Washington, D.C.

Barack Obama's Internet-fueled campaign has transformed the way Americans choose a president. Now, the president-elect's administration plans to change the way Americans use technology.

If Obama gets his way, all Americans will have broadband Internet access, whether they live in big cities or remote villages. Online life will be safer, with better defenses against cybercriminals. And there will be greater access to government, with online services to let anyone question members of the president's Cabinet or track every dime of the federal budget.

Ogilvy is hosting the October meeting of the Social Media Club of Washington, D.C., next week.
We have organized a panel discussion about Web 2.0 and government - and we’ll hear from people who are actively evangelizing social media within federal agencies today. 

On Thursday, the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) in Washington, D.C., is scheduled to vote on a request by the National Music Publishers Association to increase the royalties paid to its members for online music sales. Artists are currently paid a royalty of nine cents and want the CRB to increase it to 15 cents.

The move is opposed by the Recording Industry Association of America and the Digital Media Association, a trade group of online music retailers that includes AOL, Apple, MusicNet, Napster, RealNetworks and Yahoo.

Microsoft Corp. does not have to pay $1.5 billion in damages to Alcatel-Lucent SA, a panel of federal appeals judges has ruled in what may be the last word on a long-running digital music patent lawsuit.

In February 2007, a jury in U.S. District Court in San Diego determined Microsoft infringed on two patents that cover the encoding and decoding of audio into the digital MP3 format, a popular way to convert music from CDs into files on computers and vice versa.

The National Security Agency, other governmental agencies, and President George W. Bush are named in a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The action by EFF, a nonprofit with offices in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, also accuses Vice President Dick Cheney; David Addington, Cheney's chief of staff; Alberto Gonzales, former White House counsel and attorney general; and John McConnell, director of national intelligence, of participation in domestic surveillance.

Despite a doubling of the cost to send a mobile-device text message, users are still thumbing messages at record rates.

Wireless data is changing, and consumers are making it clear that texting is a favorite way to communicate, according to CTIA, a wireless association based in Washington, D.C.

There were 75 billion messages recorded in June alone, about 2.5 billion messages per day, according to CTIA's Semi-Annual Wireless Survey. That's a 160 percent increase from the 28.8 billion messages sent in June 2007.

Comcast fired back at the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday in its long-running duel with the agency. The cable-TV and Internet service provider filed suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.

The filing is the result of a FCC hearing last month in which Comcast was sanctioned for throttling back the broadband speed of customers using the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing application. The FCC ordered Comcast to provide plans for equitably managing its bandwidth and to make its network-management policies public.

Comcast's View

In advance of its WiMAX rollout this fall, Sprint announced Thursday a lineup of mobile partners to localize its customer's 4G experience. In what the company calls "geobrowsing," XOHM users will get local news, weather and many other localized networking features delivered to their laptops and mobile devices.

The WiMAX service is expected to kick off in Baltimore in September, with Chicago and Washington, D.C., to follow before the end of the year.