Financial Times

Social networking website Facebook has capped a year of phenomenal growth by overtaking Google's popularity among US Internet users, with industry data showing it has scored more visits on its home page than the search engine.

The Federal Communications Commission is due to unveil plans on Tuesday aimed at improving the country's mediocre performance in the global broadband race.

Mainland China's television industry, one of the ruling Communist party's bastions for information control, is being gradually transformed from within amid growing pressure for commercial success.

Telecommunications companies are threatening to launch a legal challenge to the UK government's plans to increase the availability of Internet access on mobile phones.

Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecommunications billionaire with a net worth of $53.5 billion, has been crowned the world's richest person by Forbes magazine.

China's telecom operators could do with a lift after record investments in 3G networks and cut-throat competition for customers took a big bite out of their profits last year. But although capital expenditure at China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom is set to drop from highs this year, the country's three big operators are preparing for the next challenge. This time it is not from each other but from outside.

Britain should invoke some of the spirit of Inmos - a government-owned semiconductor company set up more than 30 years ago - to establish a £300m series of new technology centers to lay the basis for economic growth, according to a top government adviser.

The UK's largest Internet service providers have fired a broadside at last-minute changes to a law dealing with copyright piracy on the Internet, condemning the measures as "dangerous" and "unworkable."

Countries accused of harboring criminal computer hackers are victims themselves, the new US cybersecurity policy chief said on Thursday, suggesting that the US would not take a more confrontational tack against China and Russia.

The BBC laid out a defiant vision of its future on Tuesday, with the director-general refusing to shrink its activities to pacify commercial rivals and its governing body setting its own timetable to approve any changes.