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Sprint shareholders have some serious thinking to do.

On the one hand, they have SoftBank's $20.1 billion offer for a 70% stake. On the other, there is Dish Network's $25.5 billion bid for the entire company.

In many ways, SoftBank's proposal, which delivers a one-time $4.9 billion cash infusion into Sprint on top of the $3.1 billion the Japanese carrier has already invested, seems to carry lower risk. While Sprint's gross debt would remain the same, the cash injection would give it more flexibility to invest in upgrading its network and allow it to participate in future deals. Dish's bid looks to be riskier. But the combined company would also have greater cash flows. Then there is the added promise of greater reward down the line. That would come if Dish-Sprint can forecast synergies worth $37 billion in today's money and successfully execute a "double play" strategy of video and voice. The latter sounds appealing. But estimating the value of synergies can involve a lot of rough math, particularly in light of the fact that Dish's bankers have yet to see Sprint's books. There is no guarantee these will pan out.

Travelers hitting the road with their mobile electronic devices have three questions about staying connected away from home: will there be Wi-Fi, how much will it cost and how well will it work?

Increasingly, it is that last question that matters most. Hotels, airports and airlines are struggling to keep up with customers streaming movies on their tablets and hosting online meetings on their laptops, with varying degrees of success. While hoteliers and airport authorities have been fighting the bandwidth battle for years, airlines are still installing Wi-Fi on many aircraft and are already confronting challenges. Travelers who want Wi-Fi in the air cannot always tell if a plane will have Internet service when they book their tickets. Prices for service are still evolving, and the quality of the connection does not come close to matching what most people are used to on the ground.

Duke University has pulled out of Semester Online, an education consortium that will offer online undergraduate courses for credit, after faculty members objected.

The consortium announced April 30 that it would offer 11 courses this fall, from Boston College, Brandeis, Emory, Northwestern, the University of North Carolina, Notre Dame and Washington University in St. Louis. But the Arts and Sciences Council at Duke, which represents faculty members from the university’s largest undergraduate college, voted 16 to 14 last week against participating in the consortium. While Peter Lange, the Duke provost, saw the consortium as expanding the courses available to Duke students, some faculty members worried that the long-term effect might be for the university to offer fewer courses — and hire fewer professors. Others said there had been inadequate consultation with the faculty.

The White House issued its official response to a We The People petition titled “Stop CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act).”

The White House issued a veto threat for the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) on April 16, because the legislation did not fully address our core concerns (especially the protection of privacy). Even though a bill went on to pass the House of Representatives and includes some important improvements over previous versions, this legislation still doesn't adequately address our fundamental concerns. But it's not good enough to just stop things: We've got to work together, with legislators on Capitol Hill, technology experts from the private sector, and engaged advocates like you to advance cybersecurity legislation without compromising privacy.

When it comes to information-sharing, there are three key principles we apply to any legislative proposal:
Does it (1) sufficiently protect privacy and civil liberties,
(2) ensure that a civilian department -- not an intelligence agency -- is the primary point of entry for cybersecurity information sharing, and
(3) provide narrowly tailored liability protections that would allow the private sector to respond to threats (without encouraging reckless behavior).

Here's a bit more detail about each:

1. It's important that any information shared under a new cybersecurity law must be limited to what's relevant and necessary for cybersecurity purposes. That also means minimizing information that can be used to identify specific individuals. For example, if a utility company is looking for government assistance to respond to a cyber attack, it is unlikely that it needs to share the personal information of its customers, like contact information or energy-use history, with the government.
2. Cybersecurity legislation needs to preserve the traditional roles for civilian and intelligence agencies that we all understand. Specifically, if legislation authorizes new information sharing between the private sector and the government, then that new information should enter the government through a civilian department rather than an intelligence agency. That doesn't mean breaking the existing mechanisms that already work. For example, victims of cyber crime ought to continue to report those violations to federal law enforcement agencies and public-private information-sharing relationships that already exist should be preserved.
3. Any new legislation ought to provide legal clarity for companies that follow the rules and appropriately share data with the government. But it should not provide broad immunity for businesses and organizations that act in ways likely to cause damage to third parties or result in the unwarranted disclosure of personal information.

Moving forward, the Obama Administration will continue to advocate vocally for cybersecurity legislation that applies these principles to protect privacy.