Headlines

It is a decade overdue, but Mexico finally has a clear path to ending the near-monopoly status of Telmex – Carlos Slim's Telefonos de Mexico. Whether President Felipe Calderón seizes the day will signal just how serious he is about modernizing his country's economy.

Sometime in the next few years, if a memorandum signed by President Bush this month ever goes into effect, one government official talking to another about information on terrorists will have to begin by saying: "What I am about to tell you is controlled unclassified information enhanced with specified dissemination." That would mean, according to the memo, that the information requires safeguarding because "the inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure would create risk of substantial harm." Bush's memorandum, signed on the eve of his daughter Jenna's wedding, introduced "Controlled Unclassified Information" as a new government category that will replace "Sensitive but Unclassified." Such information -- though it does not merit the well-known national security classifications "confidential," "secret" or "top secret" -- is nonetheless "pertinent" to U.S.

Ten years ago today, the United States Department of Justice filed a landmark antirust lawsuit against Microsoft. Six months later, Google incorporated in Menlo Park (CA). The proximity of those two dates raises a delicious "what if." Knowing how the subsequent decade turned out, do you think the Justice Department would still have gone after Microsoft in 1998?
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The fight over the Federal Communications Commission's Dec. 18 media-ownership vote set up a potential battle between the current president and a senator who wants to be the next one.

Though it’s late in the Bush administration, it’s still a bit too soon to discount Kevin Martin, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and cable-industry nemesis for the past three years.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected Comcast's challenge of the Federal Communications Commission's decision not to grant it a waiver of its rule requiring the unbundling of security and surfing functions of its set-top boxes.

With a preponderance of sales managers becoming TV station general managers, the pressure to squeeze more money out of understaffed stations and the flood of veterans leaving the industry -- leaving younger executives with less grounding in ethics.

In a world of almost unlimited viewing options, the broadcast networks need to reestablish themselves as the premier showcase of programming with the best viewer experience. Fox's "Remote-free TV" experiment is a good first step.

The Federal Communications Commission is conducting testing to determine whether and how to allow spectrum-sensing unlicensed devices to operate in the digital-TV-spectrum band being used by broadcasters. If a device cannot tell when a broadcaster is already using the channel, it could mistakenly start transmitting on the channel and create interference to those beautiful new DTV signals broadcasters' future depends on.