The Federal Trade Commission released the agenda and speakers for its upcoming workshop, "From Town Criers to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?" The workshop has been organized to consider the emerging issues of an increasingly Internet oriented society. The workshop will run from Dec. 1-2, 2009.

There's not enough spectrum for mobile broadband. A federal fund for phone service needs to be repurposed to include broadband. Consumers should be told the truth about the Internet access speeds they pay for. These are the problems identified by the FCC as obstacles in its effort to blanket the country with high-speed Internet service.

Hailed as the next-big-thing, customer service through tweets is a work in progress. The performance of many companies has been uneven as they try to handle a crush of customer queries, integrate Twitter into their overall strategy and manage the heightened expectations of consumers.

The FCC will lay out the case for expanding broadband Internet service, outlining current obstacles to making it widely available. The agency is considering whether to force Internet providers to share their networks with rivals and raise fees charged on consumer phone bills to pay for the broader access.

The FCC's proposal to reallocate some of the spectrum now held by TV broadcasters to mobile communications companies has caught the attention of Congress. In a letter to FCC Chair Julius Genachowski, Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, took up the position of broadcasters that the broadband plan being floated by the FCC was not a good idea.

On behalf of itself as well as station and broadcast group clients, a D.C. based law firm has asked the FCC to stay the Dec. 15, 2009, deadline for station owners to file biennial ownership reports.

After some unsettling equivocation, the Obama administration has embraced a Senate bill that would offer limited protections to reporters who have promised confidentiality to their sources. The compromise reached by the administration and members of the Senate Judiciary Committee is imperfect, but it brings a federal "shield law" closer to enactment than at any time in recent history.

The FCC is developing a national plan for increasing the supply of broadband connectivity, and Chairman Julius Genachowski has said that the demand for wireless broadband will soon be an order of magnitude greater than the supply. So the commission may be unusually receptive to the idea of forcing TV stations to share more of their spectrum wealth. The broadcasters' lobbyists will be playing defense for a while.

A proposal to create a national wireless broadband network is generating tens of thousands of comments at the FCC. Commenters range from lobbyists, think tanks, schools, phone companies, citizens, among others.

As the FCC starts work on the tough task of reallocating more spectrum to mobile services, the television broadcast lobby is going into full NIMBY mode. The debate centers on a crucial question. In the age of cable, do broadcasters still need those licenses?