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[Commentary] Reformers are now pinning their hopes on a single bill: the USA Freedom Act, only one step away from passing the House of Representatives. The USA Freedom Act, brought by Rep Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), focuses on the most notorious government surveillance program: the NSA’s mass collection of phone call records, which it stores for up to five years.

The new bill focuses only on the calling records. Among other things, the amendment took out a section that would make it easier for companies to reveal that they’d been ordered to give up data, and it explicitly allowed intelligence agencies to gather numbers within two "hops" of the original query, instead of restricting it only to foreign agents and their contacts.

Most controversially, though, it struck out a section that applied to another NSA program: the collection of emails through Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. The original bill explicitly barred the practice of "backdoor searches," which let NSA agents get around bans on collecting communications from Americans by searching for data that had been inadvertently caught in the dragnet.

The Intelligence Committee, meanwhile, was initially rumored to be making some unpopular changes of its own. A circulated amendment, says Center for Democracy and Technology senior counsel Harley Geiger, apparently would have made it unclear what the NSA could count as a search term when requesting data, opening a significant loophole. Unlike the Judiciary Committee, the Intelligence Committee held its hearing behind closed doors, part of a more general pattern of secrecy.

Ultimately, though, the bill that emerged was the same one the Judiciary Committee had amended and approved. Rogers and Ruppersberger praised the committee for adopting "a compromise that garnered strong, bipartisan support," leaving their own proposal in limbo.

More than a month after Turkey lifted its Twitter block, the country's government is still keeping a close eye on any potentially embarrassing tweets.

In a single week, Turkish courts have filed five separate takedown motions to Twitter Headquarters, requesting the removal of over a hundred tweets.

Most of the tweets are still available to US users, but it seems likely that Twitter has blocked them for users registered within Turkey, in accordance with its policy of compliance with local laws and court orders.

Google opted not to buy "a relatively thin piece of harmonized spectrum" and decided Project Loon would instead use spectrum that's already owned by wireless carriers across the globe.

Rather than pay to license spectrum, Google will lease the balloons to carriers as they fly over countries where each company provides service.

"That actually makes you feel much more comfortable that I’m not invading your country or I’m about to take your users," Teller said. "So now you and I can be great friends, and we don’t even need to buy the spectrum." This approach also gives Google a "much thicker wedge" offering far more bandwidth.

TV shows -- now routinely even good ones -- have been debuting on the web, and advertisers and producers all want to understand how they can be a part of it before they miss the boat.

Advertisers don't always mind less exciting series, so long as the demographics and numbers all add up. Many say they're just happy to see that companies like AOL and Yahoo are willing to put big money on shows and attract big talent. But the general consensus is that there's still a bundle of potential for connected platforms that few are trying to tap into yet.

After years of pressure from Internet service providers, network neutrality is under threat by the Federal Communications Commission itself.

In a letter, Sen Al Franken (D-MN) warned that the FCC’s latest network neutrality proposal "would not preserve the Open Internet -- it would destroy it." His language is reminiscent of the response to another "Internet-destroying" policy: SOPA, the anti-piracy bill that mobilized perhaps the most effective online protest of all time. Like SOPA, these proposed Open Internet rules tackle an issue that’s near to the hearts of both Internet denizens and tech companies.

And as the FCC plans to officially consider the rules on May 15th, they’re figuring out how to mobilize the same kind of opposition. Though the company hasn’t confirmed anything on the record, sources say that outspoken net neutrality proponent Netflix has privately brought concerns to the FCC, and that it, Google, and other major players are quietly planning an accompanying publicity blitz.

Other groups have been more open. Mozilla, a prominent participant in the 2012 anti-SOPA blackout, has filed a petition with the FCC, asking it to regulate parts of Internet service providers’ business under common carrier laws. Mozilla senior policy engineer Chris Riley sees the FCC’s current proposal as the worst of both worlds: by allowing "commercially reasonable" discrimination, it’s allowing ISPs to undermine net neutrality, and by requiring a baseline level of service, it could be stretching beyond the limited authority courts have given it. "I’m really worried that what the FCC would do now is both lose in court and fail to protect net neutrality," he says. If it fails, net neutrality supporters predict dire consequences.

Reddit, currently one of the 25 most popular sites in the US, also joined the SOPA blackout, and it’s planning a site-wide online protest on May 15th. Nothing is locked down, but he hopes some of the politicians who have spoken out against the proposal will make appearances on Reddit -- a statement by Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT) made it to the top of the site.

It’s been almost a year since the nation learned that the government has been heavily surveilling Americans using a web of programs that potentially violate the Constitution or at least some laws.

The legality of those programs has yet to be definitively challenged. Even if the programs are legal, many feel the government is at least obligated to be transparent about them.

There have been at least 25 major lawsuits have been filed against the National Security Agency, President Barack Obama, telecommunications companies that facilitated data collection, and others involved in the government’s surveillance programs since Edward Snowden’s first revelations on June 6th, 2013, according to investigative journalism nonprofit ProPublica.

There have been various rulings by lower courts and appeals courts, some of which contradict each other. So far, only one case has been dismissed. The lack of consensus suggests that some part of the NSA program should eventually come before the Supreme Court.

There are arguably three cases closest to reaching the Supreme Court, all challenging section 215 and the phone-record surveillance. Two were filed after the Snowden revelations, and one was filed back in 2006 but just recently cleared a legal hurdle: Klayman v. Obama et. al., ACLU et. al. v. Clapper et. al., and Jewel et. al. v. National Security Agency.

[Commentary] The year is 2018. The death of net neutrality was just the beginning.

[Commentary] The Internet is screwed, and the US government is making it worse. Political cowardice caused the Federal Communications Commission to lose its first battle for net neutrality regulation: the rules that keep the Internet as you know it free and open.

The idea of net neutrality is that all traffic is created equal -- whether you’re a movie streaming from Netflix, or a WhatsApp message, or a Tweet, or a bulletin board message. But according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, instead of trying to correct the errors it made in open Internet rules the first time around, the FCC will consider enacting new rules that directly destroy the principles of net neutrality.

The proposal would allow profit hungry behemoths like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon to become gatekeepers that give preferential treatment to companies that pay the most for special access to customers. If cowardice caused the FCC to lose its first major net neutrality battle, complicity with the ISP industry is leading to its second major failure.

The proposed rules would mark a complete capitulation to the monied Internet interests, harming consumers in the short and long-term. The ISPs that control the "last mile" of the Internet -- the pipes that connect to your home -- would love nothing more than to extract tolls from companies. Netflix’s surrender to Comcast sits in the murky waters of "peering," where major ISPs connect to one another, but the new rules could mean that similar deals are made in the last mile of the Internet where net neutrality thrives.

The government is too afraid to say it, but the Internet is a utility. The data that flows to your home is just like water and electricity: it’s not a luxury or an option in 2014. The FCC’s original Open Internet rules failed precisely because it was too timid to say that out loud, and instead erected rules on a sketchy legal sinkhole that was destined to fail.

Illiteracy isn't a major issue for much of the Western world, but it remains endemic in many developing countries, where incomes are low and books are scarce.

That may be changing, though, thanks to the spread of mobile technologies that have made books more accessible than ever before -- something that UNESCO, in a new report, describes as a veritable "reading revolution." The report examines the reading habits of nearly 5,000 mobile-phone users in seven countries -- Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Zimbabwe -- where the average illiteracy rate among children is 20 percent, and 34 percent among adults. (The US, by comparison, has an adult illiteracy rate of around three percent.)

UNESCO describes the survey as the largest ever undertaken on mobile reading in the developing world, and its results are encouraging: people are reading more, they're reading to their children, and they're hungry for more content.

The study was based on questionnaires and telephone interviews with people who use an app from Worldreader -- a San Francisco-based nonprofit that distributes e-books in low-income countries. The organization delivers Kindles to under-equipped classrooms, while its app allows users to choose from over 6,000 (mostly free) e-books on low-end feature phones. Today, the app has more than 300,000 monthly active users in developing countries, and Worldreader says it's delivered nearly 1.7 million e-books since its launch in 2010.

There is evidence to suggest that mobile technology can improve literacy test scores, though UNESCO's study focuses on the behaviors and demographics of users in developing countries, in the hopes of better understanding how and why they read. More than 62 percent of those surveyed said they enjoy reading more after they started reading on mobile devices, and one-third said they use their phones to read to their children (an additional third said they would do so if more child-friendly books were available).

The survey also shed light on important gender-based differences. Although the vast majority of mobile readers are male (77 percent), women actually devote far more time to reading: 277 minutes per month, on average, compared to just 33 minutes for men.

[Commentary] Comcast wants to own the Internet -- or, at least, the cables that carry it to most Americans’ homes. There is absolutely no way that Comcast can argue it would have meaningful competition in wired broadband or cable after the merger.

A merger would turn Comcast’s already long lead into overwhelming dominance. And Comcast knows this. So how can it convince the FCC that this isn’t a problem? By comparing itself to pretty much any company that offers Internet or video service in any form. Leaving aside its link to NBCUniversal, Comcast has three major offerings: wired broadband, cable TV, and video on demand. If a company has moved into any of those spaces, Comcast says it’s a competitor.

Taken individually, each of these companies do compete in some sense with parts of Comcast, but the comparison falls apart when you look at how many of these services run on its broadband network. Comcast offers carefully constructed revenue and market cap charts that place it and TWC at the very bottom of the scale -- except that it’s comparing itself to the entirety of multinational giants like Apple, AT&T, and Microsoft, as well as bizarre additions like Facebook.

Comcast can only claim new services compete with existing wired broadband if it vastly oversells their potential. Google announced tentative plans to bring Fiber to more cities in February, and Comcast has spun this into a pending flurry of expansions, ignoring the fact that Google has until the end of 2014 to announce its decision and currently operates in only two small markets. There’s no doubt it can spur competition, but certainly not on the scale that Comcast implies.