Tag: OBAMA

The White House has announced that President Obama will hold a Town Hall meeting later this month, alongside Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and company COO Sheryl Sandberg. The event, scheduled for April 20th, will be held at Facebook headquarters and live-streamed via the social network. You can RSVP on the White House Facebook page or submit your questions to the President here. ...

The House of Representatives has approved the procedures for a joint resolution that would overturn the FCC's controversial Net neutrality rules. The resolution (PDF) is scheduled for a vote on Thursday in the GOP-controlled House. If it passes, it would then move on to the Democratic-controlled Senate, where its chances of survival are less certain. Even if it passes the Senate, though, the ...

As President of the United States, Barack Obama gets to enjoy some pretty sweet perks. Big house, private jet, personal chef -- and yes, his very own computer. He has an iPad, too, in case you were wondering. Univision's Jorge Ramos posed these hard-hitting questions during a recent interview with the President, who replied with a blank stare, before coolly reminding Ramos that he's the ...

House Republicans are pushing the Obama administration to move forward with a controversial law that, if enacted, would require every state to issue nationally standardized identification cards to its citizens. As it stands right now, states have until May 11th to comply with the 2005 Real ID Act, signed by President Bush. Enacted as a response to the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the ...

Yesterday, Barack Obama held a private meeting with a dozen Silicon Valley luminaries, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple's Steve Jobs and heavyweights from Twitter and Google. During the two-hour dinner, Obama reportedly discussed his ideas on investments in education and a proposed public-private partnership geared toward helping startups and small businesses get off the ground. ...

President Obama is scheduled to meet with the titans of Silicon Valley today, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Eric Schmidt and, perhaps most surprisingly, Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Obama, who has been trying to build a healthier relationship with the business community, will reportedly meet with technological leaders at a private residence in San Francisco. "The president and ...

The Obama administration is expected to introduce a new policy on Internet freedom today, following weeks of Web-fueled protests in the Middle East. The policy has reportedly been in the works for about a year, but recent events in Tunisia and Egypt have added a new sense of urgency to the issue as the U.S. struggles to balance old alliances in the Middle East with a new wave of reform-driven ...

The final details surrounding the Obama administration's auction of wireless spectrum, potentially doubling that available for broadband, were announced by the president at a speech in Michigan on Thursday. The plan could net up to $27.8 billion dollars over the next ten years, with roughly a third of it going to reduce the budget deficit. It's the rest of the plan, though, where the really ...

Last June, the Obama administration outlined an auction plan that could help double the U.S. broadband spectrum. According to Reuters, the White House has finally revealed the specific financial details concerning that strategy. As part of the overall plan, Obama will propose an additional $5 billion investment to bring wireless Internet to rural areas of the country. But, the spectrum auction ...

The Obama administration has put together a new set of digital copyright laws aimed at cracking down on illegal downloads and other forms of online piracy. Yesterday, intellectual property enforcement coordinator Victoria Espinel released a 92-page report (PDF), outlining the White House's copyright proposals, which will be submitted to Congress "in the very near future." Although the report ...

The Obama administration is pushing for a new policy that, if implemented, would give the U.S. government the power to veto any top-level domain names submitted for approval. The process of approving suffixes like .com, .org and .net is overseen by a non-profit called Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which operates under a contract with the government. Current ...

On the very day that the Egyptian government shut down an overwhelming majority of the country's Internet servers, Republican Senator Susan Collins began floating a piece of legislation which, if passed, would grant the President the power to do essentially the same thing in the U.S. The so-called 'kill switch' bill was approved by the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs ...

President Obama has devoted up to $27 billion in federal funds to digitize health records at hospitals across the country, but a new study suggests that he probably shouldn't bother. In the nationwide study, a team of researchers from Stanford University analyzed data from more than 250,000 patient visits between 2005 and 2007. According to their findings, digital record-keeping systems didn't ...

This Thursday, President Obama will field questions submitted from the world of social media during a live-streamed YouTube interview. Any inquisitive Web surfer can send their questions to the President at youtube.com/askobama, or via Twitter, by using the #askobama hashtag. Obama will answer the top-rated questions when the interview kicks off at 2:30 p.m. EST, just two days after his State of ...

In the wake of this month's Arizona shootings, President Obama called upon all of us to raise the level of our political discourse and to avoid "pointing fingers or assigning blame" at a time that demanded unity. His message was pretty clear, and largely well received. But it seems to have flown directly over the head of one mayor in North Carolina. Mark Chilton, mayor of Carrboro, North ...