Coordinated website blackouts had a resounding impact Wednesday on both public and congressional support for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). At our deadline at least five of the bill’s original 30 co-sponsors said they had either withdrawn or reconsidered their support for the bill. The bipartisan defections came after thousands of websites including Wikipedia, Reddit, Craigslist and others blacked out their pages and urged users to contact their representatives in protest of the legislation.

Officials behind SpectrumCo will face questions from the FCC Wireless Bureau after Comcast Chief Financial Officer Michael Angelakis told investors at a Citigroup conference that the company never planned to build out the AWS spectrum licenses it purchased in the 2006 auction. The questions are expected to come as part of the bureau’s analysis of Verizon Wireless’s pending buy of the licenses from SpectrumCo, FCC officials said Wednesday. Comcast likely will be asked to explain the comment in the initial interrogatory the bureau sends Comcast as it looks more closely at the deal, agency officials said.

Broadcasters’ high cost estimates for putting TV stations’ political file information online (CD Dec 27 p7) are unfounded and probably overblown, said LUC Media Group, an ad agency that specializes in getting political advertisers federally mandated rates during periods leading up to an election. “Stations and cable television systems have learned over the years that if they can limit the information that candidates have about availabilities and rates, they can get candidates to overpay for airtime that they buy,” LUC said in reply comments filed in the commission’s enhanced disclosure of TV stations’ public interest obligations proceeding. “Internet access to those files will enable more candidates to become better informed about the availabilities and pricing, and thus demand that they receive the lowest unit charge for the time they buy. That is the real reason that stations are voicing objections to having to upload their political files to the Internet."

Criminalizing the use of the Internet has serious implications for basic human freedoms, said Frank La Rue, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression. The Internet is a tool that enables freedoms and while it can be used for defamation and hate speech, governments around the world should not censor it, he said Wednesday at George Washington University Law School in Washington.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski worries that U.S. appeals courts sometimes interpret statutes too narrowly in reviewing federal agency decisions. Hopeful his agency will prevail in a challenge to net neutrality rules before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, he voiced concerns that courts generally aren’t giving agencies enough leeway to interpret legislation. That trend is “making it more and more difficult for agencies in fast-moving areas to respond to changes in technology or changes in the marketplace,” Genachowski said Wednesday during a Q-and-A with Jeffrey Rosen of The New Republic. Genachowski said he gets the rationale behind court decisions that say an agency overreached.

The FCC misunderstood AT&T’s objections to remarks last week by Chairman Julius Genachowski over how much authority the agency should have to set the rules for incentive spectrum auctions, Senior Vice President Robert Quinn said in a blog. Quinn said AT&T’s primary concern is that the company not be excluded from bidding in upcoming auctions because of its large size relative to other carriers.

Congress is close to passing cybersecurity legislation, House and Senate aides told the State of the Net conference Tuesday. The Senate, returning from recess next week, is “narrowing in” on a cybersecurity bill to bring to the floor in three to four weeks, said Tommy Ross, aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. Meanwhile, House committees are marking up individual bills to be combined later, House aides said.

More consumer electronics are subject to new FCC requirements to display online captions from content originally broadcast on TV or seen on cable, DBS or telco-TV than industry executives expected. They said the order (CD Jan 17 p3) requiring TV stations and multichannel video programming distributors to caption video they put online appears to go beyond what’s required by 2010 disabilities legislation. The order said the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act didn’t say in great detail what type of CE equipment must be covered by Internet Protocol captioning rules.

CTIA urged the FCC to allow a 24-month transition period if it changes its hearing aid compatibility (HAC) rules to incorporate the 2011 revision of American National Standards Institute (ANSI) technical standard C63.19. The revision would replace the 2007 version of the standard now part of the rules. Groups representing the deaf and hard of hearing said a year is time enough. In a Nov. 1 notice of proposed rulemaking (http://xrl.us/bmozvb) the Wireless Bureau and Office of Engineering and Technology proposed giving Tier 1 carriers a year to meet the revised standard and smaller carriers 15 months.

A letter from the Space-Based Positioning Navigation and Timing (PNT) Executive Committee to the NTIA released Friday is raising questions about the FCC’s ability to allow LightSquared to move forward, said industry executives. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012, signed New Year’s Eve, which prevents the agency from lifting conditions on LightSquared without resolving Defense Department concerns, could be in play due to the letter, the executives said. LightSquared said the PNT process for review was deeply flawed and the NTIA should assert itself to take over the next testing phase. The PNT committee, co-chaired by the DOT and DOD deputy secretaries, works to “advise and coordinate federal departments and agencies on matters concerning,” according to the PNT website.