There is “not yet widespread piracy in the cloud,” Business Software Alliance President Robert Holleyman told us, but “we're starting to see small elements of this.” Piracy will not disappear in the cloud, as some have claimed, Holleyman said, but “the form that piracy takes will change,” Holleyman told the House Judiciary Internet Subcommittee earlier this year, and private industry is taking steps toward combating it.

Industry and agency officials gathered at the FCC Thursday for a detailed explanation of the proposed Connect America Fund Phase II cost model, presented by CostQuest Associates. The goal of the CostQuest broadband analysis tool (CQBAT) is to identify the high-cost portions of broadband buildout throughout the country, defined by the ABC Coalition as anything over $80. A map presented at the meeting showed most of the high-cost areas exist in the western half of the country, and some loops can even cost in excess of a million dollars. This can happen when a dedicated plant is required to serve a single customer, said CostQuest President James Stegeman.

House Intelligence Committee members said they remain skeptical and frustrated about the response from Chinese telecom firms Huawei and ZTE to their investigation into whether the companies posed a security threat to the U.S. The committee has been investigating whether the Chinese government is using the companies as agents to commit espionage and threaten critical U.S. infrastructure (CD Nov 18 p5). The committee called in executives from both companies Thursday -- Charles Ding, Huawei’s senior vice president, and Zhu Jinyun, ZTE’s senior vice president for North America and Europe -- to answer questions under oath they think the companies haven’t properly responded to during the investigation.

House Republicans and Democrats differed over the best way to ease what both sides say is a looming commercial spectrum crunch, at a House Communications Subcommittee hearing Thursday. Majority members on the subcommittee urged federal agencies to relinquish more federal spectrum for commercial use, while Democrats cheered the administration’s across-the-board approach to sharing and clearing spectrum. A Defense Department official said federal users are working hard to achieve the administration’s goal of freeing 500 MHz of federal spectrum by 2020. Spectrum experts said that goal can only be achieved by employing sharing scenarios. Industry groups said that clearing spectrum for commercial use, rather than sharing, should be the ultimate goal.

Next-generation 911 is moving forward as text-to-911 trials continue and authorities reconsider old regulation, panelists at an FCBA emergency communications session said Wednesday night. They looked at the virtues and shortfalls of text-to-911 and considered the broader regulatory challenges 911 providers face, such as in interconnection agreements.

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, said it may be time for Congress to abolish the USF. The senior House Commerce Committee member and its former chairman spoke in a C-SPAN interview about the fund created by the Telecom Act of 1996 and being expanded by the FCC to cover broadband. Barton, on an episode of The Communicators to be shown Saturday and Monday, was sharply critical of FCC net neutrality rules. Limited privacy legislation could still be enacted in 2012, he said.

Comcast’s NBCUniversal makes about $1 billion a year less on its broadcast network than its three main competitors do, a gap the company hopes to close, President Stephen Burke told investors during a Bank of America conference Thursday. “Each of our competitors makes somewhere between $700 million more than we do, up to a billion and a half,” he said. “There’s really no good reason for that other than we need to make better shows.” That gap represents a huge opportunity for NBC’s profitability, he said. The owners of broadcast-TV networks each have the same infrastructure, “and yet one company on average is making a billion dollars a year less than the others,” he said. “That’s a great opportunity.” NBC’s station group was earning about $150 million a year in profit recently, which has since climbed to about $400 million, he said. That number can continue to improve, he said. “It’s hard to find many [business] priorities where you can find a billion dollars in operating cash flow just by doing things better."

EU lawmakers Thursday overwhelmingly approved a measure allowing access to works whose rights owners can’t be found, paving the way for digitization of orphan works. The draft directive, a “trilogue” compromise among the European Commission, European Parliament and Council of Ministers, will help public-service broadcasters, libraries, archives and similar institutions disseminate previously inaccessible content. It proves that copyright and technology can be brought together in the Internet age through working together, said European Health and Consumer Policy Commissioner John Dalli during a pre-vote parliamentary debate. He said the measure gives cultural institutions the legal certainty they need to make content available online. Some legislators and one consumer group called it disappointing.

Verizon is completing power audits of all facilities, a review expected to conclude in the Washington region by the end of October and nationwide by March, Senior Vice President Kyle Malady told House lawmakers Wednesday. The telco will have better monitoring equipment in place by 2013, he said. Verizon understands the need to communicate better with public safety answering points and the public during disasters, he said. The Subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness, Response and Communications held the hearing on the challenges and future of resilient communications, which emphasized the problems of Verizon as well as the new technologies emergency responders are facing. Its prime focus was Verizon’s June 29 failure to maintain power in Northern Virginia during the derecho wind storms and subsequent 911 outages.

Religious content is threatened by censorship on Web-based platforms, like those operated by Google, AT&T and Verizon, the National Religious Broadcasters said in a report released Wednesday. NRB drafted a charter aimed at identifying solutions to policies and practices of these companies that it claims violate free speech on the Internet. Private enterprise, with enormously successful platforms of communication, “is now becoming an engine of constraining speech,” said NRB CEO Frank Wright at the National Press Club.