Last week, the House of Representatives passed the Data Accountability and Trust At of 2009 (H.R. 2221). Possibly you will remember this train wreck of a bill from previous coverage. To refresh your memory, this piece of legislation does two things. First, it requires businesses that own sensitive consumer data to plan to secure that [...]

Late last month, the House Small Business Committee held yet another oversight hearing involving the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), this time focusing on the investments called for in the bill into nationwide broadband deployment. Broadband deployment is particularly important for microbusinesses, which tend to be heavily reliant on a variety of Internet-based technologies [...]

When it comes to controversial, gigantic, game-changing legislation, Congress is not slacking off. When lawmakers are finished with the current health care reform slugfest, there is another major legislative initiative waiting in the wings for the to fight about next. And the probable subject of the next round of mud-slinging is the Clean Energy Jobs [...]

Congress has not yet finished with health care reform, of course, but that hasn’t stopped them from starting to fashion what will no doubt be the next huge policy debate: energy and the environment. Which makes a new report released last week by the National Small Business Association (NSBA) not just interesting and informative, but [...]

It’s only May but I think it’s safe to say that one epithet that no one will be able to apply to the 111th Congress is “Do Nothing.” It’s almost as if the folks at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, having followed the marriage counselor’s advice, suddenly find they can work together again and it [...]

Lest anyone forget that there is a presidential campaign going on in the midst of the economic melodrama playing itself out on the Hill and on the Street, a new policy paper from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation serves as a timely reminder. The ITIF is a Washington-based tech policy think tank headed up [...]

There is language in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that allows companies to petition the FCC to refrain from applying standing regulations on them. There is also language designed to force the FCC to make decisions about those petitions in a reasonable amount of time. You wouldn’t think that would cause much problem but it [...]

There was yet another hearing on green technology and small businesses last week before the House Committee on Small Business. The spotlight during the hearing was on how green building technologies might help to resuscitate the ailing construction and manufacturing industries, while simultaneously helping constituents with rising energy costs. Witnesses were uniform in urging Congress [...]

A hearing last week before the Subcommittee on Rural and Urban Entrepreneurship of the House Small Business Committee on cutting edge energy technologies that are currently in the pipeline offered a unexpectedly fascinating glimpse into where our energy future may be heading. The need for a next generation has become crystal clear as rising input [...]