Telecom policy was one topic of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, a Senate Commerce Committee member, during his keynote at the Republican National Convention Wednesday. “The internet -- keep it free from taxes, keep it free from regulation and don’t give it away to Russia and China," Cruz told the delegates, shortly before a chorus of boos began over his refusal to endorse GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. Cruz has opposed the FCC net neutrality order and the Obama administration’s internet governance position.
Russia export controls and sanctions
The use of export controls and sanctions on Russia has surged since the country's invasion of Crimea in 2014, and especially its invasion of Ukraine in in February 2022. Similar export controls and sanctions have been imposed by U.S. allies, including the EU, U.K. and Japan. The following is a listing of recent articles in Export Compliance Daily on export controls and sanctions imposed on Russia:
The Air Force expects to launch a wideband analysis of alternatives (AoA) this fall that could see DOD increasingly turn to commercial communications satellite providers for a much bigger slice of the military’s communications needs. But satcom operators said in interviews that commercial satcom capabilities could be a secondary issue to the challenge in changing military procurement procedures. "The number one issue is cultural," said Myland Pride, Intelsat director-government and regulatory affairs. DOD and other government agencies increasingly recognize commercial capability improvements in satcom and other mission areas, Pride said, but "to switch from how they have done business for many, many years is difficult."
The Air Force's Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) almost certainly will get out of the business of space traffic management, said Benjamin Roberts, assistant director-civil and commercial space at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. With the Federal Aviation Administration almost surely picking up the space traffic cop job, the key issue is how all that will shake out, he said Thursday at Future Space 2016 during a series of talks about the state of space debris management. The new oversight should come with new technologies and capabilities built in and not just a transfer of the status quo from one body to another, Roberts said.
Russia denied entry to U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors Chairman Jeff Shell, the board said in a news release Wednesday. Shell arrived at Moscow’s Sheremetevo Airport late Tuesday on a flight from Prague, but Russian security officials detained him for several hours in a locked room, then escorted him to a flight to Amsterdam, BBG said. Shell possessed a valid passport and Russian visa; the security officials gave no explanation but told Shell it was a lifetime ban, BBG said. BBG officials met Wednesday with U.S. Ambassador John Tefft in Moscow to discuss the matter, the board said. Shell, also chairman of NBCUniversal’s Filmed Entertainment Division, was appointed by President Barack Obama to chair the board that oversees all U.S. international media.
The 2016 draft Republican Party platform says Republicans don’t want government to be a “meddlesome monitor” on tech policy and attacked the FCC net neutrality order and broadband policies generally. The Republican National Convention platform committee began meeting Monday in Cleveland, the site of the GOP convention beginning next week, to start debating the GOP draft platform.
Only a “limited window of time” remains for Congress to intervene to stop the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition from occurring as scheduled Sept. 30, said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, during a Heritage Foundation-TechFreedom event Thursday. Cruz has led Senate skeptics of the IANA transition, most recently by bowing the Protecting Internet Freedom Act (S-3034) last month. S-3034 and its House companion (HR-5418) would prohibit NTIA from allowing the IANA transition unless Congress “expressly grants” the NTIA administrator the authority to allow it (see 1606080044).
That commissioners got a chance to vote on the FCC's latest Open-Market Reorganization for the Betterment of International Telecommunications (Orbit) Act report to Congress raises the question of why similar agency reports don't follow the same procedure, Commissioner Mike O'Rielly said. The FCC issued its 17th annual status report on the privatization status of Inmarsat, Intelsat and New Skies Tuesday. It was unanimously approved by commissioners, with O'Rielly and Commissioner Ajit Pai issuing separate statements. The report said the FCC over the past year has taken part in numerous international satellite coordination negotiations with Russia as Intelsat's licensing administration, while the company signed operational arrangements with satellite operators licensed by seven nations, which will in turn lead to coordination agreements between the U.S. and the pertinent foreign administrations. The FCC said during the past year it also granted a number of Inmarsat earth station licenses and approved other earth stations' authority to communicate with satellites from New Skies, an Intelsat spin-off. Several past reports have said Inmarsat and Intelsat have fully transitioned to privatized operations. Pai has said the Orbit Act reports have outlived their usefulness (see 1506100062) and he repeated that Tuesday in a brief statement, saying "There's no need to reinvent the wheel." O'Rielly said he proposed a similar process for all delegated authority matters before the agency: "Alas, this reasonable process reform has been summarily rejected to date."
Congress should work quickly to ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as an expanding patchwork of data localization rules in Asia threatens to stunt U.S. digital entrepreneurship, weaken U.S. dominance in services exporting, and barricade Eastern economies from adopting open internet standards, said Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Robert Holleyman Friday. Governments including China, India, Indonesia, Russia, South Korea and Turkey either maintain or are working to pass commercially inhibiting data localization rules, Holleyman said at the American Enterprise Institute.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., filed companion versions of the Protecting Internet Freedom Act Wednesday, in a bid to hinder the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition. The bill, as expected (see 1605240067 and 1606020056), would prohibit NTIA from allowing the IANA transition unless Congress “expressly grants” the NTIA administrator the authority to allow it. The bill also would require NTIA to certify within 60 days of the bill's enactment that the U.S. government has “secured sole ownership” of the .gov and .mil top-level domains and that the government has a contract with ICANN that grants the U.S. “exclusive control and use of those domains in perpetuity.” Sens. James Lankford, R-Okla., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, signed on as co-sponsors of the Senate version. “This issue threatens not only our personal liberties, but also our national security,” Cruz said in a news release. “We must act affirmatively to protect the Internet and the amazing engine for economic growth and opportunity the Internet has become.” The White House “wants to hand over the keys to the Internet to countries like China and Russia,” Duffy said in the Cruz news release. “The governments of these countries do not value free speech. In fact, they censor the Internet and routinely repress and punish political dissidents. They cannot be trusted with something as fundamental to free speech as a free and open Internet.” Duffy last year bowed the Global Internet Freedom Act (HR-355), which also sought to prohibit the IANA transition (see 1501150030). Cruz's office noted support for the Protecting Internet Freedom Act from more than a dozen conservative and right-leaning groups, including Americans for Tax Reform, National Religious Broadcasters and TechFreedom. Heritage Foundation's Heritage Action for America lobbying arm endorsed the bill Tuesday. The White House “has viewed this transition as a cheap way to recover the global political credibility it lost because of the Snowden revelations and its own stubborn resistance to real surveillance reforms,” said TechFreedom President Berin Szóka in a news release. “They simply haven't been willing to negotiate to protect ICANN’s multistakeholder model.” Cruz also filed the Protecting Internet Freedom Act's language Tuesday as an amendment to National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2017 (S-2943) (see 1606070056). The bill is unlikely to pass on its own or as part of S-2943, but its introduction and recent skepticism voiced by other GOP Senate Commerce Committee members about the IANA transition “puts more steel in the spines” of members of the House Appropriations Committee to extend an existing ban on NTIA's use of its funds on the transition, said Phil Corwin, principal of e-commerce and IP law consultancy Virtualaw, in an interview.
The U.S. and EU took divergent cybersecurity policy approaches in the almost three years since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden began leaking information about controversial U.S. surveillance programs, but they continue to maintain a strong cybersecurity partnership, said Andrea Glorioso, delegation of the EU to the U.S. counselor-digital economy/cyber. Glorioso and others at Wednesday's Georgetown University Law Center event said cybersecurity policy differences between the EU and the U.S. are reflected in the U.S. 2015 Cybersecurity Act and the EU 2016 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).