WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Lawmakers stopped anti-piracy legislation in its tracks on Friday, delivering a stunning win for Internet companies that staged an unprecedented online protest this week to kill the previously fast-moving bills.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said he would postpone a critical vote that had been scheduled for January 24 “in light of recent events.”

Lamar Smith, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, followed suit, saying his panel would delay action on similar legislation until there is wider agreement on the issue.

“I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy. It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products,” Smith said in a statement.

The bills, known as PIPA in the Senate and SOPA in the House, are aimed at curbing access to overseas websites that traffic in pirated content and counterfeit products, such as movies and music.

The legislation has been a priority for entertainment companies, publishers, pharmaceutical companies and other industry groups who say it is critical to curbing online piracy, which they believe costs them billions of dollars a year.

But technology companies are concerned the laws would undermine Internet freedoms, be difficult to enforce and encourage frivolous lawsuits.

Jan 18 (Reuters) – Wikipedia, the world’s free online encyclopedia, went dark on Wednesday and other Internet players including Google put black censorship bars on portions of their websites in protest of pending U.S. legislation designed to curb online piracy.

The unusual protest was visible across the Internet in many forms on Wednesday, with dozens of commercial and non-profit websites either closing down for the day or urging visitors to oppose what had until recently been a relatively obscure and technical legislative proposal.

Internet companies aim to get U.S. lawmakers to back off of bills designed to shut down access to overseas websites that traffic in stolen content or counterfeit goods.

The effort has gained traction. The White House over the weekend warned that overly broad legislation could harm free speech, and on Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner acknowledged there was a lack of consensus on the bills.

Several members of Congress said the legislation appeared stalled, with some reversing earlier support for the measures.

The legislation, known as SOPA in the U.S. House of Representatives and PIPA in the Senate, has been a major priority for entertainment companies, publishers, pharmaceutical companies and many industry groups, who say it is critical to curbing online piracy that costs them billions of dollars a year.

But Internet players argue the bills would undermine innovation and free speech rights and compromise the functioning of the Internet.

Jan 18 (Reuters) – Wikipedia, the world’s free online encyclopedia, went dark on Wednesday and other Internet players including Google put black censorship bars on portions of their websites in protest of pending U.S. legislation designed to curb online piracy.

The unusual protest was visible across the Internet in many forms on Wednesday, with dozens of commercial and non-profit websites either closing down for the day or urging visitors to oppose what had until recently been a relatively obscure and technical legislative proposal.

Internet companies aim to get U.S. lawmakers to back off of bills designed to shut down access to overseas websites that traffic in stolen content or counterfeit goods.

The effort has gained traction. The White House over the weekend warned that overly broad legislation could harm free speech, and on Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner acknowledged there was a lack of consensus on the bills.

Several members of Congress said the legislation appeared stalled, with some reversing earlier support for the measures.

The legislation, known as SOPA in the U.S. House of Representatives and PIPA in the Senate, has been a major priority for entertainment companies, publishers, pharmaceutical companies and many industry groups, who say it is critical to curbing online piracy that costs them billions of dollars a year.

But Internet players argue the bills would undermine innovation and free speech rights and compromise the functioning of the Internet.

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 18 (Reuters) – The English page of Wikipedia, the world’s free online encyclopedia, was dark on Wednesday except for a paragraph urging users to protest legislation designed to stop copyright piracy, but that Wikipedia says “could fatally damage the free and open Internet.”

Google’s home search page has the logo: “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the web!”

Smaller sites, such as Reddit.com and BoingBoing.net, were also dark, with BoingBoing noting that the proposed anti-piracy bills “would put us in legal jeopardy if we linked to a site anywhere online that had links to copyright infringement.”

The companies oppose bills designed to curb access and payments to overseas websites that traffic in stolen content or counterfeit goods on the grounds that it could put them in legal peril.

The legislation has been a major priority for entertainment companies, publishers, pharmaceutical companies and many industry groups. They maintain the proposed law is critical to curbing online piracy they say costs them billions of dollars annually.

Internet companies have furiously opposed the legislation and have stepped up lobbying efforts in recent months, arguing it would undermine innovation and free speech rights, compromise the functioning of the Internet, and would be ineffective in stopping piracy.

The bills were seemingly on the fast track for approval by Congress until the White House criticized aspects of it over the weekend.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – A blackout scheduled for Wednesday to protest against proposed legislation on online piracy has failed to get the support of the biggest Internet players.

Despite calls for the participation of sites such as Facebook, Twitter and other big names, the biggest participants are the online dictionary Wikipedia and the social-news website Reddit.

The situation shows that, while technology companies are concerned about the legislation, the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), the companies are not prepared to sacrifice a day’s worth of revenue and risk the ire of users for a protest whose impact on lawmakers is hard to gauge.

Wikipedia and Reddit will black out their pages so visitors will see only information about Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).

Of the biggest tech sites that have voiced opposition to the legislation, only Google is planning any type of change to its site tomorrow. It too will have information about the bills, although users will still be able to conduct Google searches.

“Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and Web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet,” said a Google spokeswoman. “So tomorrow we will be joining many other tech companies to highlight this issue on our US home page.”

That solution allows Google to keep revenue attached to its searches, while still highlighting the issue.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Telecom startup LightSquared is asking for an investigation of a possible conflict of interest by a member of an advisory board that has already warned against its technology because of interference with the global positioning system.

LightSquared, which needs government approval of its high-speed wireless technology by the end of the month to keep its major partner on board, lodged its probe request with NASA Inspector General Paul Martin late Wednesday.

The petition charges that Bradford Parkinson, sometimes referred to as the father of GPS, serves as vice chairman of the National Space-Based Position, Navigation, and Timing Advisory Board while also a director for Trimble Navigation Ltd, which makes GPS equipment and has been a vocal opponent of LightSquared’s network.

Lightsquared said Parkinson may have violated a federal conflict of interest law and ethics regulations.

It charges that any GPS interference is the result of GPS receivers “looking in” to LightSquared’s spectrum.

LightSquared said Trimble could take a financial hit if regulators approved LightSquared’s network, which would force the company “to address the problematic design and manufacturing process that has resulted in its high-precision receivers looking into LightSquared’s spectrum.”

The Coalition to Save Our GPS, formed last March by Trimble and other companies concerned with LightSquared’s impact on the satellite-based GPS system, said the allegations have no merit and instead point to LightSquared’s increasing desperation.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Telecom startup LightSquared is mounting a last-ditch effort to win U.S. regulatory approval for a new wireless network after being outmaneuvered by the GPS industry, which has spun doomsday scenarios of interference problems that could cause planes to fall out of the sky and threaten national security.

Billionaire hedge fund manager Philip Falcone has bet more than $3 billion of his Harbinger Capital Partners money on LightSquared, which in turn has spent more than $1 million on lobbying efforts in Washington to try to get approval to launch a new high-speed wireless network.

The company is staring down an end-of-the-month deadline for the government to give the green light, before partners start bolting and as its cash position gets more dire.

LightSquared reported a $427 million net loss for the first nine months of 2011 and could run out of money in the second quarter of this year if it cannot raise additional capital and financing.

LightSquared’s term loans were trading around 50 cents on the dollar in the secondary market, a sharp discount to their face value. The loans were fetching 90 cents on a dollar over the summer, but the price for the debt dropped sharply as concerns over the GPS problems magnified and investors began wondering about the company’s ability to raise new money.

The collapse of LightSquared could prove disastrous for Falcone’s hedge fund, as roughly half of Harbinger’s assets are tied up in LightSquared.

Harbinger spokesman Lew Phelps said the hedge fund “is focused entirely on working with LightSquared to obtain FCC approval.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The top U.S. communications regulator on Monday proposed measures to eliminate the waste and fraud plaguing a telephone subsidy for the poor, and broaden the program to bring high-speed Internet to more low-income households.

The subsidy, offered through the Lifeline program, provides up to $10-per-month discounts on landline or wireless phone service for low-income households. The program is supported by the universal service fund, paid for through fees added to consumers’ telephone bills.

While it has helped tens of millions of Americans afford phone service over the past two decades, the Federal Communications Commission said, the program has become outdated and inefficient, lacking cost controls and oversight to prevent abuse of the subsidy.

The FCC is continuing its reform of the $8 billion universal service fund. The agency in October voted to overhaul the largest segment of the fund, roughly $4.5 billion that subsidized telephone service for rural families, shifting the program to support high-speed Internet in rural America and costly-to-serve areas.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski on Monday proposed reforms to the fund’s Lifeline program that would crack down on duplicate benefits, subsidies for ineligible consumers and fraudulent misuse of Lifeline funds.

Genachowski said his proposal could save the fund as much as $2 billion over the next few years.

A draft order, to be circulated on Tuesday to Genachowski’s fellow commissioners, would create a database of Lifeline service recipients to prevent carriers, like Verizon Communications Inc, AT&T Inc and Sprint Nextel Corp, from signing up customers already receiving Lifeline discounts from other providers.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – LightSquared’s prospects for getting its wireless network off the ground were dealt another blow this week as U.S. government tests found that the signal of the telecom startup would cause “harmful interference” to a majority of GPS devices.

Preliminary analysis of testing of the company’s planned network conducted last month showed the wireless network would not interfere with cell phones but would cause “harmful interference to the majority of other tested general purpose GPS receivers,” the U.S. Defense and Transportation departments said in a joint statement late Wednesday.

LightSquared is owned by billionaire hedge fund manager Philip Falcone. The company in June revised its plan to deploy a high-speed wireless network serving roughly 260 million people after interference issues arose with GPS devices that are used by the military and in civilian applications ranging from aviation to agriculture.

Falcone, who could separately face civil fraud charges over alleged manipulative trading in debt securities from 2006 to 2008 and other trading violations, bet much of his Harbinger Capital Partners money on LightSquared.

Falcone’s hedge fund empire has shrunk from $26 billion to around $5 billion, and roughly half of that money is tied up in LightSquared LP.

LightSquared’s signals would also interfere “with a flight safety system designed to warn pilots of approaching terrain,” the government statement said of a separate analysis performed by the Federal Aviation Administration.

LightSquared Chief Executive Sanjiv Ahuja said the company would work with the FAA on the terrain avoidance systems, but disagreed with the government’s conclusions on general navigation devices.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Eddie Lazarus, chief of staff to the top U.S. communications regulator, is stepping down next month to pursue other endeavors, the Federal Communications Commission said on Tuesday.

Lazarus described his role at the agency as a “consigliere” to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

“Within this office, I’m the last stop before the chairman for pretty much everything,” he told Reuters.

Lazarus came to the agency from the law and lobbying firm Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld in June 2009 to serve as Genachowski’s chief of staff.

“I am enormously grateful to Chairman Genachowski for giving me the opportunity to enter public service and join his vital enterprise of bringing the extraordinary benefits of broadband to all Americans,” he said.

Lazarus has not yet decided what he will do next.

His tenure at the agency put him at the forefront of major and controversial changes in the communications sector, including Universal Service Fund reform, adoption of net neutrality rules and major merger reviews.