WASHINGTON, October 31, 2009 – This week Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., added to the growing number of network neutrality-related bills when she filed legislation that would ban the Federal Communications Commission from regulating internet access, as proposed last week by Chairman Julius Genachowski. Blackburn’s measure, H.R. 3924, is intended “to prohibit the FCC from further regulating the Internet.” In a statement, she said FCC rules “ironically would make the Internet less neutral by allowing the FCC to regulate it in the same way it regulates radio and television broadcasts.”

The Internet domain-name governing body has approved, after years of discussion, the use of internet addresses that consist solely of non-Latin characters. “The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago,” said Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush in a statement. “Right now internet address endings are limited to Latin characters – A to Z. But the Fast Track Process is the first step in bringing the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world online for domain names.”

October 31, 2009 – Finland made headlines earlier this month in declaring that broadband had become a legal right. While this startled some people, the Finns were not the first people to declare this – the Swiss were. Further, in 2003, at the World Summit on the Information Society, a declaration of principles was drafted and signed by a number of nations around the world, including the United States.

WASHINGTON, October 30, 2009 – At a Friday workshop that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration held on data collection and the broadband stimulus, NTIA announced that the agency will be collecting large amounts of data that they would like to make more broadly available. Researchers and other government agencies will also be using the data collected to create new programs and create predictive models, agency officials said.

WASHINGTON, October 30, 2009 – CTIA-The Wireless Association announced Friday that it has a newly elected board of director officers. AT&T Mobility President and CEO Ralph de la Vega will serve as CTIA’s chairman, Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse will act as vice chairman, Asurion CEO Bret Comolli as treasurer, Cellcom President and CEO Patrick Riordan as secretary and T-Mobile USA President and CEO Robert Dotson as chairman emeritus.

WASHINGTON, October 30, 2009 – Over the summer, BroadbandCensus.com split our operations between the news and events that we host, and the Creative Commons database with the local broadband SPARC: the Speeds, Prices, Availability, Reliability and Competition in the local broadband marketplace. As we’ve now entered the fourth year of this saga in which BroadbandCensus.com has been leading the charge for public and transparent broadband data, much has changed about the opportunity that we face, and our country faces, in bringing better broadband data to consumers, and to policy-makers. In previous versions of this series of blog posts taking stock, I’ve highlighted our efforts to start the ball rolling on crowdsourcing broadband data, and on uniting scholars and state officials through the “Broadband Census for America” conference that we hosted on the eve of the passage of the Broadband Data Improvement Act. Today, I’d like to speak about some of the major changes that 2009 has brought to BroadbandCensus.com – particularly as both our news and our data side have helped to set the table for the national broadband plan currently under development. In the final series of these blog posts, next week, I plan to unveil some of the major changes in store as we relaunch BroadbandCensus.com.

WASHINGTON, October 29, 2009 – Under regulations recently finalized by the Environmental Protection Administration, large sources and suppliers in the U.S. must collect accurate and timely emissions data of greenhouse gases. Information technology firms see big opportunities to find innovative solutions to help companies covered under the new rules to comply with reporting requirements. These representatives say that potential new regulatory changes, which were issued by the EPA on September 22, 2009 – and become effective at the beginning of the year – could spur new business ideas.

WASHINGTON, October 29, 2009 – Microsoft and Yahoo on Thursday gingerly weighed into the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed rules governing internet access – otherwise known as “Net neutrality” – that were announced last week. The two companies offered up, to BroadbandCensus.com, carefully crafted comments splitting the difference between the hardening battle lines between Google and AT&T.

WASHINGTON, October 28, 2009 – Assistant Secretary of Commerce Lawrence Strickling said Wednesday that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration will work to apply the lessons from the first round as it moves on to the next phase of broadband stimulus applications. “The NTIA and RUS are finalizing a new request for information that will help us shape the round two process,” Strickling said, testifying before the House Small Business Committee. He also said that at least 15 percent of the applications for stimulus funding came from small and disadvantaged businesses.

WASHINGTON, October 28, 2009 – Google told the Federal Communications Commission Wednesday that its Google Voice service currently is restricting calls to fewer than 100 specific phone numbers that it believes are involved in the business of adult sex chats. Google provided a detailed response Wednesday to questions posed by the FCC concerning Google Voice’s practice of preventing calls to certain telephone number prefixes.