Anonymous lobbed at least three distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against supporters of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) Monday. The “hacktivist” group allegedly crashed the websites of USTelecom, TechAmerica, and the NCTA in separate, coordinated attacks.

Comcast said it plans to petition the FCC to reconsider a Media Bureau decision that would give Boston authority to again regulate the rates of its basic service tier. The bureau on Monday granted the city’s request to reinstate its basic-rate regulation authority (http://xrl.us/bm27k8). The bureau and full commission both found in 2001 that Comcast was subject to effective competition in Boston from RCN, which the bureau considered to be a LEC. Boston disagreed with that classification and the conclusion that RCN’s service area substantially overlapped with Comcast’s, and last year it asked the FCC to let it once again regulate Comcast’s basic service rates.

The FCC pointed to a recent Media Bureau public notice asking questions about the definition of the terms “multichannel video programming distributor” (MVPD) and “channel” as it presented its defense of its pace of adjudicating a program access complaint brought by Sky Angel against Discovery Communications. In a response to Sky Angel’s petition for a writ of mandamus at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the commission argued that the notice represents a concrete step toward resolving the dispute.

Cable operators face little threat from Verizon Wireless’s new LTE service in rural areas, cable officials said, downplaying the recent start of HomeFusion Broadband. They mainly view the new product as either a replacement for DSL or a rival to satellite broadband in areas that are unserved or underserved by other ISPs. The executives said cable’s broadband market share won’t likely be hurt much by HomeFusion Broadband.

The Verizon Wireless/cable deals, unveiled in December, have raised opposition that looks similar on some levels to that for AT&T’s proposed buy of T-Mobile last year. Most of the foes of AT&T/T-Mobile reorganized against the latter deal, with the addition of T-Mobile, which may have the most at stake. Opponents of Verizon’s buy of AWS licenses from SpectrumCo and Cox say marketing agreements unveiled concurrent with the spectrum buys are partly to blame. Then too, the spectrum landscape has changed in recent months, with the FCC facing huge obstacles bringing any new spectrum online for commercial use anytime soon (CD March 30 p1).

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski decided to limit what information the commission will make TV stations disclose online when they put files now kept on paper in studios on fcc.gov, agency officials said Friday. They said a Media Bureau draft order to require public-inspection files go online doesn’t mandate inclusion of sponsorship identification information nor deals between multiple TV stations with separate owners in the same market, as the commission proposed in October. The political ad part of the public file, a posting regime subject of criticism from congressional Republicans and GOP Commissioner Robert McDowell, will need to go online, under the order tentatively set for a vote at the April 27 meeting, agency officials said. But there’s a phase-in period.

There are still many issues yet to be resolved as of Friday as labor negotiations between the wireline AT&T and the unions continued, said the Communications Workers of America. Four contracts covering 40,000 union workers were set to expire Saturday. AT&T claimed it’s well prepared for a potential strike.

The FCC’s upcoming further notice of proposed rulemaking on USF contribution reform, expected to be voted on at the April 27 commission meeting (CD April 5 p1), will tackle the inconsistency over how different providers define how their contribution base is calculated, agency officials said. Because of outdated rules that haven’t kept up with changes in technology and how services are being sold, some providers can pass a lower USF charge on to customers, and that can lead to unfairness, a commission official said. The further notice will try to “avoid market distortions by closing loopholes and ensuring similar services face similar service obligations,” the official said.

Sprint Nextel won’t introduce any new WiMAX 4G smartphones this year as it shifts focus to LTE, the deployment of which will ramp up quickly after the initial six markets launch mid-year, Development Director Ryan Sullivan told us following a New York news conference for HTC’s new Evo 4G LTE model. Sprint’s Network Vision 4G LTE network, expected to be nationwide with 38,000 cell sites by late 2013, will debut in Atlanta, Baltimore, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Kansas City, Mo. In each of the markets, Sprint will install new multi-mode base stations supplied by Alcatel, Harris and Samsung. Field testing is being conducted in the first six markets consisting of internal Sprint trials and those with third-party companies, Sullivan said. The first multi-mode base station went on line in December.

Google’s YouTube could still find itself guilty of copyright infringement, under a ruling Thursday by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which sent back to a trial court Viacom’s case against the video-sharing website. The U.S. District Court in New York had absolved YouTube of liability, granting summary judgment under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) safe harbors (CD June 24/10 p6). The 2nd Circuit found fault with U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton’s requirement that YouTube have “item-specific” knowledge of infringement to be disqualified from the safe harbors, and said a “reasonable jury” could find that YouTube had “actual knowledge or awareness of specific infringement.”