TORONTO -- The Canadian government pushed back plans to auction off the nation’s valuable 700 MHz spectrum until at least the second half of next year, even though Canadian TV broadcasters are slated to start vacating that spectrum this summer and the nation’s major wireless carriers have been pressing for an earlier auction date.

Congress doesn’t want to mandate a data retention enforcement policy to help law enforcement but will very soon if it doesn’t come up with a voluntary standard, a bipartisan group of congressional leaders said at a House Judiciary hearing Tuesday. The message is loud and clear, replied Kate Dean, executive director of the United States Internet Service Provider Association after the hearing.

STANFORD, Calif. -- Civil libertarians go into Data Privacy Day, Friday, cheered by a string of recent victories in intermediate federal appeals courts concerning electronic communications, said two prominent legal activists. Last month, a “really important” ruling by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati recognized for the first time a reasonable expectation of privacy in stored e-mail, said Professor Susan Freiwald of the University of San Francisco’s law school.

Don’t let public safety and some wireless carriers stop the FCC from auctioning the 700 MHz D-block, former government officials and others on the Connect Public Safety Now coalition told Hill staffers in a pair of briefings Monday. In panels on both sides of the Capitol, the auction advocates dismissed public safety concerns about spectrum sharing, and said AT&T and Verizon are only looking out for themselves. The Senate briefing in the afternoon was well attended by staffers for senators on the Commerce Committee, including aides for Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, Mark Warner, D-Va., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.

Qwest and CenturyLink have been in talks with state legislators about shifting video oversight authority to state from city, state officials told us. Although many states have some statewide video franchising authority, in states like Colorado, companies have to seek franchise agreements with individual municipalities before they can offer video service.

The FCC will consider reverse auctions as part of its overhaul of the universal service fund, two commission officials confirmed. The FCC is already structuring a pilot program that would allow reverse auctions for the mobility fund, but Chairman Julius Genachowksi’s proposed rulemaking notice sets up a separate set of reverse auctions, the officials said.

The FCC’s proposed update to the Individual Location Longley-Rice model is “potentially useful” but includes “insufficient improvements to the model,” said Dish Network. It was responding to the FCC’s proposed adoption of a new ILLR model hoped to increase predictive accuracy. The FCC uses the ILLR model to predict broadcast signal strengths and helps determine who is eligible to receive affiliated distant signals, which are meant to fill in where consumers are “unserved” by broadcast signals. The proposed rulemaking was part of the FCC implementation of the Satellite TV Extension and Localism Act (CD Nov 24 p4), which broadcasters and DBS providers have clashed over before. The current model has led to significant overprediction, said Dish.

TORONTO -- Telco-delivered IPTV is finally beginning to take root in Canada, years after many phone companies began rolling out the new video technology over fiber lines in the U.S. Over the past few months, several major Canadian telcos have started offering IP video services over new fiber networks in their prime markets. The list of phone companies that have begun deploying IPTV includes such large national service providers as Bell Canada and Telus, as well as such regional players as SaskTel, MTS, and Bell Aliant.

Democratic Commissioners Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn have no regrets about supporting a compromise net neutrality order last month, the commissioners told us after a Minority Media and Telecommunications Council panel Friday morning. Copps acknowledged that he was “worried” that Verizon would prevail in its appeal of last month’s order, “and I said so at the time,” but said “our case is stronger” than the one the FCC took to court that led to last year’s Comcast decision. Verizon announced it would challenge the net neutrality order in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (CD Jan 21 p1).

Understanding the economics of broadcaster/pay-TV deals raises several questions -- not all of which may be readily answerable -- but the industries can help inform the FCC as it looks to start a rulemaking on retransmission consent deals, the commission’s top economist said Friday. “This is an interesting economic question” about the benefits of such deals to TV stations, subscription-video providers and their consumers, Jonathan Baker told a Technology Policy Institute event on Capitol Hill. Retrans deals aren’t a “lump-sum transfer” of money since the payments are made on a per-subscriber basis, Baker noted.