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For a glimpse of how out of control sports bidding wars have become, look no further than your cable television bill.

Time Warner Cable subscribers in Southern California will eventually see their monthly bills increase thanks to an impending $7 billion deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers, believed to be the most lucrative for any sports team in history. DirecTV, the country’s most popular satellite service, and Verizon FiOS have started adding a $2 to $3 monthly surcharge in markets like New York and Los Angeles to pay for regional sports networks. Per-subscriber fees for sports networks keep going up: ESPN, the granddaddy of them all, passed the $5-a-month mark last year. The eye-popping price tags have restarted debate about a topic near and dear to sports fans, fairness: many TV customers never watch the mightily expensive channels at all, yet almost all must pay.

There was a shudder in the industry when John Malone, the business tycoon who helped create the modern-day cable system, said in November that “runaway sports rights” costs amounted to “a high tax on a lot of households that don’t have a lot of interest in sports.” The only short-term fix, he said, was government intervention.

Facebook and the three largest email providers told The Hill this week that they require police to obtain a search warrant before accessing their users' private online communications.

The policies of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook go beyond the privacy standards of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a 1986 law that only requires police to obtain a subpoena, issued without a judge's approval, to read emails, instant messages and other forms of digital communication that have been opened or that are more than 180 days old. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is pushing legislation that would update ECPA to require police to obtain a warrant before seizing electronic messages, regardless of how old they are. He argues the law is badly out of date and fails to protect Internet users' privacy. But the four Web companies said they all already refuse to turn over their customers' communications unless the police have a warrant. The companies argue that the Fourth Amendment provides more legal protection to their users than ECPA does.

The College Station (TX) City Council entertained a proposal to allow business and residents access to cheaper high-speed Internet connections that could allow for virtual reality simulations, real-time genomic sequencing, ultra-high definition video streaming and other applications in the not-too-distant future.

Blair Levin, executive director of nonprofit Gig.U, delivered a presentation to the council during its workshop session. Levin, who was the Federal Communications Commission chief of staff during the Clinton presidency, called upon the councilmembers to consider policy changes that could bring more gigabit-per-second speed Internet connections to town -- roughly 20 times as fast as what's available to most residential phone and cable subscribers, proponents said. The proposal, and Levin's visit, were organized by freshman councilman James Benham, owner of a technology company in Downtown Bryan. Benham's business, along with the others downtown, already has access to the gigabit speeds, but he said he wants to see the service expanded to benefit residents, the business community and to attract businesses.

Google's Transparency Reports, released every six months, are interesting not just for what they reveal about government requests for Internet user data, but also for what they do not reveal.

Google's transparency reports do not include requests for user data made by the government under the U.S. Patriot Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment Act or through the use of National Security Letters (NSLs). Most of the requests made via these statutes are tied to national security issues and often compel providers to disclose far more data than Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) subpoenas and court orders permit. Google has said that it will try to release more information about such requests in the future. But how it will do so remains to be seen, because companies that receive NSLs and requests under the Patriot Act and FISA are not allowed to publicly disclose the requests. As a result, it's unclear how many more requests Google might have received from the government, how intrusive those requests were or how many people might have been impacted by the requests, said Trevor Timm, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.