Government

FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly on Tuesday suggested the government should investigate Netflix's practice of throttling video content delivery to customers using mobile devices. However, Netflix's video throttling was not a violation of the FCC's Net neutrality rules, O'Rielly also said. Netflix l...

After a bitter legal battle over encryption and privacy rights, the Department of Justice on Monday announced it would back out of its case against Apple because the FBI was able to crack the code of the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino, California, shooters. The department had asked a feder...

Broadband Internet service providers are wary of a government plan to impose consumer privacy protection regulations on the sector. The Federal Communications Commission likely will issue the proposed regulations by Friday. It will accept public comment on the proposal before taking final action. Th...

GOVERNMENT IT REPORT

White House Puts Clamps on Data Center Development

The federal program for improving the operation of thousands of government data centers has entered a new phase that will impact significantly how electronic information is stored and managed. Proposed updates to data center operations will affect providers of data management products and could spur...

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear an appeal from Samsung regarding its patent dispute with Apple. The case stems from a 2011 lawsuit by Apple that alleged Samsung copied certain design elements and features from the iPhone and iPad and used them in Samsung Galaxy phones and tablet comp...

A federal magistrate judge on Monday granted the Department of Justice's request to delay a much-anticipated court hearing that had been scheduled to take place on Tuesday in Riverside, Calif. The court granted an indefinite stay, after the DoJ said it had found a possible method of accessing the en...

A new front may have opened up between the Department of Justice and Silicon Valley in the ongoing legal battle over government access to encrypted data, this time involving WhatsApp, the electronic messaging and voice system owned by Facebook. DoJ officials reportedly have been debating how to proc...

The legal battle between Apple and the Department of Justice over access to encrypted iPhone data got a little more personal last week after lawyers for Apple blasted a government filing that accused the company of collaborating with the Chinese government. The DOJ's filing was nothing more than a s...

Lawmakers this week sent to the White House the draft version of a bill that would penalize technology companies if they failed to cooperate on encryption cases, according to Capitol Hill sources. The bill, sponsored by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., and ranking member ...

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler on Tuesday announced a $2.25 billion plan to expand the federal Lifeline subsidy program to help low-income consumers afford broadband Internet service. Lifeline, which currently allows low-income consumers to buy mobile phone service at a discount, would let them buy standa...

GOVERNMENT IT REPORT

White House Proposes $3B IT Update Fund

The Obama administration is seeking $3.1 billion for a fund to update federal IT resources that need to be replaced with more efficient systems. The fund would bolster the government's annual spending on IT, which is set for a modest increase to $89.8 billion in the administration's fiscal 2017 budg...

Vivek Kundra, the former federal CIO, envisioned that 25 percent of the funds the federal government spends each year on information technology could productively be deployed through cloud-based systems. Two recent reports on the status of federal cloud procurement show that for government IT manage...

Apple General Counsel Bruce Sewell on Tuesday testified before the House Judiciary Committee that his company should not be required write new code for software that would weaken the security of the iPhone in the wake of the San Bernardino, California, terrorist attacks. The FBI wants Apple to take ...

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