Digital Convergence
Different Media 'Decency' Rules Spur Thorny Debate
     The voice of radio host Howard Stern literally went out of the world this week when an all-new program lineup launched on Sirius Satellite Radio. The key selling point: "Howard Stern, uncensored only on Sirius." With such a bold marketing message, Stern and Sirius are forcing a nettlesome and looming Washington debate: Why are broadcast television and radio subject to indecency standards when cable and satellite services are not? Few people in the capital city have a good answer. Technological convergence is blurring the lines between broadcasting, satellite, cable, mobile telephones and the Internet. The issue reappears over pornography, content rating and filtering. It also is embroiled in the debate over the appropriate packages for bundling video entertainment. Technology Daily is covering various aspects of the debate in a new series of articles. Other stories that ran this week covered the debate at the FCC, in Congress, in the courts and in the states.

Campaigns
Candidates For Majority Leader Strong On Tech Issues
     With the race for House majority leader running white hot between Republican Reps. John Boehner of Ohio and Roy Blunt of Missouri, the technology industry can stay cool. The two top contenders for the post have strong records on high-tech issues. According to the Information Technology Industry Council, the lawmakers received a 100 percent rating for 10 key tech-related votes in the 108th Congress. Boehner enjoys a 98 percent lifetime voting record with the group. ITI tags Blunt with an 84 percent rating.

Campaigns
Ex-ITAA Chief Miller Will Challenge Sen. Allen
     Former technology lobbyist Harris Miller made his candidacy for the U.S. Senate official this week by filing at the Federal Election Commission. He will challenge Republican Sen. George Allen for one of Virginia's Senate seats in 2006. Miller's long-expected candidacy caps a flurry of activity that saw him depart the Information Technology Association of America last week after a decade-long stint as its president. Miller has strong ties to Virginia's outgoing governor, Democrat Mark Warner. Miller already is the target of attacks from some online activists for his work at ITAA, particularly his defense of e-voting technology.

Telecom
Indiana Senate OKs Phone Deregulation, Broadband Rules
     An Indiana Senate committee advanced a proposal to deregulate the state's telephone market. The Homeland Security, Utilities and Public Policy Committee approved the measure, S.B. 245, on an 8-2 vote, sending it to the full Senate for action that could come as early as next week. The bill would let telephone companies set their own prices by 2009 and hike their rates by $1 each month until that date, if they provide high-speed Internet services to more than half of their customers in areas with increased prices. The legislation also would empower the state with franchising authority for video programming and would create strict rules for municipalities seeking to deploy broadband networks.

Privacy
Enacting A Law On Data Breaches Will Be Difficult
     Congress will face pressure this year to move data-protection legislation that would pre-empt state laws, but advocates on both sides of the issue acknowledge that success will require coordination. "Industry is at a point where it would like to see legislation pass ... but with six different committees engaged (with the House Judiciary Committee yet to come), we don't know what the timing will be, but the sooner the better," said Tom Boyd, a partner at the Alston & Bird law firm. Boyd leads the lobbying efforts for the National Business Coalition on E-Commerce and Privacy, a group of 16 large, brand-name companies. Edmund Mierzwinski, the consumer program director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, estimates that there is less than a 50 percent chance that Congress will enact any data-protection law by the end of the year.

Spectrum
Satellite Firm Fights FCC Decision That Favors Rivals
     Inmarsat, a leading satellite communications company, has launched a full-scale attack on the FCC's decision last year to award 40 megahertz of prime spectrum to two rival companies at no charge. The awardees, ICO Satellite Services and TerreStar Networks, were pleased with the Dec. 9 decision and said the agency's action would allow them to enhance rural, high-speed Internet services, and to offer emergency communications after disasters and terrorist attacks. But Inmarsat blasted the FCC for "flawed and unsubstantiated assumptions" in splitting the 40 MHz of spectrum between ICO and TerreStar. Each of the companies was awarded 10 MHz in the uplink band and 10 MHz in the downlink band. In other news, FCC chairman Kevin Martin said the agency will not let high-speed Internet companies block access to content and services but will let them offer tiered categories of high-speed access.

Intellectual Property
Experts Hail Initiative To Improve Patent Quality
     The software and intellectual property communities hailed a Patent and Trademark Office initiative to improve software patent quality by embracing the "open source" community. "Any effort to improve patent quality is an important step," said Morgan Reed, vice president of public affairs at the Association for Competitive Technology, adding that the group is "hopeful that this step moves us forward." PTO recently asked IBM to coordinate meetings with the open-source community to discuss patent quality. The initiative includes a program to establish collaborative patent reviews, and a project led by open-source backers to ensure that patents are not duplicated and are issued only for actual software inventions. It also aims to create a unified, numeric index to assess the quality of patents and applications.

Business
Format Wars II: High-Definition DVDs Spur Battle
     Remember Betamax versus VHS, the technology format war of the 1980s? In the days of the analog videocassette recorder, video rental stores like Blockbuster lined one wall with movies in one format and a second wall with movies in the rival format. Now get ready for the sequel: the high-definition format war for digital videodiscs. In one camp are Dell, Philips Electronics, Sony, seven major movie studios and about 170 companies that back the Blu-Ray Disc format. Intel, Microsoft, Toshiba, three studios and about 120 companies constitute the other group, which backs the HD DVD format. Each has reasons for the choice. Blu-Ray can hold 50 gigabytes on its discs. But the rival camp said its format will prevail by building DVDs in both standard and HD DVD.

Lobbying
New Biometrics Group Focuses On Frequent Fliers
     A new coalition of biometric and access-control companies launched this week to advise the government on large public-credentialing programs such as the Registered Traveler system of the Transportation Security Administration. The group, called the Voluntary Credentialing Industry Coalition, will be led by Wexler & Walker Vice Chairman Tom Blank. Its members include ImageWare Systems, Iridian Technologies and Panasonic. Blank said VCIC will focus on voluntary credentialing programs, and related issues of consumer privacy and data theft.