congress

If you think there's something a little odd about a bunch of corn farmers lobbying Congress to hold hearings on the details of a Google-Yahoo advertising deal, you may be right.

A letter (PDF) that the American Corn Growers Association and other farmers' groups sent to the U.S. Congress on Monday appears to be linked to a Washington, D.C., lobby group that does work for cable providers, some of Google's most potent political adversaries.

The letter warned Senate and House committee chairmen that any such deal would "create a monopolistic concentration of power in the … Read more

Earlier this week we told you about the Bush administration opposing a bill that would slap extensive regulations on technology companies doing business in China and other nations deemed to be unreasonably "Internet-restricting."

That is likely to doom the legislation, which was written by Republican Rep. Chris Smith and enjoys the support of journalist and human rights groups.

We've now posted a copy of the U.S. Department of Justice's letter to Capitol Hill opposing the so-called Global Online Freedom Act. One key section of the proposed law limits the ability of U.S. companies to … Read more

The U.S. Congress may soon vote on a new "compromise" spy law that would still likely derail pending suits against AT&T and other companies accused of opening their networks to the government in violation of wiretap law.

Democratic leaders, facing intense election year pressure from Republicans and more conservative "Blue Dog" members of their own party, had said they hoped to reach an agreement on a contentious rewrite of a 1978 electronic-surveillance law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, before their Memorial Day recess.

That self-imposed deadline passed without action. … Read more

Editor's note: Updated at 5:50 a.m. PDT with comment from Yahoo.

A proposed federal law that would slap extensive regulations on technology companies doing business in China and other nations deemed to be unreasonably "Internet-restricting" is facing an uncertain future due to opposition from the Bush administration and telecommunications providers.

The House of Representatives bill says that search engines, Web e-mail services, and other Internet businesses may not place servers with user account information in those nations. Any "aggrieved" person anywhere in the world would have the right to sue U.S. companies … Read more

Computer scientists have pressed for e-voting paper trails for years, in peer reports and in testimony on Capitol Hill. Now it looks like Congress is poised to ignore this idea: forthcoming legislation will say that a backup "electronic" record is OK too.

Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Bob Bennett (R-Utah), who lead a Senate committee charged with overseeing election law, said they plan to introduce a bill in the next few weeks that would require voters casting ballots on touch-screen or so-called "direct recording electronic" machines to have the ability to verify their selections through "… Read more

A U.S. Senate panel has unanimously approved a bill that would encourage federal, state, and local police to use and create special software designed to nab child pornography swappers on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday voted to send an amended version of the Combating Child Exploitation Act, chiefly sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), to the full slate of politicians for a vote.

All told, the bill would allocate more than $1 billion over the next eight years for a broad array of efforts aimed at tackling Internet crimes against children. It calls for hiring … Read more

Updated at 12:57 p.m. PDT to add the Democratic leadership's comments.

WASHINGTON--The U.S. Congress won't be beefing up the number of H-1B visas anytime soon, the chief legal adviser to an influential Republican predicted Monday.

Proposals to raise the annual H-1B cap would sail through Congress if called up for a floor vote, but political considerations mean that probably won't happen anytime soon, said George Fishman, chief counsel to the Republican side of a U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee panel on immigration.

That's because the Democratic leadership, including House Speaker Nancy … Read more

The entertainment industry's controversial efforts to get universities to be more proactive about policing peer-to-peer piracy have begun to spread from Capitol Hill to the states.

Earlier this year, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a Hollywood-backed proposal buried in a higher education reauthorization bill that would require universities receiving federal financial aid funding to devise plans for "alternative" offerings to unlawful downloading--such as subscription-based services--or "technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity."

That otherwise wide-ranging bill won't become law until House and Senate politicians agree upon a compromise version. Meanwhile, the debate … Read more

The only Net neutrality proposal to encounter some measure of success in the U.S. Congress is back again for another try.

As foreshadowed at a March hearing, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) on Thursday reintroduced the Internet Freedom and Non-discrimination Act, which passed by a 20-13 vote in the same committee in 2006. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) is co-sponsoring the bill, but so far, it is not clear whether any Republicans have signed on.

Just like last time, the bill would rewrite U.S. antitrust law to prohibit network operators like AT&T and Comcast from … Read more