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India's telecommunications regulator proposed that the government open its auction of mobile-phone bandwidth, including frequencies that some current operators are required to surrender, to all companies.

The regulator also suggested a base auction price that is several times more than that at which India allotted 122 licenses and bandwidth to several companies in 2008. The Supreme Court of India in February ordered the cancellation of those licenses citing irregularities in their allotment. While some of the affected operators have decided to shut their operations, others, such as Norway's Telenor ASA and Russia's Sistema JSFC, have expressed interest in the auctions. The regulator's recommendations, if the government accepts them, would make the process tough for the companies that want to continue operations because competition could drive up prices. In 2010, the government set a base price of 35 billion rupees, or about $670 million, for a pan-India five-megahertz slot, under a plan to raise at least 350 billion rupees by auctioning third-generation bandwidth. It ended up raising 677.19 billion rupees after the auction went into several rounds.

President Obama issued an executive order that allows US officials for the first time to impose sanctions against foreign nationals found to have used new technologies, including cellphone tracking and Internet monitoring, to help carry out grave human rights abuses.

Social media and cellphone technology have been widely credited with helping democracy advocates organize against autocratic governments and better expose rights violations, most notably over the past year and a half in the Middle East and North Africa. But authoritarian governments, particularly in Syria and Iran, have shown that their security services can also harness technology to help crackdown on dissent — by conducting surveillance, blocking access to the Internet or tracking the movements of opposition figures. Obama’s executive order, which he announced during a speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, is an acknowledgment of those dangers and of the need to adapt American national security policy to a world being remade rapidly by technology, according to senior administration officials familiar with the plans. Although the order is designed to target companies and individuals assisting the governments of Iran and Syria, they said, future executive orders could name others aiding other countries through technology in crackdowns on dissent. Under the order, the administration announced new sanctions, including a U.S. visa ban and financial restrictions, against a range of Syrian and Iranian agencies and individuals.

As the audience for free television fades, federal regulators are wrestling over the future of the government-mandated broadcasts, which were originally intended to knit the nation’s disparate communities together.

Today, only 10 percent of the nation relies on free, over-the-air TV, which was created by the Telecom Act in the 1930s. To get a license, broadcasters had to offer local, educational and political programming, and to make it widely available to rich and poor alike. Now, that viewing audience is becoming fragmented once again, social scientists say. On the Web, where users pick and choose what they want to watch, it’s harder to ensure public broadcasting, local news and political debates will reach the bulk of American households. With options such as iTunes, Hulu, YouTube and Netflix — which can be accessed on TVs and mobile devices alike — communities are no longer bonded by watching the same evening news and prime-time shows. And as fewer people rely only on broadcast television, stations around the nation are struggling to survive even as some rural residents, elderly and the poor continue to rely on free TV.

A paradigm shift may be coming to the digital lifestyle. Instead of the PC being the center of the personal computing universe, consumers will be opting for tablets as their primary computing device and relying on cloud storage to access their content across their devices, according to a new report.

"This burgeoning market is set to disrupt the personal computing device and OS markets," according to a new report from Forrester Research on the future of computing. Instead of serving as a supplement to a desktop or laptop computer, the report said, these burgeoning cloud services will play such an integral role in the connected future that consumers will first choose a service, then the compatible device as the focus shifts from device to personal content storage services. And tablets such as iPad will become the conduit between consumers' digital devices such as smartphones and PC and the cloud-stored content. The computing platform will also make its way more solidly into the office, the report said. Even though the same functionality is heading to the PC, the form factor and mobility of tablets give them a clear edge over PCs, the report says.