congress

WASHINGTON--The presidential elections may be more than a year off, but a newly unveiled group is already plotting how to ensure No. 44 has a fresh "blueprint" for managing cybercrises.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, said on Tuesday that it's forming an independent, nonpartisan Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency, composed of more than 30 people who are considered experts in the field.

Its goal by the end of 2008 is to "come up with a set of recommendations for the next administration, whether Democratic or Republican," … Read more

Updated at 11:13 a.m. PDT: America's Internet access subscribers can breathe a sigh of relief: Congress isn't planning to allow taxes on your connection for another seven years.

With little debate, the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday voted 402-0 to pass an extension of an existing ban on Internet access taxes until 2014. The same proposal received unanimous approval in the Senate late last week.

The move comes just in the nick of time, as current law generally prohibiting state and local governments from levying the taxes was scheduled to expire Thursday.

The bill'… Read more

WASHINGTON--Federal consumer protection authorities say they want nothing more than to put the financial hurt on deceptive spyware purveyors. The trouble, they say, is that the law still doesn't let them.

Sure, the Federal Trade Commission has the ability to go after spyware purveyors now, and it has done so a dozen or so times. So can state attorneys general and the U.S. Department of Justice.

But currently, the FTC can only force an offending company to turn over ill-gotten profits or to pay a finite amount to affected consumers--"consumer redress," as it's known … Read more

Scarcely a week before an existing ban on Internet access taxes is set to expire, the U.S. Senate late Thursday voted to let the prohibition live on for seven more years.

The compromise bill, which was approved by a voice vote, would prohibit state and local governments from taxing any service that enables users to connect to the Internet and some related services through 2014. That's three years longer than the version passed by the House of Representatives last week.

The bill won't go to the president's desk just yet. First, the House must approves the … Read more

Editor's note: Click here for Friday's update on the Senate's Internet access tax vote.

When the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill last week extending a ban on Internet access taxes, it may have opened up the possibility of previously forbidden taxes on paid e-mail and other Web services.

That's what a Congressional Research Service attorney concluded in a two-page memorandum (click here for a PDF) released on Thursday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the author of the original tax ban in 1998. The CRS is a federally funded sort of "think … Read more

While a class action lawsuit is definitely one way to get Comcast to behave, another perhaps more productive way to do so is to have politicians step in and regulate.

On Tuesday, I discussed the issue of Comcast's anti-BitTorrent "network management" with Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., who is a strong supporter of consumer rights and has led the battle to undo the damage caused by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA.

He was named Politician of the Year for 2006 by Library Journal, largely due to his efforts to protect the fair-use doctrine and expand Internet … Read more

WASHINGTON--America's online poker enthusiasts descended on Capitol Hill this week with two messages for Congress: Poker's good for the brain, and stop jeopardizing our games already.

The multiday lobbying visit by members of the Poker Players Alliance, which counts more than 800,000 professional and amateur players on its rolls, arrived about a year after politicians enacted a restrictive anti-Internet gambling law.

The players' goal for the fly-in: to boost support for a couple of bills, which so far enjoy backing from only a handful of politicians, that would roll back a sweeping ban in favor of more … Read more

Update 12:53 p.m. PDT: Congress has moved a step closer to enacting a new law regulating key aspects of how U.S. tech companies operate in countries whose governments censor or otherwise manipulate the Internet.

As expected, the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs backed a slightly amended version of the Global Online Freedom Act by a voice vote on Tuesday morning. The bill's preliminary nod is a prelude to the same House committee's plans to grill Yahoo executives early next month about a widely publicized case involving the imprisonment of a Chinese journalist.

The … Read more

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly named the House bill. It is the Global Online Freedom Act.

Updated Tuesday at 9:04 a.m. PDT: Try as it might, Congress failed last year to pass new rules for U.S. companies--backed by fines of up to $2 million--that do business in "Internet-restricting" locales like China.

But the politicians apparently aren't giving up on the idea just yet.

The House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs has scheduled a Tuesday vote on the Global Online Freedom Act. Past iterations have enjoyed support from human rights activists … Read more