FCC Public Safety Bureau Chief Jamie Barnett played defense to skeptical police and fire department officials on the agencies’ recommendations for establishing a nationwide, interoperable public safety network. At a conference Friday of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), Barnett urged public safety to back calls in the National Broadband Plan for $12 to $16 billion in additional funding. But officials said they care more about getting spectrum “real estate” than money. Many officials said they were worried they can’t rely on shared commercial networks in emergency situations.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.”

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."

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."

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.