CEA President Gary Shapiro took the opportunity of a Media Institute lunch Monday to again accuse broadcasters of trying to delay the spectrum incentive auction. “Broadcasters appear to be employing every possible strategy to slow walk the auctions,” he said, repeating an accusation he has leveled against broadcasters at recent speaking appearances (CD April 2 p6).

The move to Internet Protocol networks will implicate a whole host of policy issues, and regulators should use a light touch on an industry that’s no longer dominated by monopolies, ILEC executives told Senate staffers Monday. Senior Vice President-Regulatory Affairs Bob Quinn offered more details on AT&T’s proposed deregulatory wire center trials.

The FCC Wireline Bureau sided with advocates of using a greenfield Connect America Fund cost model rather than a brownfield one for estimating costs. Industry officials have characterized this choice as the most important before the commission as it develops a forward-looking cost model to estimate the support necessary to serve areas where costs are above a specified benchmark, but below a second “extremely high-cost” benchmark (CD Jan 16 p3). Monday’s order is a win for the ABC Coalition, made up of USTelecom and several ILECs, which support the greenfield approach. Commission officials signaled earlier this month they would endorse a greenfield approach over the alternative approach (CD April 5 p3). A greenfield approach estimates the full cost of constructing and operating a network from the ground up, while a brownfield approach takes into account the existing infrastructure already in the ground.

Financial cybercrime and state-affiliated espionage made up a combined 95 percent of all cybersecurity incidents in 2012 included in a Verizon Communications study released Monday. The report examined 47,000 security incident reports from Verizon and 18 other organizations, including the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) and two of its Computer Emergency Readiness Team units, as well as the U.S. Secret Service. Verizon focused its study on the 621 confirmed data breaches included in those reports, said Jay Jacobs, principal with Verizon Enterprise Solutions’ RISK Team, which writes the annual data breach report. A final version of the report had not been made public at our deadline.

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai called for a Connect America Fund to support broadband buildout for rate-of-return carriers. Also at an NCTA conference Monday, Rural Utilities Service Acting Administrator John Padalino noted he and U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack had asked for expanded USF support (CD Feb 20 p3). Broadband buildout support for rate-of-return telco carriers “would recognize that line loss in rural America is real, and that direct support for broadband-capable facilities” is “critical,” Pai said. Rural representatives twice interrupted him with applause, as Pai, who grew up in Kansas, repeatedly characterized himself as a friend of rural interests. “My name is Ajit, and I am a rural American,” he said. “When I confront a rural issue, whether it is about call completion or universal service or outdated regulations, it isn’t just an abstraction to me."

A recent filing by the Justice Department on spectrum and competition isn’t consistent with last year’s Spectrum Act, top Republican members of the House Commerce Committee said in a letter to FCC commissioners. If the commission adopts spectrum aggregation limits as part of incentive auction rules, it could doom the auction to failure, the legislators wrote.

Syncbak, a closely-held company that distributes participating TV stations’ signals online within their designated market area, sold a minority stake to CBS for an undisclosed amount, the companies said. CBS joins the NAB and CEA as investors in the company.

Provo, Utah, has fought for years to make its municipal fiber network a success. “From the very beginning, we have struggled,” Mayor John Curtis told us. A $39 million 20-year bond, taken out eight years ago, funded only the infrastructure buildout, he said: Operating the network, and maintaining and upgrading equipment, has “always been a struggle.” With the announcement Wednesday that Google will make Provo its third “Fiber City” (CD April 18 p18), Curtis thinks the city’s luck is about to change.

Viacom plans to again appeal a federal judge’s ruling that Google’s YouTube acted within the safe harbor of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in dealing with clips of Viacom’s content that users posted to the site. Judge Louis Stanton of U.S. District Court in Manhattan granted Google’s motion for summary judgment and dismissed Viacom’s case. “This ruling ignores the opinions of the higher courts and completely disregards the rights of creative artists,” a Viacom spokesman said. “We intend to appeal the decision."

"There’s a lot of work to be done and questions to be answered to ensure successful and timely transition to enable non-federal use” of the two bands, Strickling wrote. The two groups Strickling said he has asked to start planning for a possible auction are the federal Policy and Plans Steering Group, a high-level group created by the White House in 2010 to oversee spectrum, and the Interdepartment Radio Advisory Committee, made up of spectrum experts from the various federal departments and agencies.