Michael Callahan, an executive president and general council at Yahoo has apologized to lawmakers for offering faulty information about the company working with a Chinese government request for user information about a journalist who was later jailed.

A group of about 100 people arrived in Washington this week to lobby for the legalization of online poker.  And considering that many of the 100 people are among America’s top poker players, it wouldn’t be wise to bet against them.

Have a seat; your hypocrisy detectors are about to blow. First the good news: The House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs passed the Global Online Freedom Act, which would penalize companies like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco for aiding countries like China spy on political dissidents.

Something is starkly wrong when diametrically opposed ideologues join hands in public to protest something else. That something wrong, in a nutshell: the government and communications companies working in concert to erode the freedoms that made our country great.

Brian Bieron, eBay’s senior director of federal government relations testified before the House Small Business Committee and said that small businesses would be negatively impacted if a permanent ban on Internet access taxes were not implemented.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sent a reminder to AT&T (and the rest of us) that at one time the company resisted government pressure to spy on US citizens, and even publicized it.

Big names in online advertising attracted attention in Congress, as House Representative Bobby Rush (D-IL) announced his intention to investigate antitrust implications in Google’s proposed DoubleClick acquisition.

The federal Office of Management and Budget has made a couple of tweaks to the Earmarks database they maintain.

Whatever happens with web radio from this point forward will depend on whatever concessions webcasters can wrest from SoundExchange and the record labels that back it.

So as state-funded university tuition rises faster than the inflation rate, grants are becoming nonexistent, and students are actually looking abroad to complete their education cheaper and in half the time, Congressmen cozy with the RIAA are threatening to cut their funding more if they don’t play ball with the recording labels.

Yahoo’s efforts at heightening awareness of global warming has drawn a question from a very high-profile person for the Yahoo Answers audience.

Representative Ed Markey (D-MA) opened up a can of Congressional hearings on the Federal Communication Commission over the regulatory agency’s understanding of what, exactly, constitutes broadband and how many people in the US actually have access to it.

Capitol Hill got a little surreal this week as YouTube CEO and founder Chad Hurley got yanked in font of the House telecommunications subcommittee to discuss the future of video.

The US Government is recognizing the citizen blogosphere’s function in the operation of the press by introducing new legislation to offer bloggers the same protections as traditional journalists.

A bill, not written by Congress, requiring that US representatives actually read legislation before voting on it, under penalty of perjury, has been around a couple of years, but hasn’t received much attention. The authors of the bill aim to remedy that through an online viral campaign, leveraging the sudden power of social networking.

This is what happens when good companies go public: the principles that made them good, even necessary, to the point of inspiring a romantic loyalty among their customers, are whittled away at until only those principles which are profitable remain. If it’s true that Google is reconsidering its view of Network Neutrality, let it be said that this is the reason why.

Google says it’s not true, by the way, but we’ll get to that later. This is an exploration of what could happen, a seemingly very likely ethical pickle the search company could find itself in down the road.

Marc’s The Video Library of Alexandria post on O’Reilly Radar connected a set of dots for me that I can’t believe I never connected on my own.

In that, it certainly seems like an appropriate purchase for Google, much like DejaNews before it.

First let’s echo Ron White when he says, “you can’t fix stupid.” Now that we agree on that, let’s also doubt that imposing stiffer penalties on those stupid enough to post video evidence on YouTube of themselves committing a crime won’t really act as a deterrent. Because, again, you can’t fix stupid.

CEO Mark Hurd, ex-board chairman Patricia Dunn, and former general counsel Ann Baskins were among the Hewlett-Packard employees who were lambasted by Congress for their roles in a spying scandal that has brought criticism and law enforcement scrutiny to the company.

Canadian telecom regulators denied the request of a Jewish human rights lawyer, asking the government to allow Internet service providers to block access to U.S.-based white supremacist’s websites.

AOL’s shocking searcher log release has reignited the debate in Congress over whether to restrict Internet companies’ use and storage of user data. Though a bill aimed at protecting user privacy has been effectively tabled since February, the fallout from AOL’s data dump may bring it back into light.