Media and creative industry groups opposed a new bipartisan bill Thursday aimed at curbing online IP theft and copyright infringement. The Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act offers a legislative alternative to the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s PROTECT IP Act, giving the International Trade Commission (ITC) more power to target and sever funding to foreign websites that infringe copyrighted goods. But the MPAA said the legislation “fails to provide an effective way to target foreign rogue websites” and “goes easy on online piracy and counterfeiting.”

The Senate Commerce Committee unanimously approved FCC and FTC nominations, setting up votes by the full Senate before the chamber leaves for the year. Voting by voice off the floor in the President’s Room, the committee approved the nominations of Jessica Rosenworcel and Ajit Pai for the FCC and Jon Leibowitz and Maureen Ohlhausen for the FTC. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, threatened again to block the FCC nominations due to his ongoing concerns about the LightSquared network.

The Justice Department has seen Internet “bottlenecks,” justifying net neutrality actions, DOJ Acting Assistant Attorney General Sharis Pozen of the Antitrust Division said Wednesday at an antitrust oversight hearing in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Internet. She declined to name any of them. Also at the hearing, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz raised concerns with ICANN’s plan to roll out hundreds of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). Pozen said nothing new on DOJ’s lawsuit to block the AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile USA.

Companies and industry groups continued to push for some changes to a draft order implementing a law restricting the noise levels of TV ads, ex parte notices show. The discussions came just before the FCC scheduled a vote on a report and order implementing the CALM Act at its Dec. 13 open meeting. Broadcast, cable, phone and TV programming executives met with FCC staff early this week to discuss possible changes to the order, which is reported to already give industry groups some of what they want (CD Dec 5 p9).

AT&T asked Republican FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell for help in its battle over spectrum screen standards (CD Dec 6 p1), an ex parte notice on docket 11-18 showed. In a Dec. 2 meeting with McDowell’s chief of staff, Angela Giancarlo, AT&T Senior Vice President Robert Quinn and Vice Presidents Gary Phillips and Joan Marsh discussed their company’s proposed spectrum deal with Qualcomm, the ex parte notice said. The company executives then mentioned footnote 137 in the T-Mobile report, which tightened standards on the spectrum screen. FCC officials didn’t comment.

Competitive telcos think the FCC has turned its back on them, CLEC executives and lawyers told us. “I think the commission hasn’t taken any initiatives to promote competition,” said Eckert, Seamans telecom lawyer James Falvey. “There have been a number of issues that the CLECs have brought to the commission and said, ‘We need your help on this to promote competition.’ The commission hasn’t taken any proactive steps.”

LightSquared will soon file its own proposal to help define the future for the upper 10 MHz of the L-band, said Executive Vice President Jeff Carlisle during a company press conference on Capitol Hill Wednesday. GPS interests recently filed a request at the FCC for the agency to declare the upper 10 MHz out of bounds for terrestrial services forever (CD Nov 9 p7). LightSquared also said independent testing of newly designed precision GPS filters show that coexistence of GPS and LightSquared’s terrestrial service is possible, and urged the government to begin the required further testing.

Verizon is parting with DirecTV on an LTE test in Pennsylvania, in one of the first signs of fallout from Verizon’s proposed $3.6 billion purchase of Spectrum Co.’s AWS licenses, Verizon officials confirmed Wednesday at the UBS investors conference in New York. Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks last week agreed to sell 122 AWS licenses in the 1700/2100 MHz band (CD Dec 6 p5) to Verizon covering 259 million POPs and potentially setting the stage for freeing wireless spectrum that has been “warehoused,” Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said.

AT&T asked the FCC to increase the amount of spectrum used for its screen of the proposed Qualcomm deal, the company’s initial application shows. AT&T has cried foul about the changed spectrum screen standards in the review of its proposed takeover of T-Mobile, but the company itself urged the commission to expand the standards and appeared to at least acknowledge tacitly that the FCC had the authority to change the screen standards, its Qualcomm application shows. “If the FCC were to revise its screen to include all spectrum available for mobile wireless services, it is clear that there are no areas where this transaction would require further analysis to conclude that no competitive harms were likely,” the company said on page 21 of its Qualcomm application.

Media companies attacked the “scarcity doctrine” of broadcast media regulation in petitions for certiorari filed with the U.S. Supreme Court this week. The companies are seeking to overturn several media ownership limits, including a ban on owning newspapers and broadcast assets in the same market and consolidating radio and TV licenses in a single market, in asking the court to hear an appeal of a 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Philadelphia, decision remanding to the FCC some rule changes that would have relaxed ownership restrictions (CD Aug 24 p3). Meanwhile, a petition for certiorari from the NAB avoided mentioning the scarcity doctrine but asked the high court to take the case because of a split among lower courts on the ownership rules.