Hill, The

Comcast has hired a new team of high-powered lobbyists as it fights for approval of its proposed merger with Time Warner Cable.

The company added The Normandy Group to its advocacy roster, according to recently filed lobbying disclosure forms, and will have former Rep Henry Bonilla (R-TX) working on its behalf. It’s the second lobby shop Comcast has hired since announcing its intention to merge with Time Warner in February, and it brings the company’s total tally of lobby firms to 35, forms filed with the Senate indicate.

The Normandy Group will “work on Comcast's pending acquisition of Time Warner Cable and related Congressional hearing on the transaction,” according to the paperwork. Also on the account are Krista Stark, who served as legislative director to Rep James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-WI), when he was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Louis Dupart, a veteran of Capitol Hill, the Defense Department and the CIA.

Sen Mike Lee (R-UT) said he is worried that the proposed $45 billion merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable could lead to a clampdown on conservative media.

The deal would put one massive cable and Internet provider in 27 of the top 30 markets in the country. But perhaps more importantly, that resulting cable giant would also own NBC Universal and its slew of subsidiary channels, which Comcast has owned since 2011. That could lead to unfair treatment of some content, Sen Lee warned, including shows appealing to the conservative right.

“I’ve heard some concerns expressed that the emerging Comcast, the post-merger Comcast, might have the incentive or even the predilection but certainly an enhanced capacity, due to its larger size, to discriminate against certain types of content, including political content,” he said at a hearing with Comcast and Time Warner Cable executives.

The House Commerce Privacy Working Group met with Federal Trade Commission (FTC) officials as part of an ongoing series of meetings to examine online privacy that began last fall.

The group, led by co-chairmen Reps Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Peter Welch (D-VT), met with Democratic Commissioner Julie Brill and Republican Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen to discuss the agency's role in protecting online privacy.

In a prepared statement for the group, Commissioner Brill outlined the ways in which the FTC gets involved in the online privacy space, including bringing charges against companies that fail to adequately protect consumer data from data breaches and companies that mislead consumers about their data collection and sharing practices. Speaking before the afternoon meeting with Commissioners Brill and Ohlhausen, Rep Welch said the meetings with tech companies and privacy advocates thus far have been educational for members.

The Obama Administration is promising to come back to Congress with additional reforms of government spying operations.

Attorney General Eric Holder told lawmakers in the House Judiciary Committee that the White House’s recent legislative proposal to end the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk collection of phone records would not be its last word on the surveillance. Additional reforms, he said, would be on their way to Congress once he and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper decide how to move forward, as President Barack Obama directed in a January speech.

“We have begun the process that the president gave us in that regard. We are not finished with the work that we are doing,” Attorney General Holder said.

Critics of the NSA’s surveillance have said that the White House’s plans to end the phone records program, unveiled in March, seemed too limited. “They focus on one program used to access one database collected under one legal authority,” said Rep John Conyers (D-MI), the top Democrat on the Judiciary panel. “To me the problem is far more complicated than that narrow lens implies.”

The prime subject under review before the administration is Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, which allows the NSA to collect information about “non-US persons” who are “reasonably believed” to be outside American borders.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said that he is hopeful his committee will consider his patent reform bill.

“As chairman of the Judiciary Committee, I am committed to ensuring we move forward with meaningful legislation to support businesses and combat abuses in the patent system,” he said, adding that he “hopes” to begin consideration of a compromise patent reform bill. Negotiations continued, and no manager’s amendment was published by the close of business day.

“Weekend negotiations on this complex issue were positive, and I am confident we are closer to solidifying a bipartisan agreement that incorporates the ideas of many members,” Chairman Leahy said. He added that he scheduled the upcoming markup so that “all members [will] have the opportunity to debate this legislation.”

A former lawmaker involved in the sweeping rewrite of communications laws in 1996 says he regrets giving too much discretion to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Former Rep Jack Fields (R-TX), who served as chairman of the Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance back when the 1996 Telecommunications Act was passed, said that Congress should have been more prescriptive.

“We gave the Federal Communications Commission too much latitude and too much flexibility,” he said at a Capitol Hill event sponsored by the Internet Innovation Alliance, a group that advocates for universal broadband networks. “I think we should’ve been much more prescriptive in terms of legislative intent.”

Tech companies are pushing federal regulators to get involved in the multiplying disputes over how they connect to Internet providers.

The industry and allied groups are looking for opportunities to push for equal treatment of Internet traffic in the wake of a court ruling in March that opened the door to the use of “fast lanes” for Web traffic. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler has said his agency wouldn’t look at the deals that websites strike with Internet providers -- called “interconnection” or “peering” arrangements -- in the agency's push to rewrite net neutrality rules.

Chairman Wheeler is keeping an eye on the issue, according to an agency spokesman. “Peering and interconnection are not under consideration in the Open Internet proceeding, but we are monitoring the issues involved to see if any action is needed in any other context,” he said.

Tech and advocacy groups say the FCC needs more information about the often-hidden deals, which were left untouched by the agency's first round of net neutrality rules. “We just don’t even know what’s going on in this market,” Public Knowledge Vice President Michael Weinberg said. “What we’ve been telling the FCC to do is figure out what’s happening” in the peering market, he said.

TechAmerica is bringing on a former House Homeland Security Committee staffer as its director of cybersecurity policy. Michael Spierto, who worked on the Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection and Security Technologies subcommittee, will help the organization as lawmakers continue to push for legislation to protect the country’s computer networks.

“Cybersecurity is a worldwide challenge that spans across every industry and government sector,” Spierto said in a statement. “TechAmerica is on the forefront of this debate and I aim to build upon the organization's proven record of success to development of new thresholds of achievement.”

TechAmerica has urged Congress not to enact an overly broad cybersecurity bill that could end up doing more harm than good by imposing extra mandates or requirements on companies. Instead, it has pushed for a way to allow companies and the government to better share information as well as a nationwide set of rules for alerting people after their information may have been compromised in a data breach.

Major tech companies including Microsoft and Apple are teaming up to advocate for strong patent protections as patent reform efforts heat up on the Hill.

Microsoft, Apple and IBM joined with GE, Pfizer, DuPont and Ford to launch the Partnership for American Innovation "to highlight the value of intellectual property and patents to US jobs and the economy." The group will focus on promoting strong patent protections, highlighting the role of those protections in the global economy and pushing for the Patent and Trademark Office to be fully funded.

The group is being advised by former Patent and Trademark Office Director David Kappos, now a partner at Cravath, Swaine and Moore. Kappos said he has seen "firsthand the significant role the patent system plays in encouraging inventors, promoting investment in innovation, and creating jobs." “Now is not the time to gamble with America’s innovation engine -- once patent protections are eliminated, they cannot be restored," he said.

Google has paid a fine of 1 million euros for violating Italian privacy rules with its Street View service.

Italy’s data protection watchdog said the Web giant’s cars “roamed the streets without being perfectly recognizable,” which prevented people from being about “to decide whether or not to avoid being photographed. The government agency received a slew of complaints, it said, from people who did not want to be captured by Google’s cameras but were not able to make the choice. One million euros is the equivalent of about $1.4 million.

The Italian watchdog claimed that Google’s cars were not easily identifiable. It required the company to publicize upcoming routes ahead of time online, on the radio and in at least two local newspapers. Google had “promptly adopted” those measures, it added.