Benton RSS Feed

Verizon Communications is in talks to acquire one, and maybe two, struggling Canadian mobile-phone carriers, as it mulls a push north of the border.

Verizon has signed a nondisclosure agreement with Mobilicity, a small upstart wireless carrier in Canada, in preparation for talks over a possible deal, according to a person familiar with the matter. This person said Verizon executives have told Mobilicity that any talks with the company would be contingent on separate discussions now under way about a possible acquisition by Verizon of Wind Mobile, another small carrier in Canada. It is unclear how Verizon would structure any deal with either company, or what valuation it is putting on either or both privately held companies. A previous expression of interest for Wind, reported earlier this year by The Wall Street Journal, valued the company at about 500 million Canadian dollars ($476 million.)

The Federal Communications Commission’s Wireline Competition Bureau seeks additional comment on certain fees related to inmate calling services (ICS).

Comments in the record in the above-referenced proceeding indicate that ICS providers may charge ICS account holders fees that appear ancillary to making calls, such as account setup fees, account replenishment fees, account refund fees, and account inactivity fees. The Bureau requests that parties provide data and information about such fees. Specifically, the Bureau request that parties identify any Ancillary ICS Fees that ICS providers charge in connection with the provision of interstate ICS, the level of each fee, total amount of revenue received from each fee, and cost of providing the service for which the fee recovers. The Bureau also requests that parties identify any portion of ancillary service costs that are shared or common to provision of other services, and explain how these costs, and recovery of them, are apportioned among the services to which they are shared or common. To evaluate how costs associated with providing ancillary services relate to ICS providers’ overall costs, the Bureau requests additional service provider cost data, discussed below.

The Bureau also notified the public that certain publicly-available inmate calling services (ICS) contracts may be considered as part of the record in this proceeding.

Comments are due July 17, 2013; reply comments due July 24, 2013.

The Pentagon is paying $5 million for virtual battlefield technology to practice and launch offensive cyberattacks, according to government business documents. National security firm Apogee Research was awarded the contract on June 24. The project is part of Plan X, an initiative launched last year under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to rehearse and manage what officials call "cyberwarfare in real-time, large-scale, and dynamic network environments."

Negotiators at the World Intellectual Property Organization have finalized terms on a copyright treaty that would provide more book access to the world’s blind and visually impaired.

The treaty makes it legal to make copies of copyrighted material accessible to the blind community by converting it to formats such as Braille books, audio recordings or large-print books without first having to seek permission from copyright holders in every instance. Advocates for the visually impaired say that fewer than one percent of all the world’s books are accessible in these formats. The treaty would make it possible for converted texts in a given language to be available in multiple countries.