juliana gruenwald is with "the national journal" where she is the tech and telecom staff writer, and gautham nagesh is with "the hill" and he's a technology reporter there. thank you for being on "the communicators" once again. gautham nagesh, second session of the 112th congress begins in just a couple of weeks. what's the biggest issue that the congress will be facing with regard to telecommunications issues? >> guest: well, i think right now the hottest issue is, obviously, online piracy. that's a new development, but as we've discussed in the past, there's two bills in front of the house right now and a bill in front of the senate that would take some rather significant steps to increase the government's authority to enforce online copyright. they've also drawn a very strong backlash from the technology community, and i think that's the hottest topic right now pause the fate of those bills is still very much in doubt. >> host: juliana gruenwald, who's on each side of these piracy bills? >> guest: well, on the one side the supporters include the content industry, the movie makers,

. >> juliana gruenwald? >> we need a bill to get to the floor now. there's been a closure of the votes on the senate bill protect ip and that will likely pass. that's what supporters say senator leahy, the chairman of the senate judiciary committee and as the author of the senate bill said he believes he hasn't won enough votes to get the bill through. >> what else will the telecommunications industry face this year? >> the other is the spectrum legislation and the whole host to free up more spectrum to meet the nation's demand for and before congress left there was that maybe spectrum legislation was going to get attached to the payroll tax extension and when they only passed the two month extension they did not include the spectrum legislation. when they come back and work on the one-year extension, there is the fault that spectrum legislation could be included in that because spectrum auctions raise money for the treasury, and that would provide an offset for the cost of that bill. >> paul kirby this has been one of julius genachowski's issues tal

. >> hi, this is juliana gruenwald with national journal. you say the process came about through consensus and the bottoms-up, you know, consensus driven process that icann is supposed to make decisions by, but can you respond to your critics who say you didn't follow this process given how many trademark holders have cried foul? can you just respond to that? >> sure. the policies were supported by the gnsl, and it took three years of hard work of that group , multistakeholder model's gone through two significant revolutions in two years, so our design is organic and evolving. it was reviewed in depth by our board which is a multistakeholder consensus body itself. the board members are elected by those policy development organs that i mentioned. they're also appointed from the advisory committee such as the root server advisory committee that engaged in these policies, the security and stability advisory committee which is security experts from around the world, the at-large advisory committee which includes more than 150 civil society group

. >> hi, i'm juliana gruenwald with national journal.ow confident are you you can get 41 seats to block cloture? >> yesterday was, i think, the beginning of a pretty remarkable grassroots phenomenon. i don't know exactly how many members of congress pulled off their support yesterday. i think it was in the tens, it was a big number. so i'm -- but i will say this, i think that senator leahy is committed to this, and my guess is he's going to introduce a last minute manager's amendment that he drops on everybody. and just to give you a sort of prewarning, i think at this point he would drop a ham sandwich into the process and try to pass that if he thought it could pass just to restart the momentum and get to a conference with the house where a conference is a back room deal, closed door process, to pass something. so i'd be very suspicious of any efforts to try to launch or introduce upon the community some sort of, quote, deal. >> one comment i have on that is yesterday was the beginning of something, it wasn't the end of something or th