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The Bitcoin industry has formed a political action committee that it could use to shower lawmakers and party committees with donations.

The Chamber of Digital Commerce, a month-old trade group for digital currencies and assets like Bitcoin, registered a political spending group with the Federal Election Commission in August.

The group is still in its infancy and has no immediate plans to support individual candidates, CEO Perianne Boring said. Still, formation of the PAC is a sign of increasing maturity for Bitcoin and a signal that politicians could face political pressure to support virtual currencies.

Sen Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep Mike Doyle (D-PA) are continuing to pressure the Federal Communications Commission to intervene where state laws keep cities from creating local Internet networks.

Local governments’ attempts to create opportunities for high-speed Internet “shouldn’t be restricted by technologically unsophisticated state governments,” Rep Doyle said. He “strongly” encouraged FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler “and the FCC to take quick and decisive action to lift restrictions that limit or prevent communities from addressing their own broadband needs.”

A small wireless company CREDO and tens of thousands of supporters are calling on President Barack Obama to fire CIA Director John Brennan over a report that showed his agency hacked into Senate computers.

CREDO Action -- the advocacy wing of CREDO -- presented the White House with a petition calling on President Obama to fire Brennan.

Comcast is making the case for regulators to approve its proposed $45 billion merger with Time Warner Cable.

In meetings with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen and others from the company pushed back on critics’ claims that the merger would hurt competition, according to new filings at the agency.

Comcast repeated its commitment to the agency's largely defunct network neutrality rules -- a condition of Comcast's merger with NBCUniversal in 2011 -- and said the merger would not harm broadband competition.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) wants more than just Beltway views heard as the rules governing Internet traffic are rewritten.

“Holding roundtables across the country will help ensure that Americans have a meaningful opportunity to participate” as the Federal Communications Commission tries to fix its network neutrality rules, Sen Leahy wrote in a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler.

The giants of the tech industry are at odds over how the government should protect users in the era of “big data.” While some companies are pushing President Barack Obama to propose firm rules for data collection, others say the industry should be trusted to regulate itself.

Microsoft is among those calling for new federal standards, arguing Congress should act to craft “strong, comprehensive privacy legislation.” But the Internet Association -- “the unified voice of the Internet economy,” which includes Facebook, Google and Yahoo -- took a different approach, calling for “a flexible and balanced self-regulatory responsible use framework” that protects consumers while allowing for innovation.

Internet providers and wireless companies are warning lawmakers not to get overly involved in deals over online traffic.

In comments filed to the House Commerce Committee, USTelecom -- which represents Internet providers -- said lawmakers and regulators should stay out of “interconnection” deals, the arrangements Internet providers make with each other and websites to handle online traffic.

Radio and TV broadcasters issued a formal rebuke to the Federal Communications Commission’s restrictions on company ownership. The FCC should “recognize and come to grips” with the changes that have taken place in the media market over the last eight years, the National Association of Broadcasters said.

The Communications Workers of America is calling for the Federal Communications Commission to require radio and TV broadcasters to publicly detail all sharing agreements that they have.

CWA said that broadcasters make deals to share the same news programming or give each other operational support “to evade the Commission’s local television ownership rules and its newspaper/broadcast cross-ownerships rules.”

The FCC should expand an order banning broadcasters from selling at least 15 percent of another’s advertisements to those other sharing arrangement, the union said. That would prevent companies from trying to skim profits by getting rid of employees and degrade “the quality and quantity of locally originated news and public affairs programming at the expense of quality journalism.”

Two Republican lawmakers introduced a privileged resolution criticizing House leadership for changing the text of a bill on cellphone “unlocking” before it hit the floor earlier in 2014.

Reps Walter Jones (R-NC) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) introduced the measure to disapprove of the action from House leaders and the heads of the Judiciary Committee and direct them “to operate in a matter that maximizes transparency and public trust.”

The action is a formal rebuke to House leaders for quietly slipping a controversial measure into the bill that allowed people to switch their cellphone from one network like AT&T or Verizon to another in February. The contested provision banned unlocking for “bulk resale,” which would have prevented people from setting up shop exclusively for unlocking phones and which supporters said was necessary to reduce the incentive for people to steal phones.

In their resolution, the two lawmakers claimed that the change “fundamentally altered the substance of the underlying bill.”