GigaOm

The United States spied on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and that’s a pretty big deal because she’s a head of state, but this wasn’t purely a one-sided affair.

According to a report in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, German intelligence also listened in on a call involving erstwhile US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Crowdsourced Wi-Fi Internet service provider Fon plans to add a business component to its largely residential hotspot footprint.

Now, Fon has launched a global beta program, inviting consumer-facing businesses to install a souped-up version of its Fonera router and offer Internet access to Fon members and the general public.

The new program seems to split the difference between the two models of business Wi-Fi we see today: wide-open networks businesses offer as an amenity to attract customers and closed networks for internal use.

Republican Federal Communications Commissioner Ajit Pai has renewed a push to kill a 1975 rule that allows the leagues to black out games on cable if a local team fails to sell enough tickets.

The proposal, first announced in December, appears to be gaining momentum before a vote in the fall, according to a National Journal report. If the FCC plan passes, which appears likely, it will be a victory for fans but a relatively minor one. The reason is that the FCC rule, for practical purposes, has only affected football fans in a handful of cities where small-market NFL teams -- including Buffalo, Cincinnati and San Diego -- fail to sell out their games.

An even bigger victory for fans comes by way of a court decision in which a federal judge in New York refused to halt class action claims by fans who say blackout rules imposed by the NHL and Major League Baseball violate antitrust laws.

Taken together, the rulings are important because they suggest that authorities are growing skeptical of rules that give powerful sports leagues a free pass on ordinary anti-trust rules. More importantly, for fans, the end of blackouts could mean not just more games, but lower prices -- the judge reportedly cited an expert who claims game packages could cost 50 percent less if there were true competition in the sports market.

If you’re living in a rural area, “broadband” likely means slow speeds and strict limits on the amount of data you can consume each month.

But Exede, the rural broadband service owned by satellite Internet service provider ViaSat, is starting to close that gap between the city – with its access to cable modem or even fiber connections -- and rural areas.

Exede will start testing a new broadband plan with a 150 GB-per month gap in several regions of the US. It’s calling the new Freedom Plan a “virtually unlimited” service, which is on par with the monthly limits at which many wireline ISPs are capping their lower-tier plans.

[Commentary] The time finally may be right for a tie-up between Dish and T-Mobile. While T-Mobile’s momentum is impressive, it will need much more spectrum to continue to expand its nationwide LTE network.

Dish has been planning to use its AWS-4 spectrum as well as its coveted 700 MHz airwaves to deploy LTE services, and both companies plan to participate in the Federal Communications Commission’s auction of low-band spectrum slated for 2015.

Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen said it would be a “personal failure” if his company failed to get into the wireless market. He should move now to pick up T-Mobile to take on AT&T and Verizon at next year’s auction.

Sprint may have given up on buying T-Mobile for now, but wireless industry analyst Chetan Sharma believes it’s only a matter of time before the two renew their courtship. A merged Sprint/T-Mobile is inevitable, according to Sharma, but if the two want to consolidate sooner rather than later, T-Mobile will have to stop performing so damn well. “To be considered a player requiring some regulatory assistance, [T-Mobile] has to probably get back to those levels of losing 300-400K [subscribers] every quarter,” Sharma said.

OpenSignal’s newest report on US Wi-Fi speeds contains a particularly interesting nugget of information: the network measurement firm found that the Wi-Fi speeds we get from public hotspots, in places like coffee shops, hotels and retail stores, are consistently faster than the speeds we see over 4G networks.

But there’s a lot of new network construction going on in the US. That should mean that speeds will kick up a few notches, as more devices that can tap these networks come onto the market.

[Commentary] Now that Sprint has given up on buying T-Mobile, it looks like we’re going to have four nationwide carriers in the United States, at least until a more pliable administration is office.

Sprint and T-Mobile will plan for their futures as independent carriers, and that means they’re almost certainly looking ahead to the 2015 broadcast spectrum incentive auction.

The incentive auction will mark the Federal Communications Commission’s first major release of new mobile airwaves since the 700 MHz auction in 2008 and the Advanced Wireless Services auction in 2006. T-Mobile and Sprint are particularly interested in this band because of where it’s located on the electromagnetic spectrum: 600 MHz. They’re ideal for building a network with greater coverage.

[Commentary] HBO is never going to unbundle, except when it is: Executives of the premium cable network have long insisted that they won’t offer its HBO Go streaming service as a Netflix-like standalone Internet subscription in the United States.

But HBO is already running an Internet-only service in northern Europe, and it’s now looking to take that proposition to other countries, including possibly Japan and Turkey. HBO isn’t the only network that’s been testing the waters on Internet-based video services.

The Australian government has announced plans to introduce mandatory data retention, forcing telecommunications companies to hang on to certain customer data for up to 2 years.

The plans were leaked ahead of a press conference, in which Prime Minister Tony Abbott said they would help in the fight against terrorism. The Liberal-led coalition government said it would “update Australia’s telecommunication interception law which predates the Internet era and is increasingly ineffective,” as well as introduce “proper oversight” to protect Australians’ privacy rights.