Time Warner Cable petitioned to be exempted from municipal-video rate regulation in six California communities. The Media Bureau should find the operator’s systems in Indio, Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage and elsewhere face sufficient video competition because of rival services from both U.S. DBS companies and Verizon, said the request posted Thursday in docket 12-1 (http://bit.ly/1kGQV6H). It said the communities had about 90,000 occupied households total as of the 2010 census.

Wireless microphone maker Sennheiser said CTIA is wrong to oppose the company’s request that TV incentive auction winners be required to partially reimburse wireless mic users for the cost of replacing equipment made unusable by reallocation of the 600 MHz band. “At the outset, CTIA has mischaracterized the request,” the company said in a filing at the FCC (http://bit.ly/1dbItJR). “Sennheiser does not seek reimbursement to wireless microphone manufacturers, as CTIA states, but rather to wireless microphone users -- not only professional broadcasters, filmmakers, theaters, and concert promoters, but also churches, schools, community organizations, political groups, and countless others -- people who lack meaningful input to the Commission’s spectrum policies, yet stand to suffer financial damage from the reallocation.” Contrary to CTIA’s characterization, owners of wireless mics are not secondary users of the spectrum, Sennheiser said.

EchoStar is no longer pursuing a joint venture with Vivendi’s GVT, EchoStar said in a press release (http://bit.ly/19mP4m6). The partnership had been aimed at launching direct-to-home service in Brazil (CD Nov 14 p23).

The New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute is “reserving judgment” on the White House’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies report on the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, said OTI Policy Director Kevin Bankston. The report is due this weekend, but The Wall Street Journal (http://on.wsj.com/JesFgv) and The New York Times (http://nyti.ms/1fblhgr) published advance looks at the report Friday. OTI Policy Director Kevin Bankston said in an email statement that the report “recommends some important, common sense reforms, like separating the NSA’s code-making and code-breaking missions to avoid a dangerous conflict of interest, introducing a public advocate into the processes of the secret surveillance court, and establishing some level of privacy rights for people outside the United States.” But the review group “as we feared would be the case ... has urged that the NSA continue with its bulk collection and analysis of American phone records, just with the companies rather than the NSA holding the data,” Bankston said.

While a voluntary agreement on cellphone unlocking (CD Dec 13 p3) is an important step, more work needs to be done, said Gene Sperling, assistant to the president for economic policy, in a blog post (http://1.usa.gov/1fbV69l). “The FCC and carriers are doing their part,” wrote Sperling, who also directs the White House National Economic Council. “Now it is time for Congress to step up and finish the job by passing the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act, which was voted out of the House Judiciary Committee this summer, and its companion in the Senate. We know this is an important issue to many of you. The Administration will continue to watch it closely in the coming months.” Sperling noted that last March more than 114,000 signed an electronic petition on the White House’s “We the People” platform in support of mobile phone unlocking. Fletcher Heald lawyer Mitchell Lazarus said in a blog post Friday the agreement only goes so far. “While a definite improvement, CTIA’s action solves only part of the problem,” Lazarus said (http://bit.ly/IUf6lN). “If I buy a subsidized phone from Carrier A, I certainly owe them two years of payments on the phone. But I should be able to keep up just the phone payments, and stop paying Carrier A for service as well, if I want to take the phone to Carrier B for service. CTIA’s position does not allow this. T-Mobile is the only major company so far that properly separates the phone and service payments. We hope the others follow its lead.” The agreement also must be adopted into the “CTIA Consumer Code for Wireless Service” and doesn’t mean that a subscriber will be able to readily use a phone on a second network, he said. “CTIA’s letter points out the technical limitations on ‘unlocking': ‘[U]locking’ a device will not necessarily make a device interoperable with other networks -- a device designed for one network is not made technologically compatible with another network merely by ‘unlocking’ it. Additionally, unlocking a device may enable some functionality of the device but not all (e.g., an unlocked device may support voice services but not data services when activated on a different network)."

The person who replaces Gen. Keith Alexander as National Security Agency director will also be commander of U.S. Cyber Command, the White House said Friday. “Following a thorough interagency review, the Administration has decided that keeping the positions of NSA director and Cyber Command commander together as one, dual-hatted position is the most effective approach to accomplishing both agencies’ missions,” a White House spokeswoman said in a statement. Alexander had lobbied for the same person to hold both positions. The head of U.S. Cyber Command must be in the military, but some critics have argued that a civilian should lead the NSA to provide more sensitivity on civil liberties issues after the leaks about controversial NSA surveillance programs. Retaining control of U.S. Cyber Command in the hands of the NSA director will also ensure NSA’s continued “unique role” in supporting U.S. Cyber Command through “critical support for target access and development, including linguists, analysts, cryptanalytic capabilities, and sophisticated technological infrastructure,” the White House spokeswoman said. “These capabilities are essential in enabling [Department of Defense] cyberspace operations planning and execution."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation criticized Google Thursday for removing App Ops, “an extremely important app privacy feature,” from its Android 4.4.2 operating system update last week. The App Ops feature allowed users to install applications and directly control whether the app could collect potentially sensitive data like user location and a user’s contacts, EFF said. The group said Google told it that Google had released the App Ops feature by accident in its Android 4.3 update -- “that it was experimental, and that it could break some of the apps policed by it. We are suspicious of this explanation, and do not think that it in any way justifies removing the feature rather than improving it.” EFF called on Google to restore the App Ops feature in order to restore the belief that the company cares about “this massive privacy problem” (http://bit.ly/1bANsRz). Google did not comment.

British-based AeroMobile, which supplies technology and services to nine global airlines that enable passengers to use their mobile phones in-flight for voice, texting and data, hailed the FCC’s approval of an NPRM seeking comment on modernizing rules to allow mobile wireless calls on commercial flights (CD Dec 13 p1) . “I'm pleased to see that common sense prevailed” at the FCC, AeroMobile CEO Kevin Rogers said in a statement Friday. “There is no reason to maintain a ruling that is no longer relevant -- the technology used to provide inflight GSM services is proven, and has been operational across Europe, Asia and the Middle East for more than five years.” AeroMobile supplies “hundreds of connected flights flying to and from the U.S. every day, but at the moment the service has to be switched off when we reach U.S. airspace,” he said. As proof there’s demand for in-flight calls from U.S. travelers, Rogers said that in November alone, about 25 percent of the passengers using the AeroMobile service on trans-Atlantic flights “connected from U.S. mobile networks.” AeroMobile wants to work with the FCC to demonstrate “the value of the service to both customers and airlines, based on our experience,” Rogers said. “I'm hopeful that sensible discussions can now take place about the practicalities of operating this service in the U.S. Ultimately, it will be up to individual airlines to decide on the right in-flight mobile connectivity package for their passengers, whether this is SMS only or the full service, including voice and data."

The Council of Governments applauded the FCC order to ensure reliable 911 service in a statement Friday (http://bit.ly/1bCrCNK). COG is a nonprofit association that deals with regional issues affecting the Washington, D.C., area. The FCC voted to approve an order Thursday that requires carriers to file annual audits on how they are following best practices for 911 connections (CD Dec 13 p7). The order was influenced by regional studies documenting “significant loss” of 911 service in northern Virginia during the June 2012 derecho storm, COG said. All phone companies that provide 911 service must now certify annually that they have implemented best practices including audits of their circuits, maintenance of central office backup power and reliable network monitoring systems, it said. The FCC proves the “power of regional collaboration,” said COG Executive Director Chuck Bean. “With this new rule, we are securing our infrastructure in metropolitan Washington,” he said. “The success with the FCC was built on solid analytics but the change happened because we spoke with a regional voice."

HTC is hailing the decision of a British appeals court lifting an injunction that has kept HTC phones from shipping in the U.K. amid allegations that they infringe a Nokia European patent (EP 0 998 024). As a result of the decision, “we will immediately resume shipment of all of our devices into the UK, including the entire HTC One family,” HTC said in a statement. “Similarly, our customers should feel confident in their ability to promote and sell all HTC devices. Even though we plan to aggressively appeal the validity decision of Nokia’s EP 0 998 024 patent, we will continue to work with our chip suppliers on alternative solutions to ensure minimal disruption to our business in the future.” Nokia hasn’t commented on the court’s decision. Although the patent at issue is full of high-level math, it boils down to a simple aim -- simplifying the filters used to get rid of interference noise in a multi-band cellphone designed for use in different countries, our patent search found. Conventionally, Nokia wrote in 1998 when the patent was first filed, many filters were used to cope with the varied frequency bands used by mobile networks in different countries. Nokia’s patent describes a single, switched, filter early in the signal path, so the phone can be made smaller and still work reliably on all frequencies in all countries. In the patent, Nokia claims very broad legal monopoly to this basic idea. This strategy makes it easier for Nokia to argue that competitors are infringing. However, the broad claim also makes it easier for Nokia’s competitors to argue that what the patent claims was not truly new when the patent was first filed in Finland in October 1998, thereby rendering the patent invalid.