare-focused, economically-informed antitrust oversight where residual monopoly power remains,” wrote officials from the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and others Wednesday to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. They encouraged the FCC to continue to be involved in issues like consumer protection, public safety, spectrum management and universal service, but said market-based approaches to those issues would “lead to better policy outcomes.” The FCC shouldn’t make the Internet a “regulated industry” and should dispense with its net neutrality order in favor of an approach that would “permit new forms of contracting, and to police any abuses after the fact,” the stakeholders said. The commission should also “redouble” its use of market-based approaches to manage spectrum, particularly in the context of the upcoming incentive auction, their letter said (http://bit.ly/1fkSdUn).

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.”

The FCC received more than 54,000 complaints in Q2 on violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, showed figures released by the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau (http://fcc.us/1gq0nhx). That’s down from 66,000 TCPA complaints in Q1. It was by far the highest number of informal complaints tallied by the bureau, and was dominated by complaints about violations of the Do Not Call rules, prerecorded messages and abandoned calls. Next highest was complaints about wireless issues, such as billing and rate issues, and service problems, totaling nearly 6,000 in Q2. That was followed by complaints about radio and TV broadcasting, made up mostly of concerns over the content of programming.

The FCC proposed $44 million in fines against three Lifeline providers, an agency news release said Wednesday. That brings the total amount of proposed Lifeline fines to $90 million over the past three months. Notices of apparent liability were issued against three companies “that appear to have requested and/or received Lifeline support payments for individual customers who appeared on the companies’ Lifeline subscriber lists more than once,” the release said. Telrite Corp. was fined $22 million, Global Connection more than $11 million (http://bit.ly/J7g2DJ) and Cintex Wireless more than $9 million (http://bit.ly/J7g2DJ). “The carriers knew or should have known, based on their own internal data, that they were not entitled to support for these duplicates under Lifeline program rules,” the agency release said. Telright, a Georgia eligible telecom carrier that does business in nine states, was found by the Universal Service Administrative Co. (USAC) to have improperly sought Lifeline support reimbursement from more than 4,000 “individual intra-company duplicate lines,” said the NAL (http://bit.ly/1fkR8Mu). USAC found that Global, a Georgia ETC servicing 10 states, was seeking reimbursement for more than 2,000 duplicate lines. USAC found Cintex, a Maryland ETC in four states, was seeking reimbursement for more than 1,800 duplicate lines.

The federal government’s decision to redact information in its response to a petition from technology companies seeking to disclose more information about U.S. surveillance requests “is within the discretion of the executive branch, and in any event does not interfere with the legal arguments the companies can offer,” it responded to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (http://1.usa.gov/J2WikO). The response to FISC released Monday and dated Friday is the most recent move in the months-long attempt by five tech and social media giants -- led by Google and Microsoft -- to argue the First Amendment gives them the right to disclose the specific number and type of government surveillance requests they receive as long as they don’t disclose the content or surveillance target (CD Oct 3 p5). The federal government released a response in October urging FISC to deny the tech companies’ request. The companies responded in November, asking for more transparency in the government’s response, saying the redacted portions obfuscated the government’s legal rationale behind its stance and violated the First Amendment (CD Nov 14 p19). “None of the legal arguments in the government’s public brief have been redacted,” said the government’s most recent response. “The classified information is irrelevant to the companies’ argument about the scope of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s nondisclosure provisions.” The tech companies have until Dec. 20 to respond.

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.