The Senate Rules Committee decided today to make US Senator roll-call votes available in XML format. The change is part of a growing effort to make government more transparent.

After much petition and long after the House of Representatives had done so, a feed showing all votes from individual Senators is now available. Previously, only how the Senate voted as a group was easily accessible, and only through unanimous agreement could one easily decipher how his or her representative voted.

There is new hope for Pandora and other webcasters, but any deal is far from done.

DC lawmakers want the Federal Trade Commission to do more than rubber-stamp Google’s $3.1 billion DoubleClick acquisition.

Federal agencies may have the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) helping guide their efforts to make web information more accessible to search engines.

The bipartisan Community Broadband Act, supported by some well-known US senators, was passed out the Senate Commerce Committee today and will proceed to the full Senate for a vote.

The moratorium on taxing Internet access will continue for another seven years, as the Senate reached a compromise days before the existing ban expired.

The U.S. House of Representatives today voted on and passed a journalist shield bill which also covers bloggers. While still a long way from a law, this is an important step in the process toward becoming a law.

Shop.org has been lobbying members of the U.S. Senate on behalf of online retailers to support a permanent extension of the ban against multiple taxes on ecommerce.

The Senate Commerce Committee will consider a permanent Internet tax moratorium in an Executive Session.

This is the Internet age. We don’t have to wait for general counsels to drop their bon mots before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, because they are already posted online.

The proposed DoubleClick purchase has put Google back on its heels as people assail the blockbuster deal on several fronts.

Google’s proposed purchase of DoubleClick has drawn the scrutiny of privacy advocates, the Federal Trade Commission, and now a Senate Judiciary subcommittee.

With social networking sites such as MySpace and LiveJournal coming under criticism for not doing enough to protect children online, the United States Senate has passed a resolution making June "National Internet Safety Month."

The Internet Tax Freedom Extension Act of 2007 was introduced in the Senate yesterday and would extend the current ban on Internet access taxes for another four years.

There’s most likely a balance between no regulation and too much regulation, and the current Democratic Congress is walking that line. No one would doubt the potential harm caused by "rogue" Web-dealers, but Sen. Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) tightening grip on Internet service providers should at least cause one to step back a bit to look at it.

There’s a lot of talk surrounding a bill currently being proposed by Alaska senator Ted Stevens, which would place restrictions on access to social networks within public schools. Legislation introduced in Illinois, however, seeks to completely ban these sites from the state’s schools.

Illinois state senator Matt Murphy, a republican, has introduced a bill entitled the “Social Networking Web Site Prohibition Act” which would effectively ban the surfing of any social network sites from computers in public school libraries.

The U.S. Senate has shot down a proposal that would have required some political bloggers to register as lobbyists or face prison time for up to 10 years. The Senate approved an amendment that removed the section that would have required some bloggers to be regulated.

The Net Neutrality debate is now front and center in the US Senate (well, when their not talking about Iraq) as Senators Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Byron Dorgan (D-ND) introduce the Internet Freedom Preservation Act. Dorgan didn’t stop with the floor of the Senate, he also took his case to YouTube.

When Republican Senator Mitch McConnell returned to Washington to get to work, he brought along Jon Henke to serve in a position in the US Senate.

Someone in the US Senate put a hold on S.2590, a bill that would compel the government to publish an accessible database of federal spending. Political pundits on both sides of the blogosphere wanted to know one thing:

The Net Neutrality debate hit the floor of the United States Senate today as Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) made an impassioned plea for Net Neutrality protection, promising to use all means necessary to block Sen. Ted Stevens’ telecommunications bill unless it expressly forbade Internet discrimination.

The cries of a million or so petitioners have made it a little farther into the aural canals of Alaska’s Ted Stevens, Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. Stevens has offered up a compromise on Network Neutrality in a provision one critic is calling “Net Neutrality Lite.”