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General Motors is escalating the battle over in-car connectivity with a plan to transform its vehicles into virtual smartphones armed with the fastest data speeds in the market.

The auto maker will begin wiring its 2014 models sold in the U.S. and Canada with 4G mobile broadband technology, one of the first auto makers to do so. A vehicle owner would select a subscription package and connect to the Internet or WiFi at speeds that are 10 times faster than current market offerings. The 4G feature will be offered across GM's Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, Cadillac, Opel and Vauxhall brands. The feature could usher in a slew of new options for the vehicle's center console screen and for video viewers in the backseat.

The CEOs of AT&T, Vodafone and Telefonica — three of the world's largest cellphone companies — had some rare words of praise for U.S. regulators, saying they're doing better than their European counterparts in promoting faster wireless data networks.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson told an audience at Mobile World Congress, the world's largest cellphone trade show, that the U.S. government's practice of selling phone companies large swathes of space of the airwaves for perpetual use was helping encourage companies, including AT&T, to build out large networks using the latest "LTE" technology. By contrast, many European countries lease out space on their airwaves for eight- to 15-year terms. The perpetual licenses in the U.S. gives phone companies the incentive to invest, Stephenson said. The large, contiguous slices of spectrum the U.S. sold in its latest auctions make it easy to build fast networks, he added.

Eighteen of the world’s largest mobile operators from Telefónica to China Unicom have backed a new mobile operating system from Mozilla Firefox aimed at eroding Apple and Google’s smartphone dominance.

A number of key manufacturers of handsets have also committed to produce the first Firefox phones, including LG, ZTE and Alcatel One Touch. These will supply Telefónica, for example, which will begin selling the devices in Brazil, Colombia, Spain and Venezuela by the middle of this year. Further launches are planned in Europe and Latin America in late 2013 and 2014. Paul Jacobs, chief executive of Qualcomm which supplied the chips for the new devices, said the new platform was targeted at cheaper, high-volume production. This, combined with the operators’ plans to launch the phone in mostly emerging markets this year, suggests the new alliance is not seeking to topple Apple’s App Store and Google Play in the US and western Europe, rather prevent a similar situation as consumers in emerging markets trade up to low-end smartphones.

Organizations representing songwriters, illustrators, playwrights and other writers are asking a federal appeals court to uphold an order allowing the Authors Guild to bring a class-action against Google for its book digitization project. The groups say in a friend-of-the-court brief that a class-action lawsuit is the only realistic means for many content creators to enforce their copyrights when their works are digitized without permission.

The organizations add that a ruling denying the Authors Guild class-action status could "encourage technology providers to simply take first, and worry about the consequences later." The coalition argues: "Without the ability to aggregate their claims against infringing technology providers, [we] fear that the exclusive rights that the copyright act promises will be illusory to all except the largest and best-heeled copyright owners." The groups to join in the friend-of-the-court brief include the Dramatists Guild, National Writers' Union, Romance Writers of America, Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, Songwriters Guild of America, and the Text and Academic Authors Association. They are asking the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold an order entered last year by U.S. Circuit Court Judge Denny Chin, who rejected Google's contention that copyright infringement requires case-by-case evaluation.