governmental regulation

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down the Environmental Protection Agency's power plant regulations, environmental groups say that the decision was narrow and temporary, The Washington Post's Steven Overly report.

The court ruled that the EPA should have considered the financial burden on power plant operators when crafting the regulations of emissions of mercury by power plants. The case has been remanded to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for further litigation. Overly notes that the D.C. Circuit could put the regulations on pause while the EPA conducts the analysis of the regulatory costs, but advocates note the regulation was not thrown out entirely.

Overly also notes that many power plants have already installed equipment to curb their emissions of mercury.

Federal Aviation Administration officials testified this week that they expect to finalize rules for commercial drone flights within the year, which is much faster than previous forecasts of the rules being finalized by the end of 2016 or the start of 2017, Reuters' David Morgan reports. He notes that American firms have been pressuring the FAA regulators to get the drone rules off the ground because of lost revenue.

The Federal Aviation Administration and the drone industry are finally starting to see eye to eye, The Washington Post's Matt McFarland reports. For example, the FAA now appears to be committed to testing if drones can be operated safely outside of the line of sight of operators, including by CNN. The cooperation between industry and the FAA is a change from when the governmental agency was highly criticized for missing deadlines for making commercial drone flights legal.

The House Transportation is going to be holding a hearing Wednesday about the status of the Federal Aviation Administration's regulations for commercial drones, The Hill's Tim Devaney and Lydia Wheeler report: "Pressure is mounting from the GOP and the business community for the FAA to approve the use of commercial drones, though, Republicans acknowledge the need to address certain safety and privacy issues."

In a separate development, Amazon has told the FAA  that it may move testing of the use of drones in package delivery outside the United States if regulators don't approve domestic testing, Bloomberg's Spencer Soper and Alan Levin report.

The Wall Street Journal's Jack Nicas and Andy Pasztor report that the Federal Aviation Administration is contemplating regulations for commercial drones that industry folks say will "essentially prohibit" industrial applications in pipeline inspections and crop monitoring. While the FAA has not released the proposed federal rules for integrating drones into American airspace, WSJ reports the rules "are expected to require operators to have a license and limit flights to daylight hours, below 400 feet and within sight of the person at the controls, according to people familiar with the rule-making process." Requiring pilot training for drone operators will curb commercial drone usage because it'll be harder to get legal status to use them, including for media usages like filmmaking, WSJ also reports.

New York Law Journal's Mark Hamblett reports that the New York Court of Appeals is going to answer a question posed to it by the Second Circuit: does New York City's law governing debt collection apply to law firms? A federal district court judge held "in 2013 the law does not apply to plaintiff law firms that attempt to collect debts, and violates a provision of the New York City Charter because it purports to grant New York City the authority to grant or withhold licenses to practice law," Hamblett reports.

The Federal Communications Commission has entered the realm of data security for the first time--with a $10 million fine no less, the Washington Post's Brian Fung reports. The fine was levied against "two telecom companies that allegedly stored personally identifiable customer data online without firewalls, encryption or password protection. The two companies, YourTel America and TerraCom, share the same owners and management. From September 2012 to April 2013, the FCC said, the companies collected information online from applicants to Lifeline, the government's telephone subsidy program for poor Americans."

The data was discovered by reporters for the Scripps Howard News Service doing a simple Google search, Fung also reports.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, "the largest ride-sharing services are now facing a legal threat from regulators on their home turf, a new setback in their race to upend the multibillion-dollar taxi industry. The district attorneys of San Francisco and Los Angeles on Thursday accused Sidecar Inc. of violating California business law and threatened an injunction on its service following a joint investigation." Uber and Lyft also received similar letters. The issue with Sidecar is that it allegedly is misleading consumers about the thoroughness of its background checks on drivers' criminal records and driving records.

The Associated Press reports on a trio of lawsuits filed today by "model aircraft hobbyists, research universities and commercial drone interests ... challenging a government directive that they say imposes tough new limits on the use of model aircraft and broadens the agency’s ban on commercial drone flights." Public comment was not allowed on the FAA's June directive, Brendan Schulman, a New York attorney representing the groups that filed the lawsuits told the AP.