Internet stakeholders will need to participate in the debate over this Congress’s Internet policies if they want to win on issues like e-commerce sales taxes and cybersecurity, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said Tuesday at an Internet Association event. Grassroots opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) was a turning point in the dialogue on Capitol Hill over Internet-related issues, Wyden said. “For the first time, the technology sector had beaten the middle man,” he said. “We've got to find a way to build on that, and that’s why your work is so incredibly important today.” Regulators and other lawmakers also outlined how upcoming policy discussions would involve the Internet community.

AT&T opposed a proposal at the FCC by several CLECs to adopt rules making it harder for ILECs to retire copper loops, and making it easier for CLECs to get access to last-mile copper facilities. The telco said granting the petition by TelePacific, Mpower, Level 3 and others could delay the transition to all-Internet Protocol networks and drain ILEC bank accounts. CLECs and state regulators supported the petition, saying ILEC opposition is driven not by a desire to further the public interest but to maintain their own dominance.

The Senate’s most senior statesmen pledged to protect the nation’s broadcasters from any FCC effort that would force them to relinquish spectrum for the incentive auctions, Tuesday at the NAB state leadership conference. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy, D-Vt., and former Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, touted the importance of broadcasters in communicating lifesaving information to local communities during emergencies and put a spotlight on the importance of retrans consent. The Judiciary Committee will attempt to pass a reauthorization bill this session to extend the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act (STELA), which expires Dec. 31, 2014 (CD Jan 17 p1). On a separate panel, FCC commissioners Ajit Pai and Jessica Rosenworcel discussed their decision-making processes on media issues.

Documents submitted to the FCC “contradict the Applicants’ initial public assertions” that a combination of T-Mobile and MetroPCS won’t mean job losses, the Communications Workers of America said in a filing Monday at the FCC. CWA’s arguments are based on information submitted by T-Mobile and MetroPCS that has not been released publicly, and the filing was heavily redacted. The letter was posted by the FCC Tuesday. T-Mobile said it plans to explain why CWA’s assertions don’t add up.

Sinclair’s recent TV station buying spree has been fueled in part by a desire to aggregate more spectrum, which the company believes will be increasingly valuable, CEO David Smith told investors at a Deutsche Bank conference Monday. “We think the long-term prospects for a spectrum-space play in TV, and the opportunities it’s going to provide, are very material and we think that time is getting closer and closer,” Smith said. “These acquisitions are a mechanism to get into position to play what we think is clearly going to be a larger opportunity that exists by virtue of a platform that is capable of doing things well beyond what it’s capable of doing now,” he said. The company has been a proponent of a plan to let broadcasters provide backhaul Internet service to carriers (CD Nov 17/11 p11).

Univision’s UVideos bilingual digital video service will be made available to select Samsung CE devices later this month and will be on a total of nine platforms by the end of 2013, Carlos Alimurung, Univision vice president-digital distribution, told us at the Media Summit New York on Tuesday. That will represent more than 200 million mobile and connected devices, he said.

More operating system and device competition should mean lower smartphone subsidies across the industry over the next two to three years, said Verizon Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo Monday at a Deutsche Bank investor conference. The move of two new major operating system entrants into the market -- Windows Phone and BlackBerry 10 -- is a good thing because “the more operating systems you have in the ecosystem, inherently the more competitive that system becomes,” he said. “I am a true believer that as these operating systems start to really take hold … then you are going to start to see more competition which leads to lower prices. So I think it is going to follow the same way that I watched the basic phones come over time. I think smartphones will do the same thing."

The FCC should plan to slice more than $17 million in salaries and expenses and $200,000 from its spectrum auction program account in fiscal year 2013, according to a recent White House report. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) detailed exactly how the $85 billion in cuts would affect federal agencies following the president’s release of the sequestration order late Friday. Other agencies that oversee telecom and technology issues should expect to reduce their 2013 fiscal year expenditures by 5 percent, the report said.

Stakeholders centered on super-fast broadband networks defended and debated network models Monday at the Freedom to Connect conference in Silver Spring, Md., placing an emphasis on municipally owned networks and community needs. The gathering’s sponsors include Google Fiber, the Open Technology Institute, the consultants of CTC and the Atlantic Engineering Group, among others. Super-fast broadband networks are vital, executives said, describing projects in Louisiana, Minnesota, the Kansas City area and elsewhere, and the ways these projects have developed, and debating what models work best.

The FCC gave Harris County, Texas, authority to continue its work on a public safety broadband network in the 700 MHz band. The Public Safety Bureau order, signed by Chief David Turetsky, was posted Friday (http://bit.ly/VuH38q) and extended the network’s special temporary authority (STA) by another six months, until Aug. 28. The FCC gave the Texas network a six-month authorization last fall. The state has partnered with the Harris County Information Technology Center to use 20 MHz of spectrum in the 700 MHz band for public safety for, as the FCC authorized, 14 sites in Harris County. The county was among 21 entities granted waivers to operate in the 700 MHz band initially and had planned for such a network since 2009. It’s now slated to be folded into the proposed national FirstNet public safety network.