Government

Google avoided about $2 billion in worldwide income taxes in 2011 by shifting close to $10 billion in revenues into a Bermuda shell company. Bermuda, along with a handful of other locales, is notorious for providing offshore solutions to multinationals eager to structure cash flow operations to thei...

RIM is getting some positive government attention for the yet-to-be-released BlackBerry 10 platform. Just months after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced it would abandon its longstanding use of the BlackBerry system and give its employees iPhones instead, the agency has decided to g...

The Federal Communications Commission approved a proposal from the Dish Network that would allow it to convert spectrum currently allocated for satellite service into airwaves that could support a land-based wireless network. Dish did not lay out specific plans for its next step with the spectrum, s...

The fact that the Internet has no boundaries of time or geography has changed the way businesses operate forever. One feature of the Internet is that it has allowed creative businesses to avoid, or at least minimize their tax liabilities. In particular, Google's business success means that it has to...

"If you can keep your wits, when all about you are losing theirs, maybe you just don't understand the situation." That often-cited spoof of a Rudyard Kipling poem comes to mind as the doomsday scenarios of the federal budget Fiscal Cliff begin to mount. Maybe cool heads won't prevail. Maybe panic is...

The duo that led the Clinton-era FCC, Reed Hundt and Blair Levin, recently published a new e-book titled "The Politics of Abundance." It looks to the success of the 1990's for solutions to today's problems. They lay out a framework and a path to regenerate the kind of growth and innovation we saw du...

The meat-cleaver approach to reducing costs in business or government always has the virtue of at least being simple to apply -- although frequently painful in the execution. For the U.S. government, an across-the-board cut of roughly 9 percent in discretionary civilian and defense outlays is, in fa...

The Federal Communications Commission passed a little-publicized order last month that changes how cable television providers can deliver basic broadcast channels. This rule change has far-reaching implications for those who legally grab their basic broadcast channels for free from cable, but don't ...

Google is adding its voice to a chorus of opposition to a proposal to update the International Telecommunication Union treaty in a way that could give governments more power to restrict the flow of information online. Next week, members of the ITU -- the UN organization that oversees international c...

Adoption of cloud technology at the federal level is still far from routine -- but cloud transactions continue to emerge on a regular basis. The deals range in value, demonstrating that cloud migration can be applied for relatively small deployments or for huge networks. In the latest major deal, HP...

One of the overriding issues in the federal elections was the need to get the government's financial house in order. In the post-election period, Republicans and Democrats have offered conciliatory comments as a deadline for resolving the issue of the fiscal cliff draws near, but positions on the is...

One of the conventional views of political pundits after the Nov. 6 Presidential election was that both parties spent billions of dollars on the campaign for a result that did not change the political landscape all that much. Below the broad trends that keep political pundits in business, however, a...

The ever-changing and ever-expanding quest to keep information technology systems secure requires collaboration and coordination among government and business enterprises. To foster such joint efforts, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has put out the word to U.S. businesses to pro...

The U.S. government's efforts to advance health technology include work taking place at two obvious agencies: the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. However, an unlikely player in the healthcare arena has emerged -- the Federal Communications Commission,...

Smartphones can perform all kinds of neat tasks, such as instantly directing owners to the nearest sushi bar, or providing inning-by-inning updates of the World Series. Beyond these eye-catching consumer conveniences, the potential for more substantive uses for mobile telecom is enormous. One such a...