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The press — often the target of allegations of liberal bias by conservative media — has found an unlikely ally in right-leaning radio and television hosts who have taken to defending the First Amendment with a fire-and-brimstone zeal.

The First Amendment has always been a hot-button issue for talk radio, but conservative hosts in particular have focused on freedom of the press after revelations last month that the Justice Department had seized the phone and e-mail records of a Fox News reporter, the Washington correspondent James Rosen, who had included details about a secret United States report on North Korea in a 2009 article published on FoxNews.com. The debate over the government’s approach to leaks widened on June 9 when The Guardian revealed the identity of Edward Snowden, a contractor for the National Security Agency and the source of disclosures about the government’s widespread collection of private Internet and telephone data. On Sunday evening Fox News pundits debated whether the Obama administration had overreached in the use of secret surveillance techniques. There was little debate, however, when it came to Rosen.

[Commentary] There is still an important role for the Federal Communications Commission in regulating wireless, but it is limited. The first priority should be making more spectrum available to the highest bidders by accelerating the pace of government auctions. Once spectrum is sold, owners should be free to resell it to other wireless carriers (or to other industries that value it more).

For without more bandwidth (and free-market allocation of privately controlled spectrum), access to data-hungry services like high-definition video will be undermined, along with the incentives to develop the next generation of wireless devices. There's no denying the temptation to intervene on behalf of the underdogs in the marketplace. But the lessons from the long, checkered history of economic regulation are painfully clear: The cures are often worse than the disease. The specific lesson for the FCC is that it should think hard before following the Justice Department's counsel to restrict who can participate in spectrum auctions. Punishing firms for their success in winning and keeping customers is unlikely to foster robust competition or maximize innovation.

The big question now is whether the FCC will give wireless what it needs to change and grow—and resist the impulse to restructure the market according to its own notions of what makes for healthy and robust competition.

[Hahn is director of economics and professor at the Smith School, University of Oxford; Passell is editor of the Milken Institute Review]

The growing nonprofit news sector is showing some signs of economic health, and most leaders of those outlets express optimism about the future, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center.

But many of these organizations also face substantial challenges to their long-term financial well-being. The report finds that large, often one-time seed grants from foundations help many of these nonprofit news outlets get up and running. But as those grants expire, many organizations do not have the resources or expertise necessary for the business tasks needed to broaden the funding base. More than half of the nonprofit news organizations surveyed by the Pew Research Center in late 2012 (54%) identified business, marketing and fundraising as the area of greatest staffing need, compared with 39% who said the top need was for more editorial employees. In addition, nearly two-thirds of the nonprofits (62%) cited "finding the time to focus on the business side of the operation" as a major challenge-compared with 55% who cited "increasing competition for grant money."

Google’s growth in India is being hampered by poor technological infrastructure that is unable to keep pace with the demands of hundreds of millions of new internet users, says the US-based search group’s Indian head.

India is the world’s third most populous online nation, with 150 million Internet users, while the country is likely to surpass the US for second place behind China during the next two years. But a combination of sluggish bandwidth and counterproductive government policy threaten to slow India’s online economy, says Rajan Anandan, Google’s managing director in India.