Calls from the United States to Chile on Verizon's landline or cell phone networks will not be subject to its usual long-distance fees, the company announced last week.

The temporary break on all international calls to Chile began on February 26 and will continue until Saturday, March 6, Verizon announced. 

Additionally, Verizon has said it will not subtract minutes from customers' cell phone plans or calling cards during that week-long window.

Verizon's gesture arrives just days after an 8.8-magnitude earthquake rattled the South American country. Emergency crews fear more than 700 have died during both the natural disaster and its numerous aftershocks, and rescue efforts remain underway to free the many still trapped beneath the rubble.

"This is an excruciatingly difficult time for our customers with loved ones in Chile," said Susan Retta, vice president of consumer products for Verizon. "Waiving the calling charges will help our customers focus on tracking down and keeping in touch with their family and friends without having to also worry about the cost of the call."

One of the biggest technology trade groups in town wants Congress to stop playing political games with the essential research and development tax credit.

The R&D tax credit expired at the end of 2009, causing the loss of 20,000 well-paying jobs, over $2.5 billion in economic gains  and more than $2 billion in revenue for the treasury, TechAmerica estimates.

The extenders package under consideration this week in the Senate would extend the R&D credit for one year. But TechAmerica president and CEO Phil Bond says that doesn't cut it. Read more...

Sens. Olympia Snowe and Ted Kaufman introduced a bill aiming to boost the technical resources and expertise at the FCC (Federal Communications Commission).

The legislation would require the National Academy of Sciences to do a study to examine the technical policy decision-making process and the availability of technical personnel at the agency.

Read more...

Microsoft now seems poised to square off against Google over the search engine giant's allegedly anti-competitive business practices.

Just days after the European Commission announced it would review Google's search engine technology, Microsoft launched its own tirade against the company, stressing Google's behavior in the search market raises "serious anti-trust issues."

Microsoft also revealed the extent to which it played a role in the Commission's decision to launch that investigation in the first place.

In a blog post on Friday, Microsoft Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner said his company had met repeatedly with the Department of Justice and European Commission last year to discuss the state of the search engine market.

While the explicit subject of those meetings was Microsoft's partnership with Yahoo search, which both legal bodies approved last week, Heiner said the topic of Google arose quite regularly during the interviews.

"We told them what we know about how Google is doing business. A lot of that entails explaining the search advertising business, which is complex," he wrote. "Some of that inevitably gets into Google practices that may be harming publishers, advertisers and competition in search and online advertising."

Ultimately, that is perhaps one of Microsoft's strongest statements to date against Google. The tech giant, however, declined to respond to the blog post to reporters this week.

Read more...

Lawmakers will begin the busy month of March with a series of hearings on internet freedoms, privacy rights and broadband expansion.

Here are a few to follow this week:

The Senate Judiciary Committee will convene its Human Rights and the Law subcommittee on Tuesday for a hearing on global Internet freedoms. The meeting -- the second such hearing on the matter this year -- arrives days after an Italian court sanctioned three Google executives for a video a third-party user posted on its Web site, and weeks after Google and China butted heads over a cyberattack. Among those testifying will be Google Deputy General Counsel Nicole Wong. When: Tuesday, March. 2, 10 a.m. Where: Dirksen 226

This Wednesday, the House Homeland Security Committee will flex its oversight muscles and examine the Department of Homeland Security's new science and technology plans. Joining the panel will be Dr. Tara O’Toole, the department's under secretary for Science and Technology, who will field questions about "the activities of the Department’s Science and Technology Directorate (S&T)." When: Wednesday, March 3, 2 p.m. Where: Cannon 311, streamed online.

Lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet will then inquire on Thursday about the White House's broadband stimulus progress. That money, passed as part of the 2009 federal recovery act, has encountered a series of administrative obstacles over the past few months -- problems that have created so many delays that it is unclear whether federal officials can spend their broadband grants before their authorization expires. When: Thursday, March 4. Where: 10 a.m. Where: Rayburn 2123.

Military members across ranks and stations will now have access to popular social networking sites, including Facebook and Twitter, under a new policy announced by the Pentagon on Friday.

Previously, those Web sites had been blocked on most service members' computers, in part out of concerns that social networking could consume too much of the military's bandwidth or present serious security risks to U.S. interests. Read more...

Independents--the largest political group in America today with 34 percent of adults-- are more likely than Democrats or Republicans to say they want certain topics to get more attention from news organizations. Independents say they want more coverage of science, health and medicine, their local communities, U.S. domestic policy and international news.

This was among the results of the Pew Research Center's study on the changing news environment released today (see previous post).

Political ties tend to determine the preferred point of view of the media coverage, the study found.

Liberals and Democrats are more likely to say big news organizations do a good job on subjects that matter to them, while conservative and Republicans are the group most likely to see coverage as biased.

News seekers without strong political ties (i.e. Independents) are also more likely than partisans to want their news reported straight, without a particular point of view.

Republicans and conservatives were found to be disproportionately likely to seek out news sources that match their own views.

By contract, Democrats and liberals are more likely than other groups to seek out news that either supports their own views of differs from their own views, as opposed to seeking out news coverage that has no particular point of view.

Democrats and liberals are most likely to get news from:
    --a news organization or individual journalist they follow on social networks, such as Facebook
    --the Twitter posts of individuals who are not journalists and organizations other than major news organizations
    --the websites of international news organizations
    --websites of radio news, such as NPR
    --news podcasts from NPR and the New York Times

Republicans and conservatives are more likely to make daily visits to websites of major TV news organizations. They are also more likely than other online news users to use just one or two Internet news sources on a typical day.

The Internet is now the third most popular news platform, falling behind local and national television outlets, according to the latest Pew Research Center report to be released today.

Online news sources now surpass national print newspapers, local print newspapers and radio as the primary way Americans receive their news. About 92 percent get their news from multiple platforms and about 60 percent get news from both online and offline sources.

Only 7 percent of adults get their daily news from a single media platform--and those that do typically rely on either the Internet or local TV news, the Internet & American Life Project, in conjunction with the Project for Excellence in Journalism, revealed.

The results come at a time when policy makers are trying to find ways to bolster the ailing journalism industry. Newspapers have suffered major advertising losses due to the migration of content to the web, and TV stations have also seen a large drop in advertising revenue due to the economic recession.

Read more...

WEEKEND TECH ROUNDUP:

Live tsunami viewing? It'll be on UStream - Caroline McCarthy, CNET
Google sets up tool to help find missing relatives affected by Chile earthquake - New York Times
Redrawing the route to online privacy - Steve Lohr, New York Times
Spies and hackers exploit world cyber rule void - Reuters
Twitter plans search ads like Google's - Wired
How we hate NBC's Olympics coverage - Eric Schonfeld, TechCrunch
Google may spend 'hundreds of millions' on broadband - Brian Womack, Bloomberg

OTHER STORIES

Obama administration blocks Reid's plea for broadband stimulus extension - The Hill
DISH, DirecTV licenses set to expire due to hold-up in the upper chamber - The Hill
Cybersecurity bill to give president new emergecny powers - The Hill