Security
Local Officials Want Aid Directly And Based On Risk
     Federal grants for "first responders" to emergencies should be distributed based on the community risk of terrorism and other problems rather than population, and the money should go straight to the local level rather than being funneled through state officials, mayors from across the nation told Homeland Security Department officials. Congress has several former mayors in its ranks, and that local experience gives leaders more of a perspective when addressing the issue, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said at a U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting. "Congress is increasingly aware that [funding] can get stopped at different levels," Frist said. He promised "prioritization on homeland security" in the federal budget and an increase "in the range of 8 to 10 percent."

E-Government
Lawmaker, Officials Promote 'Share In Savings' Contracting
     A contracting initiative that pays vendors from savings that their programs generate for the government could be an ideal vehicle for deploying new e-government services, but only if congressional objections to it wane and federal agencies can properly manage it, panelists said during a panel discussion. The "share in savings" programs require little or no upfront spending by government entities. The contractors are paid for services only from the savings the programs generate, thus the contractors assume all the risk and have a great incentive to achieve results. "Share in savings gets contracts launched that otherwise would not see the light of day," said Stephen Perry, head of the General Services Administration. Virginia Republican Rep. Tom Davis said he supports the program, but some other lawmakers do not like outsourcing government services.

Telecom
FCC's Abernathy Favors Light Touch On Internet Telephony
     The FCC expects to soon launch a formal inquiry into what rules should apply to Internet telephone service, or voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP), but Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy already has decided what some of the answers should be. "I think it is beyond dispute that as broadband networks become increasingly ubiquitous, VoIP service is set to take off," Abernathy said at a Catholic University symposium. Abernathy said she is predisposed to treat nascent services with a light regulatory touch, noting that she sees no reason to establish price or quality regulations. In fact, she said the emergence of the service, which some observers believe eventually will completely replace traditional phone service, calls into question the entire regulatory regime.

Digital Television
FCC Makes Progress, But Digital TV Deadline Likely To Fail
     The FCC made progress last year in pushing the nation's transition to digital television, but the agency has a lot of work ahead of it and it is widely recognized that the transformation will not be complete by 2006, as Congress had envisioned. The content and electronics industries are awaiting the next FCC round of decisions and "then at that point hope we will see another great leap forward," Susan Fox, vice president of government relations for Walt Disney, said at a Catholic University symposium. For example, the FCC must tackle whether broadcasters will be required to simultaneously provide the same content on their digital streams and their analog streams until the transition is complete. Many issues must be resolved, and those open questions mean that the digital TV transition will not be complete and that the spectrum will not be returned until long after the 2006 deadline, which stipulated that analog broadcasts would not cease until 85 percent of the population has access to digital signals.

Crime
ID Theft Tops Complaint List, E-Auctions Creep Ahead
     Identity theft continued to be the top fraud complaint reported to the government in 2003, topping the list for the fourth year in a row, according to an annual study released by the FTC. But for the first year since 2000, when the FTC began tabulating numbers, a majority of the other complaints concerned Internet-based scams, with grievances about auctions topping that list. Of the 516,740 complaints logged in the FTC's Consumer Sentinel database, 42 percent, or 214,905, concerned ID theft. Internet auction-related complaints were 15 percent, shop-at-home catalog sales were 9 percent, and Internet services and computer complaints were 6 percent.

Budget
Manufacturing Program's Allies Question Bush's Intent
     Commerce Secretary Donald Evans recently expressed the Bush administration's support for a program designed to assist small manufacturers, but fans of the initiative say the administration is starving the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) to death. "Since George Bush became president, we've lost about 2.5 million manufacturing jobs," said Senate Commerce Committee ranking Democrat Ernest (Fritz) Hollings of South Carolina, who has fought to restore funding to the program. "The administration's solution is to give lip service to the problem while refusing to fully fund a program that works." MEP is a nationwide network of centers that provide resources and support to help small firms compete globally. President Bush is expected to call for fiscal 2005 funding for the program to be even with the fiscal 2004 allocation, sources said. The omnibus appropriations bill pending in the Senate would allocate less than $40 million for the program, down from $106 million last year.

Intellectual Property
House Judiciary Committee OKs Database Legislation
     The House Judiciary Committee approved legislation that aims to protect commercial databases from piracy. The legislation, approved on a 16-7 vote, is the product of more than two years of negotiations among several members of the Judiciary and Energy and Commerce committees. Supporters of the bill said current law does not do enough to prevent thieves from copying significant amounts of factual material from other companies' databases, repackaging it and selling it as competing information products. But several members, including Rick Boucher, D-Va., opposed the legislation, arguing that it could diminish the public's access to important factual information.