December 2015

The Federal Communications Commissions' Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Released the Mobile Device Theft Prevention Report (MDTP) and recommends:

• The CTIA -- The Wireless Association and the GSM Association, on behalf of the industry, implement the Device Information Portal.
• The CTIA-The Wireless Association to update their ongoing study and research on consumer usage and trends for smartphone security prior to July 2016.
• The FCC work with industry on developing effective outreach initiatives to educate the consumer.
• A deeper investigation by industry into the causal factors for the increase in consumer use of MDTP functions that could be used for determining how to optimize further efforts to incentivize greater consumer use of anti-theft features, if necessary.
• An industry-led investigation into whether the increased availability of anti-theft functionality on new smartphones as well as the upcoming initial device setup prompts that will be required by California legislation after July 2015 have any effect including increasing consumer use of these features.
• ATIS, working with other key stakeholders such as the GSM Association, identify key technological areas where the FCC should seek further information from industry.
• Industry adoption of the voluntary framework for a set of on-device capabilities to guide industry based on the “working group view”.
• The GSMA’s North American Regional Interest Group, with support from the GSM Association, develop a Best Practices Implementation Guideline for device blacklisting, device blocking, and data sharing.
• GSMA, working with the mobile device manufacturing community and other stakeholders (e.g., CTIA), review the 2005 published technical design principles and security weakness reporting and correction process to ensure they take into account current threats and attack scenarios and remain fit for purpose and that GSMA invite the manufacturers to reconfirm their support for these initiatives.
• The GSMA and CTIA coordinate a survey of the US carriers to assess and measure the extent to which invalid and duplicate device identities may be in use on their networks.
• The industry reinstate a service to monitor for and report security issues to provide statistical data and to ensure identified problems are notified to the affected device manufacturers.
• The FCC work with Congress on the enactment of legislation to criminalize the unauthorized changing of device identities and to supply or possess equipment to undertake the unauthorized changing of device identities.
• The FCC to facilitate the convening of Operational Law enforcement subject matter experts to discuss mobile device theft with regard to response, outreach, education, prevention, tactics, best practices, tools, analytics, and collaboration across jurisdictions.

Just days before the Federal Communications Commission was set to finalize its controversial network neutrality regulations, Google scrambled to lobby for a last-minute tweak. In a series of phone calls, which were later disclosed in a regulatory filing, three Google lawyers pressed top FCC officials to retool the legal authority underlying an important part of the regulations. At the time, Google's request seemed like an arcane footnote in the much-broader fight over net neutrality. But now, more than nine months later, that tiny tweak is causing big headaches for the FCC in federal court.

On Dec 4, the three judges on the panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals grilled the FCC on the legal classification that Google requested. The dispute doesn't threatened to cripple the core of the FCC's net neutrality rules. But the late change could lead the court to throw out the FCC's authority over traffic congestion at the back end of the Internet. That would be a major blow to companies such as Netflix, which have complained that Internet providers are extorting them by demanding payments to relive congestion at interconnection points. That congestion can lead to grainy video quality and lengthy buffering times, Netflix says. "It looks as if the commission is in trouble on interconnection," said Randolph May, the president of the Free State Foundation, a conservative think tank that opposes the FCC's rules. "To the extent that Google is responsible [for the change]...I think it does present a problem for the commission."

Every year, the United Kingdom's telecommunications regulator Ofcom releases a report on the state of the international communications market. 2015's report -- which includes data from countries including the US, UK, France, Germany, and Japan -- offers a number of interesting insights, including the decline of fixed phone lines around the world, the relative expense of mobile data in the US, and varying morning smartphone routines around the world.

When asked how much they agreed or disagreed with the statement "I am happy to provide personal information online to companies as long as I get what I want," Americans were most likely to agree strongly. Respondents from Sweden were least likely to agree with this premise, while German and Spanish individuals were also more likely to be suspicious of companies using their personal data. To compare the price of cellphone tariffs in different countries, Ofcom looked at different tiers -- from a super-basic line with only 50 minutes of talk time a month, to a premium package with 500 minutes, 200 texts, and 5GB of 4G data. The report shows that America is clearly the most expensive country to buy a cellphone tariff, even though prices fell 3 percent during 2015. (Ofcom's figures factor in the cost of handsets in these tariffs, amortizing them over a three-year period.)