ReadWriteWeb

In its 14th annual report to the United States Congress on wireless competition, the Federal Communications Commission said that far from diversifying, the sector is actually concentrating in fewer hands.

Covering a period including 2008 and into 2009, the report, issued today, found that this concentration had increased 32 percent since 2003 and 6.5 percent in 2008, indicating a significant decrease in competition. Less competition usually means fewer choices and higher prices for both individual and enterprise consumers.

U.S. Representatives Rick Boucher and Cliff Stearns released their draft legislation today that tackles online privacy issues. ReadWriteWeb covered the announcement of its release yesterday.

The discussion draft of the legislation sets up requirements for Internet companies and online ad networks that include "conspicuous" notice of information capture, initial user opt-in on all such collection and user opt-out afterward.

United States lawmakers have spent a year preparing draft legislation for a law that would define and limit privacy for advertisers and Internet companies. The legislation will govern methods of taking information from users online and using that information to target advertisements to them. On Tuesday, they will present the draft legislation.

The timing is good for such an announcement given the worry over, among other things, Facebook's recent changes that have caused fresh worry over privacy.

Testifying before a congressional hearing in late February, Mike Altschul with the Wireless Association was blunt: Federal mobile phone privacy policy is undefined and the privacy guidelines for location-based services written in 2008 are obsolete.

The hearing on consumer privacy was the fifth in a series that seeks to evaluate and eventually legislate location-based privacy issues. It comes none too soon. The recent flood of location based apps and services has significantly shifted liabilities from mobile carriers to app developers and end-users. As Congressman and hearing chair Bobby Rush of Illinois said, Yesterday there was Facebook, and in the not-too-distant future we will be encountering something more akin to a "Placebook."

"The writing is on the wall that there will be baseline privacy legislation introduced," said John Morris, general counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology at a Congressional hearing on location data and privacy yesterday. "It will require location be treated as sensitive data, like medical data. You'll need to do more than just post a disclosure statement."

We're entering an era of location as platform, but should that location data be as fundamentally private by default as medical information is?

The nonprofit Sunlight Foundation announced today the availability of its Real Time Congress iPhone app. The app displays an up-to-the-minute feed of updates from the House and Senate floors, Whip notices, hearings scheduled and key government documents as they are released.

Unfortunately all this information is displayed quite simply; there is as of yet no deep personalization as in Sunlight's years-old and fabulous OpenCongress project, there's no search and the app doesn't make use of the iPhone's push capabilities. It's not a bad start, but there is a lot of potential for an iPhone app to make Congressional activity a much more engaging part of peoples' day-to-day lives.

Just in time for the the opening of the 111th U.S Congress, YouTube today announced that is is now hosting two new channels that will make it easier to find video updates from U.S. Senators and Representatives. YouTube's Steve Grove promises that these channels will feature both floor speeches and behind-the-scenes footage.

Many Senators and Representatives already have their own YouTube channels, and these two new sites aggregate the content from these. Over time, we hope to see more elected officials on YouTube, though we also hope to see more than just clips from local TV news shows.

The Sunlight Foundation's mashup site Capitol Words relaunched this week and now offers a very handy way to see what keywords are being used in the US Congress in general and by particular congress members. If you pay only passing attention to politics, Capitol Words is a great way to familiarize yourself with politicians in a hurry. It's a mashup of several different ways to search the Congressional Record and it's fun to use.