Overnight Tech: Internet domain overseer defends transition

LEDE: The government is not giving away any property when it eventually hands off its oversight role of the Internet domain name system, according to ICANN, the nonprofit group leading the transition.

A handoff of government property would be unconstitutional unless Congress approved it. GOP leaders on the House and Senate Judiciary Committees recently asked the Government Accountability Office to review the terms and determine whether they adhere to the Constitution.

ICANN’s head of government affairs said it is an old issue. 

{mosads}”I don’t know what motivated it,” ICANN’s Jamie Hedlund told The Hill. “I do know it is an old issue. It’s an issue that has been looked [at] before. We don’t believe that we have been given any property ever. We operate under a zero-dollar contract. We’ve always used our own equipment. We weren’t given anything by the government or that was funded by the government.”

The Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA) has previously written to Congress to explain why it believes the handoff, without Congress’s approval, is above board. But Hedlund says it appears the Commerce Department has withheld a privileged legal document that explains the finer legal reasoning and Congress wants access to it.  

“How it gets worked out, I don’t know. But it seems to me — We’re confident that NTIA is only [going ahead with the transition] because they can do it, and they can do it legally. They are not going to go through all this if there is a constitutional issue.”

DISH COMPANIES GIVE UP SOME SPECTRUM: Northstar Wireless and SNR Wireless are forfeiting some of their spectrum licenses from the AWS-3 spectrum auction earlier this year. The FCC determined that the companies do not qualify for small-business discounts because of their link to the larger Dish company. In total, the three companies’ bill from the auction will be roughly $10 billion. They are also paying a fee of around $413 million, and will pay more if the spectrum licenses draw a lower price when they are resold.

PRISON RULES DOMINATE FCC OCTOBER AGENDA: Proposed rules to limit the prices inmates pay for phone calls are the highest profile item on the FCC’s October open meeting agenda. Most inmates will see the maximum amount they can pay per minute significantly cut under the rules to 11 cents. The proposed rules also limit other fees. The commission will also consider a notice of proposed rulemaking to ask for comments on how to promote competition in the inmate calling industry and on more advanced systems for communicating with inmates.

There are two other items on the commission’s agenda: A notice of proposed rulemaking to alter the process by which license applications are reviewed for foreign ownership and one that “proposes to create new flexible use service rules in certain bands above 24 GHz to support multiple uses, including mobile wireless.”

FIRE DRILL FOR CYBER STAFF: Travis Moore, who heads a new fellowship program to embed technologists into congressional offices, said he has come across committees in Congress that have scrambled for tech talent as the debate about cybersecurity grows. 

“Some committees are sort of fire-drilling this, and I don’t want to name names, but one of the committees that has been doing a lot of cyber work has essentially poached a fellow from another office who came from an executive agency, but happens to have a cyber background. But because half of their work is cyber — they’ve poached him,” Moore said, stressing the need for staffers with technology backgrounds. 

PALLONE EYES ONLINE VIDEO: House Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) will give a speech a week from Friday on “the future of video competition and regulation.” His staff says it’s his first speech on telecom issues since he took over the top Dem spot on the committee.

APPLE HEEDS CALLS FOR BOARD DIVERSITY: Apple has appointed James A. Bell, a former top executive at Boeing, as a new member of its board. The appointment of Bell, who is black, comes as the company and others in the sector face scrutiny for the lack of diversity both within their workforces and on their boards. Just eight percent of the company’s workforce is black, according to the most recent data released by the company.

AMAZON BLOCKS CHROMECAST, APPLE TV SALES: Amazon, which owns the streaming service Amazon Prime, plans to stop selling Google’s Chromecast devices and Apple TV devices on its e-commerce site. According to Bloomberg, the company said it was making the decision because the Google and Apple streaming hardware do not interact well with Amazon’s streaming service. “It’s important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion,” the company said, according to the report.

MISCOMMUNICATION CAUSES GREEN CARD TROUBLES: A communications failure between the State Department and the Homeland Security Department encouraged thousands of high-skilled immigrants to apply for early green cards that were not actually available because of yearly caps, The New York Times reported. The report found, “after the State Department published its monthly visa bulletin on Sept. 9 under the new guidelines allowing many thousands of immigrants to apply early for green cards, officials did further hurried calculations and saw that under annual limits, not enough visas were immediately available.”

T-MOBILE CUSTOMERS IMPACTED BY DATA BREACH: T-Mobile CEO John Legere said on Thursday that the carrier’s subscribers had been affected by a data breach at Experian — which processes credit applications for the company. Affected records include names, addresses and birthdays, in addition to encrypted social security numbers. “Experian has determined that this encryption may have been compromised,” Legere said in a letter to consumers. “”We are working with Experian to take protective steps for all of these consumers as quickly as possible.”

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: 

A handful of technologists are slated to embed with members of Congress next year as part of a fellowship at New America’s Open Technology Institute. 

Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy gets the technology industry, but that does not automatically translate to major legislative victories if he is elected House Speaker. 

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has missed a deadline from Congress for legalizing the use of nonmilitary drones in the U.S. 

The Senate Commerce Committee will convene a hearing on Wednesday to examine the “barriers” to the deployment of wireless broadband Internet service.

Please send tips and comments to David McCabe, dmccabe@digital-stage.thehill.com and Mario Trujillo, mtrujillo@digital-stage.thehill.com Follow us on Twitter: @HilliconValley, @dmccabe