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We’re back to where we were, amazingly. In 2012, we watched CISPA pass in the House, insufficiently amended to protect the privacy of the average citizen. The President threatened to veto the bill. The Senate worked on its own law, all but ignoring what the House had produced. And in 2013, the same tune is being hummed. CISPA has passed the House, again. The President threatened to veto the bill, again. And the Senate is, again, ignoring CISPA in favor of working on its own bill. Progress!

Today in fat-cat consolidation news comes a report that Sinclair Broadcast Group is on the verge of owning more TV stations in the U.S. than any other company.

When Sinclair Broadcast Group completes three deals announced in the past two months, it will own more television stations across the country than any other company.

Will some of America’s top newspapers find themselves bought by owners motivated by political ideology more than civic duty?

The news media are relying more on social media -- both as a reporting tool and to disseminate their own content. But a hack of the AP Twitter account shows how things can go wrong.

If you're an avid reader of the New York Times, you're probably already familiar with its complex subscription model, which offers reading options ranging in price between $15 and $35 per month. Yes, it's sometimes costly to stay in the loop, but on the upside of the paywall, company CEO Mark Thompson says that readers will soon find a wider array of content packages, including less expensive options.

Twitter and PeopleBrowsr have settled a court case that charged Twitter with improperly cutting off PeopleBrowsr’s access to a “firehose” of tweet data. Under the terms of the settlement PeopleBrowsr will get access to the firehose through the end of the year and thereafter acquire similar data from an authorized reseller.

Culminating a two-week trial in which no hacking in the traditional sense occurred, a California man was convicted under the same hacking statute internet sensation Aaron Swartz was accused of before he committed suicide in January.

Verizon Communications is eager to buy Vodafone out of their massive mobile-phone joint venture -- but it will have to get over a $30 billion hurdle.

New York's subway system is adding Wi-Fi connectivity to many stations and presumably the whole underground network will be equipped before long. The ubiquity of Wi-Fi in public places like this is a hazard that must be resisted.

There are people in public life who cannot be bought, flattered, or hammered into submission. Bob Edgar was one of them. The president of Common Cause died this week at age 69, after working out on his treadmill. That’s the way he lived: on the go, overbooked, overworked -- and always overjoyed to be heading for the front lines in the fight for democracy.

Instapaper founder Marco Arment has just announced that he doesn't own his creation anymore. Betaworks, which also owns Digg, has acquired a majority stake in the read-it-later service.

AT&T slammed the U.S. Justice Department for what it called "blatant favoritism" toward smaller wireless rivals in recommending that regulators help them compete in the forthcoming spectrum auction.

Entrenched broadband providers like Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Comcast have been slow to respond to the threat posed by Google Fiber, the ultra-high-speed Internet service that the search giant is rolling out in Kansas City. But the giants are finally starting to awaken since Google announced that it is expanding into other markets, including Austin, Texas and Provo, Utah.

New York City’s ancient subway system is getting a much-needed high-tech upgrade with the roll out of 4G LTE and free Wi-Fi connectivity at 30 subway platforms, including Times Square, Union Square and Columbus Circle. Providers include each of the Big Four U.S. carriers and Boingo Wireless.

Broadband Internet access could soon be added to an FCC program that subsidizes telephone services for low-income consumers. Three members of Congress have introduced the Broadband Adoption Act of 2013, which would add broadband access as an option to Lifeline, an FCC program started in 1985 to help people pay for telephones so they could connect to jobs, family and emergency services.

Ten years in, Apple’s music library has swelled from 200,000 songs to more than 26 million. Yet it no longer has a captive audience.

To more rigorously study how people in the Arab world access news and information, rate the credibility of information sources and use social media, Northwestern University in Qatar commissioned a survey among people in eight Arab countries: Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Qatar, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.

In the four months since the Newtown, Conn., shootings, the tone of the conversation on Twitter about gun control has shifted sharply several times in apparent response to ongoing events, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of nearly 21 million tweets from Dec. 18 through April 21.

Jessica Gonzalez, the National Hispanic Media Coalition’s vice president of policy and legal affairs, testified before Congress about the FCC’s Lifeline program, which uses resources from the Universal Service Fund to ensure that every American can afford basic phone service. Read her moving testimony.