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This week was another busy one in the world of technology and telecom policy. Here are a few of the highlights:

Dingell miffed at FCC, broadband debate looms

Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) sent a second letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski asking for an explanation of his rationale for reclassifying broadband as a regulated telecommunications service, and expressing a bit of pique that the chairman had not responded to his first letter sent in May.

"I find it wholly frustrating that Chairman Genachowski, after nearly two months, still has not responded to my questions about the classification of broadband Internet access services," Dingell said in a statement. "I have serious concerns about the FCC's proposed course of action. There is intense interest in the Congress about this, and I feel Chairman Genachowski's responses to my questions would be invaluable in informing the debate on the matter."

Dingell is hardly the only one alarmed at the FCC's reclassification proposal. More than half of the members of Congress have signed on to letters encouraging the chairman to scrap the plan, and this week saw a gang of seven Republicans in the Senate introduce a bill that would impose severe restrictions on the agency's regulatory authority.

Facebook is expected to announce a major milestone in the company's growth this week, revealing to the world that it has signed up half a billion users.

Quite likely, the announcement of the 500 million mark will come on Wednesday, and serve as a centerpiece of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer (6:30 p.m. ET).

That broadcast will feature Zuckerberg leading Sawyer on a tour of Facebook's headquarters and sitting for a one-on-one interview, presumably touching on familiar issues such as privacy, perhaps hints of a coming IPO, maybe even a mention of the upcoming movie dramatizing the controversial origins of the company with all its dorm-room intrigue at Harvard back in 2004.

There are many ways to approach a description of the magnitude of Facebook's achievement. With its 500 million members, the social network boasts a population larger -- by nearly 50 million -- than the United States, Mexico and Canada combined. Or 73 million larger than the combined population of Australia and South America. Bigger than 100 Luxembourgs! Or 600 Qatars!

It is a large number by any measure, and all the more impressive when you recall that it was only February when Facebook's ranks swelled past 400 million, and September 2009 when it hit 300 million.

As it continues to tinker with Web tools to bring more of the government's activity online, the Obama administration has relaunched its federal IT spending tracker, an online dashboard that provides an agency-by-agency view of how the government is spending nearly $80 billion on IT projects.

The souped-up IT dashboard refreshes the [spending tracker the White House first launched last June](/government/article.php/3827791/Obama-CIO-Debuts-Federal-IT-Spending-Tracker.htm), and promises faster navigation and a new views of government data. A mobile version of the dashboard is now also available.

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra bill the new IT dashboard as "the next major leap forward in transparency, performance and accessibility of the Federal IT portfolio," a tangible example of the administration's work to use technology to cast light on the inner workings of government.

Writing in a post on the White House blog, Kundra also described the dashboard as part of the broader effort to bring federal IT more in line with the private sector, replacing waste with new efficiencies.

"Government IT projects all too often cost millions of dollars more than they should, take years longer than necessary to deploy, and deliver technologies that are obsolete by the time they are completed," Kundra wrote. "Colossal failures have contributed to a significant technology gap between the public and private sector which results in dollars wasted and a government that is less responsive to the American people."