Headlines

Leaders from both side of the aisle of the House Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee have written Charter Communications expressing their "serious concern" about reports that the company plans to track Web-site visits by its Internet customers and share that information with an ad firm, asking it to hold off on those plans for now.

Federal regulators may be probing Comcast's throttling of BitTorrent filesharing traffic, but can they actually take action, if they choose, against the company or any other broadband provider on Net neutrality grounds? The answer may not be simple.

After a years-long dispute, Microsoft and the computing and education project One Laptop Per Child said Thursday that they had reached an agreement to offer Windows on the organization’s computers.

Carl Icahn's audacious bid to overthrow Yahoo's board could bring Microsoft back to the bargaining table and revive the tech megamerger. On Thursday, the billionaire investor instigated a plan to expel Yahoo's board of directors for "irresponsible" and "unconscionable" acts that prompted Microsoft to drop a $47.5 billion bid to buy Yahoo.

On Thursday night, the US Senate voted, without debate, to invalidate the Federal Communications Commission's Dec. 18 decision to loosen the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rule. The measure passed on a voice vote.

Cox Communications appears to be impeding peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic in the same way Comcast has, according to a study released Thursday by a German research group. Germany’s Max Planck Institute, a science and technology research organization, analyzed a test of 8,175 Internet volunteers around the world and found that both Comcast and Cox are blocking peer-to-peer traffic over their networks during all hours of the day.

The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission, Canada's broadcast watchdog, will hold public hearings next year into the thorny question of extending its purview to the Internet, a medium that it deemed a regulatory-free zone nearly a decade ago.

A new SNL Kagan survey predicts annual multichannel-subscription growth of 2.1%, or 108.5 million by 2012, with the total multichannel market accounting for about 89% of TV households. Kagan did not predict that the digital-TV switch will drive very many over-the-air viewers to multichannel providers, saying that about 10% of over-the-air households will opt to move to multichannel, with most of those going to cable.

Public interest groups Public Knowledge and Media Access Project want to make sure the FCC understands their position on the Sirius-XM merger in light of a recent letter from Chester Davenport the Managing Director of Georgetown Partners.