The FCC's adoption interconnection rules to give certain parties more favorable interconnection terms would reward behavior that's already proscribed under Section 5 of the FTC Act, said Jonathan Lee, a telecom attorney. Netflix wasn't surprised that its customers experienced degraded service levels as result of its "limiting the number of Comcast interconnection points to which it funneled its traffic," he said. Netflix's decision to limit its number of transit vendors artificially "meant that these vendors' capacity between their networks and Comcast were bound to become overwhelmed, resulting in congestion," he said in a blog post. The commission shouldn’t deceive itself into thinking that "consumer welfare" is served by "preemptively granting concessions to prevent behavior that is otherwise flatly proscribed by existing consumer protection laws," he said. Lee has worked on behalf of AT&T and other competitive and incumbent telecom service providers.

AT&T said it's increasing its quarterly dividend 2.2 percent, from 46 cents to 47 cents per share on a quarterly basis. AT&T's board approved the hike. “Returning value to our shareholders is a top priority and we’re pleased that this is the 31st straight year we’ve increased our quarterly dividend,” said AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson Friday.

The Patent and Trademark Office will host its first trade secrets symposium Jan. 8, said a PTO news release Tuesday. U.S. government, industry and legal officials will discuss issues of trade secrets theft, including proposed legislation. The event will be at the PTO office in Alexandria, Virginia, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. (see here to register).

Many are taking an unnecessarily dim view of the telecom sector, especially given “the craziness” of recent price wars, said Wells Fargo analyst Jennifer Fritzsche. “We were marketing this past week and it was met with a lot of pity looks that we cover such a ‘horrible’ and ‘uninvestable’ space,” Fritzsche said in a Sunday note to investors. The price wars won’t go on forever, she said. “Maybe crazy and maybe we are too glass half full but recall the airline industry was once like this,” she said. “And now look how life has changed. If you don't believe us -- try to book your spring break tickets!”

Nearly 957,000 patents were granted by the world’s five largest patent offices (IP5) in 2013, 4 percent above 2012, said a Friday news release from the Patent and Trademark Office. The release cited the publication of a report from the IP5: the PTO; European Patent Office; Japan Patent Office; Korean Intellectual Property Office; and State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China. Patent applications to those offices totaled 2.1 million, up 11 percent from 2012, said IP5.

President Barack Obama’s statement in favor of broadband reclassification potentially weakened “perhaps significantly, the case for granting deference” to the FCC's ultimate decision on net neutrality, said Free State Foundation President Randolph May Thursday in a blog post on The Hill website. “The president's intervention politicized the agency's decision-making process in a way that may give a reviewing court considerable pause before granting any deference.”

The Federal Aviation Administration’s final rule for small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) operations and other key requirements defined in the 2012 FAA Modernization and Reform Act remain incomplete, said a GAO report released Wednesday. FAA officials have indicated that they are hoping to issue a rulemaking notice soon, with a timeline for issuing the final rule in late 2016 or early 2017, the report said. Although the FAA established the test sites required in the act, some test site operators “are uncertain about what research should be done at the site, and believe incentives are needed for industry to use the test sites,” the report said. Absent regulations, “unauthorized UAS operations have, in some instances, compromised safety,” it said. FAA granted seven exemptions for the filmmaking industry as of Dec. 4, it said (see 1406030065). More than 140 applications awaited review for other industries for uses like electric power line monitoring, the report said.

APCO plans a series of seminars across the U.S. on communications during incidents involving active shooters, APCO said. “Active shooter incidents and their response pose several unique concerns for all facets of public safety including public safety communications,” the group said. There is "a multitude of issues that make responding to an active shooter incident more difficult than other armed subject calls or violent in-progress incidents.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Cybersecurity and Communications gave CenturyLink a task order to provide Einstein 3 Accelerated intrusion prevention security services to federal civilian agencies, the company said Monday. DHS’s Einstein program measures network traffic patterns to indicate possible malicious cyberactivity, CenturyLink said. DHS gave the company the one-year task order in 2013. The new task order asks the telco to provide additional managed security services beyond those included in the original task order by integrating with CenturyLink systems specifically designed to provide cybersecurity services for federal agencies, the company said.

Cisco filed two lawsuits against Arista Networks Friday, alleging the defendant committed numerous copyright and patent violations (see complaints here and here). Cisco’s suits -- filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California -- allege that because many of Arista’s executives were former Cisco employees, they used several of Cisco’s patents and copied Cisco’s command line interface. “Arista’s EOS [Extensible Operating System] was developed from the ground up as a nextgeneration network operating system for the cloud based upon the pioneering technologies invented by Arista -- far from the ugly messaging pursued by Cisco on Friday,” said Dan Scheinman, Arista board member, in a blog post Sunday. “Cisco’s lawsuit is just like the lawsuits (actual and threatened) brought against it in the 90’s by Lucent, IBM and Nortel -- an attempt by a legacy vendor that is falling behind in the marketplace to use the legal system to try and slow a competitor who is innovating and winning,” he said. “Arista incorporates features knowing that Cisco holds intellectual property rights related to those features, all of which are Cisco proprietary and none of which are industry standards,” said Mark Chandler, Cisco general counsel, in a blog post Friday.