Dan Gillmor: "Last year, about 10 percent of all international calls used VoIP, says Tom Evslin, chief executive of ITXC, a New Jersey company that sells VoIP services to carriers. Evslin expects a jump of 15 percent to 20 percent this year."

The Bush administration plans to order a year-long review of government use of radio spectrum. Will this simply transfer spectrum from government agencies and the military to private licensees, or will the administration consider the more revolutionary change of opening up some of that spectrum on an unlicensed basis?

If you want to understand FCC Chairman Michael Powell’s rationale for loosening media ownership restrictions, read his statement (PDF) in his Congressional testimony yesterday.

I can’t fathom why conference organizers still insist their events are "off the record" in this age of WiFi and Weblogs. For a small private workshop, fine. But any time a CEO of a public company stands up in front of several hundred executives, he or she knows what they say is fair game. After all, journalists could just interview the attendees and get them to confirm what the speaker ...

Here’s the striking thing about the Palm-Handspring nerger. Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky were at Palm for six years. They were at Handspring for five. Yet the Palm saga seems vastly longer than the Handspring saga. By the time the two left Palm, the company was on top of the world, having created an entirely new market category that was growing like wildfire. It had already gone through two acquisitions ...

One word: consolidation. This week, PeopleSoft bought JD Edwards and Palm bought Handspring. These are early indications of an extraordinary consolidation binge in technology and media. Get ready for many more big merger announcements. This will happen for several reasons. Everyone in high-tech was hoping that the economic downturn would be over by now, but instead we’re still bumping along the bottom of the IT spending trough. That, combined with ...

Larry Lessig isn’t just fighting excessive expansion of copyright law, he’s proposing a well-balanced alternative. If you care about the future of the Net, go sign the petition to reclaim the public domain.

You know, I’ve defended the FCC and Michael Powell many times. But I’m pretty disturbed by this headline from the FCC’s press release announcing it’s long-awaited loosening of media ownership rules: "FCC Sets Limits on Media Concentration: Unprecedented Public Record Results in Enforceable and Balanced Broadcast Ownership Rules." This is Bushism: Do one thing, but say you’re doing something else so frequently and fervently that people believe it. I’m concerned ...