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Speaking that the Access to Capital and Telecommunications Conference, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski said promoting equal opportunity, driving private sector investment, fostering an environment where new and emerging businesses can thrive are vitally important to our nation's future. read more

Speaking July 19 at the Americans with Disabilities Act 20th Anniversary Celebration, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski noted that communications technology has the power to transform lives for the better, and everyone should have access to communications. read more

National Association of Broadcasters President Gordon Smith outlined the association's spectrum policy in a July 19 letter to Lawrence Summers, director of the White House's Economic Policy Council. Smith told Summers that he thought a "holistic" approach to spectrum policy could find spectrum to repurpose without compromising broadcasters' ability to deliver a robust service to viewers. read more

A public website the Obama administration launched last year to shine a light on $80 billion in federal information technology spending contains inaccurate or outdated data on scheduling and performance, according to a new Government Accountability Office report. read more

Technology drove Barack Obama's presidential campaign. And Obama's three tech "chiefs" drive his administration's technology. Their goal: Create government websites that are more like an Apple app store than the Department of Motor Vehicles. read more

Decency standards have value and are necessary for responsible media companies, but the court was right to strike down the current indecency policy, says former FCC Chairman Michael Powell. read more

Public Knowledge and Free Press versus AT&T, Verizon, and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA). That's how the broadband world is sometimes summarized in Washington, according to Craig Settles. But government and media's reliance on this character list is a "consistent frustration." read more

It is good to be an Internet service provider. In fact, it's better than being a cable operator, since there are no multibillion-dollar payments to content creators. read more

Harbinger Capital Partners has formalized its plans to create the first wholesale-only 4G network in the US, announcing an ambitious plan to build out a nationwide long-term evolution footprint covering 92% of the population in five years, supplemented by satellites that will increase its population penetration to 100%. read more

At an unveiling last month, the Texas Department of Agriculture touted its map of broadband Internet availability as the first step in closing a "digital divide" that denies rural Texans critical services. But a political divide has opened instead, as critics question the tool's accuracy and Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples' relationship with the organization that created it. read more

The Newspaper Guild is urging the Federal Communications Commission not to relax its rules limiting same-market common ownership of a newspaper and broadcast property. read more

Washington has launched a series of democratic idea incubators that aim to align government action with public opinion. Taking advantage of a platform called IdeaScale, these open government initiatives enable the public to submit and vote on ideas for anything from state budgets and federal transparency to health care priorities and education. read more

Google just posted its response to proposals the Federal Trade Commission has said it is looking into in order to support the "reinvention of journalism." read more

When historians look back on the period between 2001 and 2011, they will be amazed that a nation that professed to hate bureaucracy produced so much of it. When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era. It is not a liberal era — when government intervenes to seize wealth and power and distribute it to the have-nots. It's not a conservative era, when the governing class concedes that the world is too complicated to be managed from the center. It's a progressive era, based on the faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems. read more

In many ways, the "Family Guy" episode "Partial Terms of Endearment" is typical of that audacious Fox animated comedy, teeming with rapid-fire jokes and willfully offensive non sequiturs about disabled animals, God, Nazis, bodily functions and the sexual habits of "Sesame Street" characters. It is also an episode in which a central character finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy and contemplates an abortion, a subject that is frankly discussed -- and flagrantly satirized -- by the cartoon's cast. read more

Behind the recovery in business spending is a surge in purchases of the computers that form the backbone of the Internet, as companies scramble to meet growing demand for video and other Web-based services. read more

Americans are turning away from home phone lines and toward mobile, but a federal program continues to pour $8 billion a year into phone service for rural homes and businesses. But as the nation looks to wireless and fiber broadband networks as its on-ramp to e-mail, tweets and Skype calls, lawmakers and regulators have called for sweeping changes to the Universal Service Fund. read more

Andrew McLaughlin built Google's public policy operation and helped craft its government lobbying strategy. Now he works for the White House on Internet policy — and that has some Google rivals crying foul as federal officials prepare to rewrite the rules governing high-speed Internet. read more

Intel, the US chipmaker, is close to settling a long-running antitrust suit with the Federal Trade Commission, bringing to a close a legal battle that has dogged the world's largest chipmaker for more than 10 years. read more

Harbinger Capital Partners, the New York-based hedge fund founded by Philip Falcone, has awarded a $7 billion contract to Nokia Siemens Networks to build a high-speed mobile phone network in the US. read more