Last week, after much delay, longtime Internet exec Julius Genachowski was confirmed by the Senate as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

It is an important role for the future development of the Web, of course, although it took a dog’s age into the new Democratic administration to approve him.

Hopefully, he and the other commissioners can soon get to work on a wide range of major digital issues, such as a national broadband plan that does not cost Americans a fortune.

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It wasn’t just Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer meeting in New York last week.

According to several sources close to the situation, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes rounded out the trio of chit-chatting execs, presumably gathered to discuss possible partnerships and other deals between and amongst the companies whose digital assets are among the largest on the Web.

Although the possibilities are numerous, exactly what Bostock, Ballmer and Bewkes–let’s call them the Busy B’s from here on out–were cooking up is unclear.

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BoomTown loves a good memo and here’s one that two of Microsoft’s top online execs, Yusuf Mehdi and Satya Nadella, sent out about the deal the tech giant signed with Dell and Verizon to distribute its search and other products.

Microsoft is opening its fat wallet to do such deal and try to best archrival Google.

Here’s the memo.

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In an article in The Wall Street Journal today comes the news that “President-elect Barack Obama’s call to improve the nation’s broadband infrastructure has cable and phone company lobbyists maneuvering to get a leg up.”

To BoomTown, this is akin to Scrooge making his overnight transformation, except without any soul, sincerity or true intent to actually care about the consumer.

God help us, everyone.

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Here is an amazing chart from a story in The Wall Street Journal recently about mobile phone search preferences, which says a whole lot about why Microsoft is so eager to hand a pile of money over to Verizon Wireless to become the default search on its many devices.

Well, as in the PC market and on social-networking sites, because of–wait for it–Google, of course.

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We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s an interview Walt Mossberg and I did with Federal Communications Chairman Kevin Martin and Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam. We paired the two together to talk about big issues facing the wireless industry, including low broadband speeds, high prices and the opening of networks.

This is the third of three parts.

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We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s an interview Walt Mossberg and I did with Federal Communications Chairman Kevin Martin and Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam. We paired the two together to talk about big issues facing the wireless industry, including low broadband speeds, high prices and the opening of networks.

This is the second of three parts.

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We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s an interview Walt Mossberg and I did with Federal Communications Chairman Kevin Martin and Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam. We paired the two together to talk about big issues facing the wireless industry, including low broadband speeds and high prices.

This is the first of three parts.

Read More »

Earlier this week, BoomTown posted our speaker list for the sixth edition of D: All Things Digital, which will take place in a few weeks–May 27 to 29, to be exact–in Carlsbad, Calif.

Just recently, we added Jerry Yang, CEO and co-founder of Yahoo, and now he is being joined onstage at the conference by Yahoo President Sue Decker (pictured here in a lovely Wall Street Journal dot-drawing).

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Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft (MSFT). News Corp.’s (NWS) Rupert Murdoch. Jeff Bewkes of Time Warner (TWX). Yahoo’s (YHOO) Jerry Yang.
All of them engaged in roiling Internet deal-making of late and all of them in just three weeks on the same stage–but not, thankfully, at the same time, or we’d need a professional [...]

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