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On the one-year anniversary of the announcement of the National Broadband Plan, Broadband Breakfast gathered key industry experts to offer criticism and discuss the government’s implementation of the plan.

“The plan showed that broadband is not a luxury, it’s really a necessity” said Information Technology and Innovation Foundation founder Robert Atkinson, “It showed that speed is not the only goal, it’s also ubiquity and adoption.” Communication architect Daniel Berninger called the plan “too timid,” and said, “the plan will not push us to become number one in the world.” He went onto say connectivity will be the main driving force of the economy in the future. Berninger fears that if the U.S. does not improve its high-speed network availability, it will never be able to overcome China’s massive population advantage. John Erik Garr, former General Manager of the Omnibus Broadband Initiative, disagreed with Berninger’s characterization that the plan was too timid. “We didn't have all the data we needed but we wanted to create an aspirational document which presents a baseline while offering up some long term goals.” Garr said. Jim Baller, founder of the U.S. Broadband Coalition, agreed with Garr, saying, “The plan did not have all the data it needed and therefore a consensus could not be made on what exactly we need.” However, the plan tried to move broadband development forward."

Netflix has been hit with a potential class-action lawsuit for allegedly breaking a federal law aimed at protecting the privacy of people who rent movies.

In papers filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Virginia resident Peter Comstock argues that Netflix runs afoul of the Video Privacy Protection Act by retaining data about users' movie rental history and recommendations. Netflix "purposefully retains confidential information regarding both payment and video viewing habits for millions of individuals -- even after their subscriptions are canceled," Comstock alleges. Comstock seeks to represent a class of all Netflix users who canceled their accounts more than one year ago. The federal video privacy law, which dates to 1988, specifically prohibits "videotape service providers" from releasing consumers' records without their permission. Congress passed the measure after a newspaper obtained and printed the video rental records of Judge Robert Bork in conjunction with his ill-fated nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. The law also requires providers to destroy consumers' video rental records within a year of the time the provider no longer needs the data. One purpose of that provision was to minimize the privacy risk to consumers, says Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and former counsel to Sen. Patrick Leahy, who drafted the Video Privacy Protection Act. But the law's wording leaves some room for doubt about whether it applies online.

To keep the Internet “forever young,” decision makers should keep in mind that the world is divided between rich and poor nations with vastly different needs, former President Bill Clinton told a packed crowd as the keynote speaker at the meeting of the organization that oversees the Internet’s naming system. “Every time you have to face a question about the future of the Internet, what applications will this have in poor countries and rich countries, ask yourself that,” said Clinton. Clinton made the remarks at the annual meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. In a far-ranging speech, he touched on Haiti, the financial crisis, job loss, basketball, the human genome and Egypt and Libya. “Are we forming a more perfect union across the world?” he asked.

Shortly after 12:46 am EST on February 11, when a massive 8.9 magnitude earthquake hit off the coast of northeast Japan, Twitter began to reverberate with posts about the catastrophe.

"Major quake shakes Japan - preliminary M7.8," tweeted Martyn Williams, a reporter and bureau chief for the IDG News Service. "JMA warns of tsunami, up to 6 meters off Miyagi coast." "wow, that was a crazy earthquake... ran out of the building. 7.9 at epicenter," posted tech blogger Chris Latko from the scene. For the one day, Friday, March 11, fully 66% of the news links on Twitter were about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. For the entire week, March 7-11, 20% of the news links were on that subject, making it the No. 1 story. The response to the earthquake illustrated the different ways in which Twitter functions as a social media tool. Initially, the site served as a way to get breaking information from a variety of official and unofficial sources, including some eyewitness accounts. It also acted as an electronic bulletin board, passing on tips about everything from the location of bathrooms to ways of tracking loved ones. And once the scope of the catastrophe became apparent, Twitter became a place to raise funds for the recovery effort and for users to express their thoughts and condolences for the victims.