After Congress ended 2013 without enacting any major legislation to bolster cybersecurity, industry observers told us in interviews they see limited prospects for progress on such bills in 2014. Congress passed two spending bills that included some cybersecurity language, but did not complete consideration of marquee legislation addressing the issue, including the House-passed Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (HR-624) and the Cybersecurity Act of 2013 (S-1353).

One of the main things consumer electronics and other high-tech companies need from the government is certainty, CEA President Gary Shapiro said on an episode of C-SPAN’s The Communicators, set for telecast Saturday. Shapiro cited as a prime example AT&T’s failed attempt in 2012 to buy T-Mobile. “Despite having the best legal advice in the world,” AT&T ended up having to pay T-Mobile $4 billion in breakup fees and other compensation after the deal collapsed, he said. “There are ambiguous laws out there,” he said. “We should not have ambiguous laws of any type. We should have legal certainty.” The FCC’s reliance on a public interest standard in weighing mergers “is not healthy,” he said.

California’s Do Not Track disclosure law is perhaps the first of numerous state laws imposing similar privacy policy requirements, lawyers told us this week. The law, AB-370, is the “initial step in the discussion,” said Vedder Price intellectual property lawyer Michael Waters. But the discussion could lead to a confusing, and possibly unconstitutional, patchwork of legislation if imitator laws pop up in other states, several lawyers said. Ultimately, the discussion might extend to the FTC since California’s law “does not dictate that companies have to follow the DNT signal,” Waters said. “It just says they have to notify users of how they're going to respond to that signal. In the long run, I don’t know if that’s going to be sufficient for the FTC.”

The FCC cleared five telcos of wrongdoing in response to slamming charges against them, but found that AT&T violated agency rules when it switched a customer’s telecom service provider to AT&T without proper authorization. AT&T did not comment.

A new study found that dialing, texting or even reaching for a cellphone while driving is dangerous behavior, especially for a novice driver, but just talking on a phone may not raise the risk of a crash. The research by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute was published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The California Do Not Track law that was scheduled to take effect Wednesday only requires a slight change to website and mobile app privacy policies, but it could be the opening salvo in a long debate over how online tracking is regulated, lawyers and industry advocates told us in interviews this week. The law, AB-370, mandates any website or mobile app that’s accessible to California residents -- essentially all U.S. websites -- must state in its privacy policy whether it honors a user’s DNT request. But it doesn’t require websites to do so, just to state whether it will or won’t, said Fox Rothschild privacy lawyer Mark McCreary, who has helped clients comply with the law.

Changing FCC rules to allow use of vehicular repeater systems (VRS) and other mobile repeaters by public safety agencies on some frequencies in the VHF band would be an interference threat to utilities, electric utilities told the FCC. But the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials supported the rule change, saying repeaters are critical to public safety. In September, reacting to a 2011 petition from Pyramid Communications, the FCC sought comment on whether “there is a need to make additional spectrum available to support mobile repeater capability” in spectrum already used by Private Land Mobile Radio Service licensees, including public safety, mostly for voice (http://bit.ly/1irZ3vd).

Consumer advocates are cautiously optimistic about Frontier’s proposed acquisition of AT&T’s Connecticut wireline assets, but plan to monitor the deal to ensure state consumers get the quality of service they expect, officials told us. Some are also questioning whether Frontier will be as aggressive as AT&T in upgrading to fiber and IP technologies.

The head of the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee said cellphone theft is a competition issue, and pressed carriers on their efforts to prevent it. Consumers face a significant public safety and monetary threat, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said Monday, issuing a press release and sending a letter to five companies, requesting answers to several questions by Jan. 9. She’s also on the Commerce Committee.

Pressure is growing on the FCC to make some decision on what to do with LightSquared’s spectrum, as the company’s bankruptcy case plays out in federal bankruptcy court in New York under Judge Shelley Chapman. Chapman scheduled the next hearing in the case for Jan. 9.