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The head of the Senate Commerce Committee came out swinging at the online ad industry, accusing it of failing to honor an agreement to honor consumers' requests to avoid online data collection.

Governments made a record number of requests for Google to remove political content in the last half of 2012, the search giant said.

As Washington has debated the sequester and the fake crisis of federal spending, some leading conservatives have revived a familiar meme about an old program called Lifeline, which is a longstanding federal subsidy created to make phone service accessible to people who are elderly, very low-income or living in rural areas. Like the furor surrounding Obamacare in 2009, the ongoing stir over “Obama phones,” as the program has been dubbed, is instructive.

Business groups representing industries from health care to banking are pressuring the FCC to ease its rules on robocalls -- saying they should get a carve-out for technology that automatically dials customers.

This week we launched a campaign asking the Tribune Company not to sell its eight major daily newspapers to the Koch brothers, the billionaires notorious for funding a range of far-right causes. But this isn’t about partisan politics. Our opposition to the Koch brothers is rooted in the issues Free Press has been working on for a decade: promoting quality journalism and curbing media consolidation.

Congress is set to clarify, bringing the quarter-century-old law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, or E.C.P.A., in line with the Internet age.

Justice Department agreed to issue "2511 letters" immunizing AT&T and other companies participating in a cybersecurity program from criminal prosecution under the Wiretap Act, according to new documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

News that Amazon is building a set-top box to rival offerings from Apple, Google, and Roku arrived as a surprise -- but not a shock. In the past several years, all of its biggest competitors have made their own plays for customers' living rooms. The simplest explanation for Amazon's entry into the set-top box space is that the company has to.

House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte said that his committee will launch a sweeping review of the country's copyright law and hold a series of hearings on the matter "in the months ahead."

Fans of newspapers are a jumpy lot these days. And in the past couple of weeks, their apprehension has gone through the roof with word that right-wing billionaires Charles and David Koch are looking to buy all eight papers.

It’s well documented that girls need more exposure to tech and science careers -- they also need more female role models. Why is it that we can easily name legends such as Gates, Jobs, Dell, and Zuckerberg for their technical contributions? Yet most people cannot name the woman who saved millions of lives by inventing Kevlar. Or the Nobel Laureate who invented radioimmunoassay testing that. Or the woman who founded the first word processing company. These women deserve to be widely known for their significant contributions. But most importantly, our daughters need female role models.

Twitter has a working two-step security solution undergoing internal testing before incrementally rolling it out to users, something it hopes to begin doing shortly.

Germany’s economics and technology minister has reportedly urged Telekom to watch its step, after the telco announced caps for fixed-line users. Thing is, usage of Telekom’s own entertainment services won’t count towards those caps.

Verizon Communications has hired advisers to prepare a possible $100 billion cash and stock bid to take full control of Verizon Wireless from its partner Vodafone.

Bob Edgar, the president of Common Cause, former Pennsylvania congressman and church leader passed away at his home in Northern Virginia. We are deeply saddened to learn of his passing. He was a true public servant who fought to make our democracy stronger. He was also one of the kindest people in Washington, always generous with his time and willing to share his experience. Our condolences go out to the Edgar family, his many friends and our close allies at Common Cause. He will be missed, but we will continue working together to carry forward his important work.

What do you get two billionaire brothers who already have everything? The Tribune Company.

Remember how Time Warner Cable executives tried to claim that American consumers don’t actually want 1 Gbps broadband connections? Well, Paul Venezia isn’t having any of it and says that ISPs who deny the challenge that Google Fiber represents are whistling past their own graveyards.

After launching a successful San Diego pilot program last year to bring low-cost broadband service and computers into the homes of needy K-12 students, Cox Communications is expanding the effort to all the markets it serves in the state.

In case there’s any doubt about which country is the world’s top industrial cyberspy, a new report adds to the mounting pile of evidence -- it’s China.

Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who have earned the enmity of the left for heavily funding conservative causes, could soon add a media franchise to their business empire.