Government

After years of disagreement, the Zambian government has finally awarded private mobile-phone operators licenses to operate international gateways in a bid to bring down the high cost of communications.  read more »

The U.S. government is shifting its strategy for defending federal networks against a rising tide of hacking attacks launched by foreign governments and criminals.  read more »

The European Parliament Thursday voted to block an agreement reached by the 27 E.U. national governments and the U.S. last month to allow European citizens' personal financial data to be analyzed by American authorities investigating the financing of terrorism.  read more »

Investor interest in the African telecom market has been heightened with news that the West African region is opening up its market to 3G network roll-out in order to enhance communication.  read more »

It has been a long three and a half weeks since Google made the dramatic announcement that it will no longer censor its search results in China, even if that means exiting that huge Internet market.  read more »

The European Parliament looks set to reject an agreement struck by E.U. national governments with the U.S. last month that would allow the banking data of European citizens to be scrutinized by American border authorities.  read more »

For the past five years, Africa Network Information Center resisted taking on assignments outside its scope. As one of the few functioning Internet-related organizations on the continent, AfriNIC now realizes that nothing much is getting done and has decided to widen its scope, but still stay grounded in its original mission.  read more »

An audit of Uganda's US$106 million national fiber backbone and e-government infrastructure project, which was contracted to Huawei Technologies of China, has brought to the fore inadequate supervision by the relevant government ministry and pricing anomalies on the part of the contractor.  read more »

At the ongoing African Union summit on ICT, Microsoft has signed an agreement with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa under which it will provide software, technical support and software development.  read more »

If the U.S. Federal Communications Commission adopts broad new net neutrality regulations, the agency's authority to do so will be challenged in court, predicted Robert McDowell, a member of the commission.  read more »