After enduring a week of bad press over its involvement with NSA spying programs, Google has written an open letter to the U.S. government asking for permission to publish more data on national security requests. Dear Attorney General Holder and Director Mueller Google has worked tremendously hard over the past fifteen years to earn our [...]

Successful entrepreneur and South African immigrant Elon Musk disclosed that he left Mark Zuckerberg’s political advocacy group FWD.us out of disgust with the organization’s cynical political tactics. Musk made the disclosure during an interview at All Things Digital (start at 56:30). WALTER MOSSBERG: Since we just touched on immigration, can you explain what happened with [...]

Yesterday’s SOPA strike was enormously successful, not only raising attention to the issue but moving a tremendous amount of politicians for a one-day event. Over 4.5 million people signed Google’s petition against SOPA. The Wikipedia action gave high-profile attention to the issue as well, and even if Facebook and Twitter’s responses were muted, overall the [...]

The biggest Internet presence in the world will have something to add to the growing online protests against anti-piracy legislation, though they won’t go as far as shutting down their operations. Google plans to highlight the issue with an action item on their famously spare homepage. “Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose [...]

At today’s LinkedIn town hall meeting with President Obama, a former Google executive asked “Would you please raise my taxes?” The man, identified as Doug Edwards, a former director of communications and marketing at Google, said that he wanted the country to continue to be able to invest in Pell grants and infrastructure and job [...]

Today’s Wikileaks release of key facilities vital to US national security is a bit less than meets the eye once you delve into it. However, it does send a kind of warning signal to the world that Julian Assange means business when he dsecribes “poison pill” information that will be released upon his arrest or [...]

In my post yesterday about Elizabeth Warren’s early efforts in standing up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, I mentioned her trip to the west coast this week, and her desire for technological solutions to consumer protection challenges. In an interview with the National Journal, Warren goes a bit deeper into that approach, suggesting that the [...]

Henry Waxman has been trying to enshrine the terrible compromise promulgated by Google and Verizon into law, by pushing a truly terrible bill on broadband that strips the FCC of rulemaking and classification ability, and gives wireless Internet providers carte blanche to discriminate in favor of their products. The FCC will not have rulemaking authority [...]

The FCC officially approved the opening of a vast amount of unused spectrum for broadband Internet, potentially creating a fast “super-WiFi” network. The change in available airwaves, which were freed up by the conversion of television signals from analog to digital, constitutes the first significant block of spectrum made available for unlicensed use by the [...]

Two FCC Commissioners and one US Senator slammed the Google-Verizon joint policy agreement and strongly endorsed the principle of net neutrality last night at a hearing before hundreds of citizens in Minneapolis, giving the Chairman of the federal agency Julius Genachowski all of the support he would need to regulate broadband Internet, if he so [...]

In addition to the flash mobs at Target, another rally took place in front of a corporate bad actor last week. A couple busloads of activists descended on Google headquarters and protested their new net neutrality policy, which would allow for discrimination on wireless Internet and also special “managed services” from telecom carriers. They delivered [...]