December 2010

House Passes Bill to Fund Government

The House approved a $1.2 trillion bill to fund the federal government through the remaining nine and a half months of fiscal 2011.

The spending package incorporates a request from President Barack Obama for a two-year pay freeze for federal employees, though members of the military are exempted. House lawmakers voted 212-206, largely along party lines, to approve the legislation. No Republicans supported the bill, while 35 Democrats joined the minority party in opposing the measure. The spending bill contains big funding boosts for federal securities and futures regulators working to erect a regulatory regime for the over-the-counter derivatives market. The resolution would continue funding the federal government at fiscal 2010 levels, though there are some changes to individual agency budgets. The federal government's 2010 fiscal year ended Sept. 30.

The measure is necessary because Congress failed to pass a single one of the dozen spending bills that must be approved each year to set the budgets for the various departments and agencies of the federal government. Since the end of fiscal 2010, lawmakers have passed two short-term bills to avert a shutdown of the federal government. The latest of those expires on Dec. 18.

The Senate must still act on a spending measure. Aides said lawmakers in that chamber planned to introduce a different version in coming days. If senators decide to do so rather than take up the House bill, it could delay final passage of the spending legislation further.

Washington Rule Makers Out of the Shadows

Federal rule makers, long the neglected stepchildren of Washington bureaucrats, suddenly find themselves at the center of power as they scramble to work out details of hundreds of sweeping financial and health care regulations that will ultimately affect most Americans.

The boom in rule-making -- the bureaucratic term for the nitty-gritty of drafting regulations -- is a result of the mega-bills approved by Congress this year at the urging of President Obama: the health care bill signed into law in March, and the financial overhaul law signed in July. “There has never been a period like what we are going through now, in terms of the sheer volume and complexity of rule-making,” said Paul Dennett, senior vice president of the American Benefits Council, a trade group for large employers. And what was already shaping up as a rancorous lobbying battle over the rules is likely to become more contentious when Republicans take control of the House, having been swept to power on a pledge to influence health care and financial regulation. At the very least, Republicans will be able to hold public hearings to spotlight financial regulations they see as too restrictive and health care rules they see as too disruptive, and they could pressure regulators to soften them.

Hackers Give Web Companies a Test of Free Speech

A hacking free-for-all has exploded on the Web, and Facebook and Twitter are stuck in the middle.

Anonymous hackers took aim at companies perceived to have harmed WikiLeaks after its release of a flood of confidential diplomatic documents. MasterCard, Visa and PayPal, which had cut off people’s ability to donate money to WikiLeaks, were hit by attacks that tried to block access to the companies’ Web sites and services.

To organize their efforts, the hackers have turned to sites like Facebook and Twitter. That has drawn these Web giants into the fray and created a precarious situation for them. Both Facebook and Twitter -- but particularly Twitter -- have received praise in recent years as outlets for free speech. Governments trying to control the flow of information have found it difficult to block people from voicing their concerns or setting up meetings through the sites. At the same time, both Facebook and Twitter have corporate aspirations that hinge on their ability to serve as ad platforms for other companies. This leaves them with tough public relations and business decisions around how they should handle situations as politically charged as the WikiLeaks developments. Some Internet experts say the situation highlights the complexities of free speech issues on the Internet, as grassroots Web companies evolve and take central control over what their users can make public.

Clay Shirky, who studies the Internet and teaches at New York University, said that although the Web is the new public sphere, it is actually “a corporate sphere that tolerates public speech.”

WikiLeaks' resilience shows strength of Internet-age lifelines

Over the past several days, the anti-secrecy Web site WikiLeaks has been hit with a series of blows that have seemed to threaten its survival. Its primary Web address was deactivated, its PayPal account was frozen, and its Internet server gave it the boot. The result: WikiLeaks is now stronger than ever, at least as measured by its ability to publish online.

Blocked from using one Internet host, WikiLeaks simply jumped to another. Meanwhile, the number of "mirror" Web sites - effectively clones of WikiLeaks' main contents pages - grew from a few dozen last week to 200 by Sunday. By early Wednesday, the number of such sites surpassed 1,000. At the same time, WikiLeaks' supporters have apparently gone on the offensive, staging retaliatory attacks against Internet companies that have cut ties to the group amid fears they could be associated with it. On Wednesday, hackers briefly shut down access to the Web sites for MasterCard and Visa, both of which had announced they had stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks' long-term survival depends on a number of unknowns, including the fate of its principal founder, Julian Assange, who is being held in Britain while awaiting possible extradition to Sweden related to sexual-assault allegations. But the Web site's resilience in the face of repeated setbacks has underscored a lesson already absorbed by more repressive governments that have tried to control the Internet: It is nearly impossible to do.

Pew: 8% of online Americans use Twitter

Eight percent of the American adults who use the Internet are Twitter users. Some of the groups who are notable for their relatively high levels of Twitter use include:

Young adults – Internet users ages 18-29 are significantly more likely to use Twitter than older adults.
African-Americans and Latinos – Minority Internet users are more than twice as likely to use Twitter as are white Internet users.
Urbanites – Urban residents are roughly twice as likely to use Twitter as rural dwellers.
Women and the college-educated are also slightly more likely than average to use the service.

Twitter users are nearly equally divided between those who check the site daily and those who check it infrequently or never. More than a third of Twitter users (36%) check the site on a daily basis or multiple times a day; 2 in 5 (41%) say they check the site less than every few weeks or never check it at all. The remaining one-quarter of users say they check the site for updates a few days each week or every few weeks.

"People are increasingly relying on their social networks to find things that are of interest to them and make sense of the world around them," said Aaron Smith, a Pew senior research specialist. "For a segment of the online population, Twitter helps serve that role by giving them a place to share their thoughts, find news that their friends have deemed important and pass on things that they think are interesting or cool."

Cloudy outlook as Google steps up push to rule web

Google’s ambitions are so sweeping, the theatres in which its campaign is being advanced so dispersed, that it is not always easy to trace the outlines of the broader war it is fighting. Sometimes it takes simultaneous advances on a number of fronts to bring its progress into focus. This has been one of those weeks.

What other company, after all, would take public aim at not one, but three big rivals – Amazon, Apple and Microsoft – in the space of just a couple of days? Not doing any one thing well enough against formidable competitors like these could end up being Google’s biggest problem. But it is counting on having an ace up its sleeve: the ability to connect with users across a broader range of devices, and with a wider array of services and media content, than anyone else. This “cloud” strategy – relying on services run in Google’s data centers, and delivered to consumers using standard web technologies – is still a work in progress, but some of its contours are becoming more discernible. Google could eventually assume a truly scary cross-media dominance. All the information about user behavior collected across multiple cloud services, mixed with its core search data, could give it better insight into users than anyone – and the ability to match that with personalized advertising campaigns delivered across different services and devices.

Brussels renews effort on roaming charges

European travellers using their mobile phones within the European Union could be allowed to choose a different network than the one they subscribe to at home under plans that would upend “roaming” rules.

Brussels is looking at ways to regulate roaming charges in an attempt to change its current approach – moving away from price caps it imposed in 2007, which are due to expire in July 2012. The proposals are part of a plan outlined by Neelie Kroes, telecoms commissioner. She wants roaming charges to disappear within the EU by 2015, meaning there should be no premium to mobile phone calls made while travelling within the 27-member bloc. In a consultation paper, the European Commission outlined the option of moving to a new framework. That could be paired with an overhaul of how operators negotiate the rates at which they carry each other’s calls, by disallowing bilateral deals between operators in favour of a “spot exchange” open to all. The new model, if adopted, would allow customers attached to a single network in their home country to pick from a range of operators as they travelled to other European countries.

India Agency Raids Former Telecom Minister's Houses

India's top federal investigative agency searched homes belonging to former telecommunications minister Andimuthu Raja and four other officials, as an inquiry into the 2008 allotment of telephone bandwidth proceeded.

Raja resigned as minister last month after a government audit concluded that the telecom department sold the bandwidth without an auction at prices set in 2001, when the number of mobile-phone users was much smaller than in 2008. That decision, the audit said, deprived the country of a potential $38.9 billion in revenue.

Google Android phones biggest network hogs

A new study from telecom network technology firm Arieso of Google's Android phones use more data services than those with other smartphones, mostly due to better cameras and video recorders, and software for editing the footage.

As jurors go online, US trials go off track

The explosion of blogging, tweeting and other online diversions has reached into US jury boxes, raising serious questions about juror impartiality and the ability of judges to control courtrooms.

Jurors' forays on the Internet have resulted in dozens of mistrials, appeals and overturned verdicts in the last two years. For decades, courts have instructed jurors not to seek information about cases outside of evidence introduced at trial, and jurors are routinely warned not to communicate about a case with anyone before a verdict is reached. But jurors these days can, with a few clicks, look up definitions of legal terms on Wikipedia, view crime scenes via Google Earth, or update their blogs and Facebook pages with snide remarks about the proceedings.

Benton

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