Roy Mark

WASHINGTON — The gasbags were full, the hot air searing. The leads waited in the wings primed and pumped, armed with loaded questions, sure of mission and confident of a rigged outcome. The stage was set for a periodic Washington set piece: industry shaming. Wednesday’s invited guests? The luminaries of search: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. […]

Two Virginia congressmen want to fold your online poker game, introducing legislation Thursday to ban all forms of electronic gambling in the United States. The Internet Gambling Prohibition Act proposes to make it illegal for Americans to use the Internet for gambling and would authorize law enforcement officials to stop credit card payments and other […]

WASHINGTON — The nation’s leading technology companies were lectured and hectored today by lawmakers accusing them of collaborating with Chinese censors. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco sat through almost two hours of opening statements – almost all them blisteringly critical of the Internet powerhouses — by a House subcommittee on human rights. And that was […]

The Baby Bells converge on Capitol Hill today to sell a Senate panel on clearing the regulatory decks for a rollout of IPTV, the Baby Bells’ fledgling alternative to cable television built on Internet Protocol (IP). The cable industry and local regulatory agencies will be waiting in opposition as the Senate Commerce Committee continues it […]

China’s continued intransigence over free trade issues, including intellectual property rights, dictates a “readjustment” in American policy, U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Rob Portman said today. In a USTR report released to Congress, Portman said that the 25-year-old U.S. policy of economic engagement with Beijing is in danger in the absence of “tangible evidence” of Chinese […]

In a preemptive strike against congressional critics of its China conduct, Yahoo said today the private sector cannot “effectively influence” foreign government censorship policies and human rights violations. That problem, Yahoo contends, is best solved by “government-to-government dialogue.” Yahoo, along with Google, Microsoft and Cisco, are under fire for their open cooperation with the Chinese […]

The furor over the unauthorized disclosure of consumers’ personal telephone records continues to gain momentum in Washington. Late Friday afternoon, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) turned its attention to the telecommunications carriers entrusted with securing the data. Already investigating the data brokers who sell the records online, the FCC now wants to know if carriers […]

Americans are consuming record amounts of media services and that bodes well for broadband according to the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) latest report on U.S. video competition. The report says cable companies remain the primary video providers in the country, although their dominance is slipping as satellite TV and the Bells’ entry into the video […]

Spam? Spyware? Data breaches? Telephone records confidentiality? Old issues. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras wants to know what’s next. Majoras said the FTC plans hearings some time this fall to ponder the next generation of consumer high-tech threats. “At these hearings, we will address a series of critical questions: What have we […]

The Department of Justice (DoJ) is launching its first national survey to measure the prevalence and impact of cyber crime on U.S. businesses. The survey starts this month and will be completed by the end of the year. Conducted by the DoJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber […]

The federal government’s ongoing probe into E-Rate fraud nabbed another conviction Wednesday with the guilty plea of California-based Premio, which agreed to $400,000 in criminal fines and $1.3 million in restitution as part of the civil settlement. Premio, which makes and sells computers, servers, software and other computer equipment, admitted to collusion, bid-rigging and mail […]

WASHINGTON — Online data brokers are selling far more than personal telephone records, including the actual names, addresses and phone numbers of instant messaging users and those registered with dating sites, such as Match.com. Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), told a Senate panel investigating the sale of online phone […]