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Two groups representing tech industry giants are asking lawmakers to give the administration funding to carry out its controversial plan to relinquish oversight of key technical Internet functions.

That administration move is a “critical transition” that needs full funding to be carried out successfully, the Internet Association and the Information Technology Industry Council said. The Internet Association includes Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Amazon. The Information Technology Industry Council includes Google, Apple, Microsoft and IBM.

The groups ask House members to oppose a provision in the Commerce Department’s authorization bill that would reduce funding for the agency. That bill is being considered on the House floor soon.

Reps George Holding (R-NC) and John Conyers (D-MI) are set to introduce a bill that would require Internet radio services like Pandora and Sirius XM to pay to play songs that were recorded before 1972.

The bill from Reps Holding and Conyers -- the Respecting Senior Performers as Essential Cultural Treasures, or RESPECT, Act -- would require Internet radio services to pay federal performance royalty fees for the older recordings.

The call for performance royalty fees for pre-1972 recordings is supported by industry groups and musicians, some of whom -- including Martha Reeves, Dickey Betts and Al Jardine -- are set to appear at the bill’s unveiling.

A bipartisan duo of House lawmakers has questions for eBay about its recent data breach. Reps Joe Barton (R-TX) and Bobby Rush (D-IL) told eBay chief John Donahoe that they share “some concerns regarding the data security practices of personal information at eBay.”

The lawmakers, who are both members of the Bipartisan Privacy Caucus, want to know if the company is still gathering details about the full scope of the hack and how users have been affected. They also asked whether or not eBay is looking to overhaul its security standards in light of the hack and if it had noticed a decrease in security breaches in recent years.

Americans for Tax Reform head Grover Norquist wants House lawmakers to permanently ban any tax on companies providing Internet service. In a letter to leaders of the House Judiciary Committee, Norquist said that a current bill in Congress would prevent “punitive and discriminatory” taxes from limiting the power of the Web.

“Excessive taxes will hinder continued growth in the digital space,” he wrote. “Allowing the Internet access tax moratorium to lapse would certainly lead to higher tax rates on consumers and reduce the rate of adoption and innovation. The Internet is our greatest gateway to innovation and education, higher taxes on Internet access undermines American economic competiveness and growth.”

The Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act would ban state and local governments from enacting taxes on Internet service. Unless it is passed this year, a 1998 law temporarily prohibiting the taxes would lapse, clearing the way for governments who might be eyeing taxes on Internet service companies as a way to fill their coffers.

The Senate needs to pass a major cybersecurity bill by August, or else the effort could be lost for the year, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) warned.

“If we don’t have something moving by August, I think it gets lost in the haze, and it will be a very long time until we actually get a bill passed that will actually have an impact,” he said.

The Senate has struggled to pass a companion measure to his Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which passed the House more than a year ago. Since then, revelations from Edward Snowden about programs at the National Security Agency have derailed the effort and heightened concerns about government snooping. The bill would allow companies to share information about possible cyber threats with each other and the government.

Rep Rogers said he was “cautiously optimistic that we can find some agreement within the next 30 days to try to get something moving.”

Sen Al Franken (D-MN) will hold a hearing on “stalking apps,” which can secretly track people through their smartphones.

“I believe that Americans have the right to control who can collect that information, and whether or not it can be given to third parties,” said Sen Franken, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on privacy. “But right now, companies -- some legitimate, some not -- are collecting your location and giving it to whomever they want.”

The bill also has a provision to end specific “stalking” apps that can be used by one person to secretly track another person. “My commonsense bill helps a whole range of people, and would finally put an end to GPS stalking apps that allow abusers to secretly track their victims,” Sen Franken said.

That bill will be the subject of the subcommittee’s June 4 hearing, which will include testimony from representatives of the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, the Government Accountability Office and local law enforcement, as well as the National Consumers League and the National Network to End Domestic Violence.

The Chamber of Commerce is encouraging lawmakers to let the Commerce Department go forward with its controversial plans to relinquish its oversight role of technical Internet functions.

In a letter to lawmakers, Executive Vice President of Government Affairs Bruce Josten asked that the House not use the Commerce Department’s funding to constrain the administration’s Internet governance plans. The agency “should be allowed to take any needed steps to achieve the cautiousness and transparency that we agree is essential for a safe and smooth transition,” Josten wrote.

More than a dozen school and library groups want the Federal Communications Commission to update its program to hook public educational facilities up to the Internet.

In a letter, the groups pushed for changes to the FCC's E-Rate program, also called ConnectED, including more money.

"We cannot wait any longer to increase E-Rate support. The time is now to permanently raise the E-Rate’s annual funding cap," groups including the American Library Association, American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association wrote. According to the groups, demand to access the fund is often twice the current cap of $2.4 billion, yet it "has received no meaningful funding increase since 1998."

Additionally, most of the money is tied up for connecting schools and libraries to the Web, which makes it difficult to ensure that every classroom and computer within the building is connected. That is leading to "major roadblocks to students, educators and library patrons having enough bandwidth to perform online research, participate in digital professional learning classes and apply online for jobs or government services and benefits."

The president of Estonia thinks that his small northern European country is paving the way for keeping people’s information protected online. At a forum on international cybersecurity, Toomas Hendrik Ilves praised his country’s system of online digital signatures, which allow people to securely access a variety of financial, political and medical resources online.

“We have come to the solution that you cannot have any genuine security without a secure online identity,” he said. For instance, 90 percent of the country’s 1.3 million residents can file their taxes online in under three minutes, remotely access digital medical records and even vote over the Internet from the comfort of their couch, using the country’s digital national identification system.

“All these things are possible if and only if you have a secure online identity, because whoever has the data knows it’s you and not anyone else,” he said. Ilves said that the global public is misguided to fear that “big data” and the availability of everyone’s information online will expose their personal secrets. Instead, they should be focusing on how secure their data are from hackers and others who may be impersonating them online.

“You might be worried about someone knowing your blood type. I’m much more worried about someone changing the record of my blood type," Ilves said. “The real issue, and the real issue that I think instills fear in me, is maybe that it can be changed,” he added. “That will require a solution of the sort that we have.”

Estonia was the first real victim of an online attack, when attackers flooded the country with a stream of distributed denial-of-service attacks in 2007. Since then, it has rapidly increased security on national networks and developed a decentralized system to add new digital components onto the online infrastructure.

A Virginia communications firm won a $250,000 government contract to bring high-speed broadband Internet to the military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, via satellite.

According to a notice posted on a federal contracting website, E&E Enterprises Global will deliver “broadband satellite Internet equipment and subscription for Joint Task Forces Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.”

Satellite Internet service is routinely used by the base’s 6,000 military and civilian residents to keep in touch with friends and family back home, as well as for official purposes. The military has tried to move off of the satellite hookups in recent years, which can be slow and expensive to maintain.

In 2013, the Pentagon announced plans to lay undersea fiber-optic cables to connect the military base to the mainland US, though that effort is not expected to be finished until 2015. After the military connects the fiber cables to its 45-square-mile base, those lines could then extend to the entire island, officials have said.