The House passed an amended version of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) by a 288 to 127 vote Thursday. The revised CISPA aims to increase cyberthreat information sharing between the public and private sectors, something which cybersecurity experts say is needed to protect U.S. networks from attacks. HR-624 is a modified version of the information sharing legislation that passed by the House last year (HR-3523) but failed to achieve a vote in the Senate. Ninety-two Democrats voted for the bill Thursday, 50 more than voted for the CISPA bill that passed the House in the last Congress.

Verizon, AT&T and CenturyLink met with the FCC Wireline Bureau chief and an aide to Chairman Julius Genachowski Thursday to urge the commission to grant USTelecom’s petition for forbearance from several legacy rules (http://bit.ly/ZvfcCl). Several regulations, such as Part 32 rules that require companies to maintain a “duplicative and anachronistic set of accounting books,” are no longer needed, the ILECs said. Section 10 of the Communications Act sets out a legal standard that disallows the commission from keeping a reporting requirement “in anticipation of a speculative need for the information at some point in the future,” the groups said.

The heads of cable, telecom and wireless trade associations endorsed the amended Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) (HR-624), in a letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. The bill, which was sent to the House for floor consideration last week, will “help us to better protect our customers’ data and our networks, and will serve the broad public interest in a more secure cyber environment,” the groups said. The letter was signed by NCTA President Michael Powell, CTIA President Steve Largent and USTelecom President Walter McCormick.

NCTA expressed “grave concern” about ILEC proposals to get access to Connect America Fund Phase I money without any corresponding obligation to extend broadband service to the 19 million Americans that lack it, in a meeting with an aide to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski Thursday (http://bit.ly/10ARgzS). That approach, which would give the price cap LECs about $1.5 billion in support for 2013, is “fundamentally at odds” with the FCC’s USF reform goals, NCTA said. The ILEC proposals would classify as unserved about a million locations currently counted as served, and then make support available to upgrade the existing DSL service at those locations, NCTA said. Spending “limited resources” in such a manner “should not be a priority,” it said. NCTA also raised concerns about USTelecom proposals to eliminate the obligation to spend a third of its 2013 legacy high-cost support on broadband in areas currently unserved by any unsubsidized provider. “Enforcement of that requirement is critical to achieving the Commission’s goal of promoting broadband deployment,” NCTA said.

A circulating draft order would “eliminate or streamline” more than 100 outdated regulations, as sought in the 2012 USTelecom petition for forbearance, FCC officials said Friday. The petition (CD Feb 17/11 p14) sought relief on an industry-wide basis from, by the FCC’s count, 141 unique requirements.

The FCC Wireline Bureau has chosen a “greenfield” model for Phase II of the Connect America Fund, said industry and agency officials. A greenfield approach estimates the full cost of building and operating a network from scratch. The ABC Coalition, consisting of USTelecom and several ILECs, supports the greenfield approach. The American Cable Association, a primary proponent of the competing brownfield model (CD Jan 16 p3), criticized the choice of a greenfield model as a “wasteful” move that will hurt consumers and small cable operators.

The FCC overstepped its authority and was unclear in some sections of its Rural Health Care reform order, USTelecom said in a petition for reconsideration and clarification filed Monday (http://bit.ly/17bc0lV). The commission should prohibit, rather than encourage, the “speculative installation and resale of excess capacity,” USTelecom said. Although the commission says such cost-sharing don’t violate the statutory prohibition against resale, the relevant statute “could not be any clearer,” USTelecom said: Section 254(h)(3) of the Communications Act explicitly prohibits selling or reselling by the user of telecom services and network capacity provided to a public institutional telecom user. “The Commission cannot save its unlawful ‘cost-sharing’ rule by attempting to create some distinction between ‘cost-sharing’ and resale,” USTelecom said. The association also wants the commission to reconsider its decision letting healthcare providers get support for “dark fiber,” which is “not a ’service'” and thus not eligible for support under the rural healthcare program, it said. USTelecom also asked that the commission direct any enforcement actions seeking recovery for current and past healthcare program violations solely at the responsible party. The commission should also clarify whether its rural healthcare competitive bidding rules include restrictions on gifts, meals and entertainment; and it should clarify the rules regarding broadband metrics reporting, certification and invoicing, USTelecom said.

Several rural organizations asked the FCC for “emergency” clarification of the requirement that rural rate-of-return regulated ILECs submit five-year service quality improvement plans (http://bit.ly/10mQK8F). NTCA, the Eastern Rural Telecom Association, the Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance, the National Exchange Carrier Association, USTelecom and the Western Telecommunications Alliance all signed the petition, asking that the deadline for submission of the five-year plans be delayed a year, to July 1, 2014.

Commenters differed on the proper speed proxy the FCC should use to ensure that recipients of Connect America Fund Phase II money provide broadband service of at least 4 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream. Commenters in WC docket 10-90 were responding to a Wireline Bureau request on how best to identify unserved areas eligible for CAF Phase II funding, and on how to measure broadband speed, latency and other metrics required of funding recipients.

Officials from USTelecom, AT&T, Verizon, Windstream and CenturyLink met with FCC staff Tuesday to discuss the advantages of adopting a greenfield modeling platform based on a “scorched node approach” for Phase II of the Connect America Fund, an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/ZHSxVW). Generally, a greenfield approach estimates the full cost of constructing and operating a network from scratch, whereas a brownfield approach takes into account the existing infrastructure (CD Jan 16 p3). Adopting a greenfield model “will produce a levelized flow of support for providing voice and broadband in high-cost areas over an appropriate time period,” the ILECs said. They also urged internal consistency in the sizing of facilities and estimates of usage, and discussed the merits of using GeoResults data for customer locations and distributing remaining locations randomly along roads.