Sometimes life’s irony smacks you in the face. Sometimes BoomTown smacks you with it instead.

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Well, look at that: Google Voice has inspired another Federal Communications Commission probe. Days after a group of House members, echoing a call first made by AT&T in September, asked the FCC to investigate Google Voice, the Commission obliged, sending a letter of inquiry to the company.

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Add another voice to the cacophony around net neutrality: Qualcomm’s. Speaking at the CTIA wireless industry conference in San Diego Thursday, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs warned of a looming crisis in wireless capacity and said it must be met with some form of traffic shaping.

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Should Google be able to offer voice services unfettered by regulations that apply to broadband carriers simply because Google Voice is a free Internet application? AT&T certainly doesn’t think so, and it seems at least a few Congressional representatives agree.

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Kara was half James Bond, half Indiana Jones in the cities and jungles of BoomTown this week. She jet-setted, jet-lagged and still managed to report on a genuine cougar fight.

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While the highlight of the week was undoubtedly Apple’s Rock and Roll event on Wednesday featuring Steve Jobs 2.0, that was only the anodized aluminum, candy-colored, video-shooting cherry on top of another week of tech sector reporting from All Things Digital.

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Before the Federal Communications Commission begins doling out the $7.4 billion in federal grants up for grabs through national broadband stimulus programs, the agency must answer an important question: What is broadband? And so, in a public notice issued today, the Commission is requesting “tailored” public comment on what the definition of broadband should be.

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The U.S. government broadband stimulus program couldn’t have come along at a better time. Leichtman Research Group said Monday that the country’s 19 largest cable and telephone providers added a net 634,000 broadband subscribers during the second quarter of 2009. That’s 29 percent fewer than were added in the same period a year ago and the lowest number of net additions of any quarter in the last eight years.

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Add Melissa Hathaway to the list of cybersecurity experts who don’t want the job of White House cybersecurity czar. Hathaway, a former Bush administration official who led President Obama’s recent 60-day review of the federal government’s cybersecurity efforts, was thought to be a leading contender for the position. But according to The Wall Street Journal, she asked not to be considered for that post about two weeks ago, citing personal reasons. And now she’s resigned her current post as well.

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QOTD

“If you can’t text, then you Twitter. And, you know, my guess is in some of these countries that–that the leadership is kind of like me. They don’t have a clue what it’s about.”

– Defense Secretary Robert Gates

In a move that most likely would not have been made without the recent efforts of Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced his candidacy for the California Governor’s seat this morning via Twitter.

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In Silicon Valley, it’s hard to believe that not everyone follows each shiny new thing on the Web, tracks OS versions as intently as the storyline for “Battlestar Galactica” and remains jacked-in pretty much 24/7. But it’s been known to happen.
For instance, BoomTown was in Rome earlier this week attending a conference on business, brand and innovation that happens only once every seven years–and one of the biggest takeaways? Hardly any Italians have heard of Twitter, and those who have don’t really use it.

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If Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, then Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s is to do the same to its tech-policy issues.
Obama made the now obligatory pilgrimage yesterday to Google headquarters, where he unveiled a high-tech agenda that might just as easily have been written by [...]

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What Yahoo would likely describe as nuance in its position on a human-rights lawsuit brought against it by two Chinese journalists, others might call talking out of both sides of your mouth. Earlier this week, the company said its Chinese subsidiary had no choice but to follow local laws when it handed over private information [...]

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In the end, YouTube did manage to do something drastic to the presidential debates–it made them watchable. But last night’s presidential debate–the first to feature questions culled from citizen videos posted to YouTube–wasn’t exactly the transformation of the democratic process some had hoped for. Certainly, it wasn’t the staid sort of affair to which [...]

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