Grant Gross, IDG News Service, Simon Taylor

Corporations are starting to embrace technologies used to monitor employee Internet use, with 60 percent expected to watch workers' social media use for security breaches by 2015, according to a new report from Gartner.

Less than 10 percent of companies now monitor their employees' use of Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and other social media sites for security breaches, although many companies monitor social media for brand management and marketing purposes, said the report, released Tuesday.

Two U.S. lawmakers have called on the U.S. Department of Justice to reopen its investigation into Google's snooping on Wi-Fi networks in 2010 after recent questions about the company's level of cooperation with federal inquiries.

Representatives Frank Pallone Jr., a New Jersey Democrat, and John Barrow, a Georgia Democrat, called on the DOJ to fully investigate Google's actions for potential violations of federal wiretapping laws. In light of a recently released U.S. Federal Communications Commission report on Wi-Fi snooping by Google Street View cars, the DOJ should take a new look at the company's actions, wrote the lawmakers, in a Thursday letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

The efforts of U.S. President Barack Obama's administration to streamline and improve the government's IT systems aren't proceeding as quickly as officials have suggested, a federal auditor said Thursday.

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has made "solid progress" toward IT reform, but officials there have oversold their progress, said David Powner, director of IT management issues at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

U.S. President Barack Obama has ordered all major government agencies to make two key services available on mobile phones within a year, in an effort to embrace a growing trend toward Web surfing on mobile devices.

Obama, in a directive issued Wednesday, also ordered federal agencies to create websites to report on their mobile progress. The websites are due within 90 days.

An Ohio startup company has raised US$200 million to fund gigabit-per-second broadband projects in six university communities across the U.S., the company announced Wednesday.

Gigabit Squared will work with the University Community Next Generation Innovation Project (Gig.U), a coalition of 30 universities focused on improved broadband, to select six communities in which to build the ultra-fast broadband networks, they said. The two organizations will select winning communities between November and the first quarter of 2013, Mark Ansboury, president of Gigabit Squared, said during a press conference.

An often-repeated concern that the U.S. Patriot Act gives the U.S. government unequaled access to personal data stored on cloud services is incorrect, with several other nations enjoying similar access to cloud data, according to a study released Wednesday.

The governments of several other countries, including the U.K., Germany, France, Japan and Canada, have laws in place allowing them to obtain personal data stored on cloud computing services, said the study, by Hogan Lovells, an international law firm that focuses on government regulations and other topics.

A Florida VoIP carrier has filed a net neutrality complaint against a Georgia utility and broadband provider, after the utility accused the VoIP firm of theft of service for using its network to deliver voice service without paying for it.

L2Networks filed the net neutrality complaint with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission Tuesday, the first formal complaint since the FCC passed net neutrality rules in December 2010. L2Networks' filing comes after the telecommunications manager for the City of Albany Water, Gas & Light Commission, a municipal utility in Georgia, filed a theft-of-service complaint with the Dougherty County Police Department in Albany earlier this year.

Schools in the U.S. will need broadband speeds of 100 Mbps per 1,000 students and staff members by the 2014-15 school year in order to meet a growing demand for Web-based instruction and a skyrocketing number of student-owned Web devices, according to a new report by a trade group representing state education agencies.

The report, The Broadband Imperative, recommends schools increase their broadband speeds to 1 Gbps per 1,000 students and staff by 2017-18. Internal WANs connecting schools within districts should be 1 Gbps by 2014-15 and 10 Gbps by 2017-18, said the report, released Monday by the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA).

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has hired Paul Ohm, a privacy advocate and critic of current online privacy practices, as a senior privacy adviser for consumer protection and competition issues affecting the Internet and mobile services.

Ohm, a University of Colorado Law School professor, will take a leave of absence from the school to serve in the FTC's Office of Policy Planning. The office focuses on long-range competition and consumer-protection policy efforts, and it advises FTC staff on cases raising complex policy and legal issues.

A proposed sale of mobile spectrum from a group of cable providers to Verizon Wireless, along with accompanying marketing and research agreements, will lead to higher prices for broadband and mobile customers, a coalition of groups opposing the deal said Monday.

Some members of the newly formed Alliance for Broadband Competition called on the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice to reject the two proposed deals for Verizon to buy Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum from four cable providers for US$3.9 billion. Other alliance members said they could live with the deals if the two agencies include several conditions focused on spectrum divestitures, roaming agreements and backhaul pricing.

A U.S. court has shut down the operations of a company that allegedly promised it would build its customers websites that would generate income of up to US$20,000 per month, after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint about its business practices.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona has granted the FTC's request for a temporary restraining order against North American Marketing and Associates, the FTC announced Monday. Judge David Campbell granted the restraining order on May 2, but court documents were sealed at the time.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is seeking a civil court contempt ruling against the largest third-party billing vendor in the U.S., alleging that it placed more than $70 million in unauthorized charges on telephone bills in violation of a previous court order.

The FTC is seeking to recover $52.6 million from Billing Services Group, but BSG denied the agency's charges, saying the FTC is targeting the wrong company. The FTC is seeking to recover the amount that the agency alleges the company billed consumers and failed to refund, the agency announced Tuesday.