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Apparently, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski said back in July that the FCC is on track to issue an order on its media ownership notice of proposed rulemaking by the end of the year and, according to FCC sources, he is expected to circulate an item for a vote at the Nov. 30 meeting.

The chairman's office had no comment. The FCC has been reviewing its rules in response to a quadrennial congressional obligation to do so, and a court order from the Third Circuit. According to sources, broadcasters have been beating a path to commission staffers' doors lately to talk about media ownership issues. If the order follows the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on the media ownership rules that the commissioners approved last December, it will scrap the radio/TV cross-ownership rules, essentially preserve the FCC's attempted loosening of the newspaper/TV cross-ownership rules, which the FCC tried to do under former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, but leave in place the radio and TV local market ownership caps.

Chicago intends to do what no American city even remotely its size has ever pulled off – get a municipal broadband network built.

There isn’t a city in the country that doesn’t want better broadband infrastructure. Several cities, tiring of waiting for the market to create those networks, have attempted to build their own. The biggest ones have all failed, usually for one of two reasons: Some never got beyond the proposal stage, blocked by commercial interests complaining about the competition; of the few that actually got built, most were unable to monetize their networks. Chicago is trying a different route. “Chicago has no interest in being an Internet service provider, so the competitive issue is gone,” explained John Tolva, the city’s CTO. The city’s primary concern is economic development, and broadband is only one among several means to that end. So the city currently has out a request for interest (RFI), asking for ideas for how private interests can build and operate a gigabit fiber ring to connect a combination of a dozen existing and developing technology neighborhoods. The ring should support free Wi-Fi access in public places and should also be expandable to provide broadband access to underserved neighborhoods. The city will sift through the responses to the RFI, then craft a request for proposals (RFP). It would expect responses to the RFP by early next year and to begin implementing the plan shortly thereafter.

A federal judge is ordering the Justice Department to disclose more information about its so-called “Going Dark” program, an initiative to extend its ability to wiretap virtually all forms of electronic communications.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of San Francisco concerns the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. Passed in 1994, the law initially ordered phone companies to make their systems conform to a wiretap standard for real-time surveillance. The Federal Communications Commission extended CALEA in 2005 to apply to broadband providers like ISPs and colleges, but services like Google Talk, Skype or Facebook and encrypted enterprise Blackberry communications are not covered. The FBI has long clamored that these other communication services would become havens for criminals and that the feds would be left unable to surveil them, even though documents acquired by Wired shows that the FBI’s wiretapping system is robust and advanced. Little is known about the “Going Dark” program, though the FBI’s 2011 proposal to require backdoors in encryption found no backers in the White House. The FBI has never publicly reported a single instance in the last five years where encryption has prevented them from getting at the plaintext of messages.

Apparently, Google and Microsoft have expressed "extreme interest" in unused sections of airwaves known as white spaces.

These spaces are effectively gaps between those airwaves used for television, radio and mobile services, and are used as buffers to prevent the broadcasting and mobile signals from interfering with each other. In the past, white spaces have been put to little or no use, but telecoms regulator Ofcom wants to develop them for broadband services. "Recycling airwaves – or 'spectrum' – in this way is a highly efficient use of what is a very limited resource," the watchdog said.