The FCC is expected to bless the merger of Comcast, the nation's largest cable and residential Internet provider, with NBC Universal. The Justice Department is expected to follow suit right away, removing the last obstacle to the unprecedented consolidation of media and Internet power in the hands of one company. You should be afraid and mad as hell.

The massive and historic union of Comcast and NBC Universal is set to be approved within hours on a 4-1 vote by the FCC. The dissenter is the panel's senior Democrat, Michael Copps, who had pushed for the most stringent conditions on the $30 billion transaction.

Federal regulators are expected to vote Jan. 18 to approve Comcast and NBC Universal's joint venture, putting an end to a more than year-long review of a controversial union that will combine the nation's biggest broadband Internet and cable service operator with a television-and-movie powerhouse.

Public interest groups, small broadcasters, independent content providers and small tech companies have been fighting the Comcast-NBC merger for a year. We caught up with a few of them at the Open Video Conference in New York City last October to hear why they oppose the merger.

The FCC is preparing to revisit the rules that govern the retransmission of local television stations by cable and satellite companies like Time Warner Cable. The industry will be looking for the first signs of a reform plan when the FCC releases its Feb. meeting agenda.

Since the Internet began, the idea has been to keep the most information flowing as fast as possible to all users. But that was long before bandwidth-hogging services like Netflix, Hulu and Youtube. Now service providers want to charge more to use those sites, and give priority to others, setting off a battle between the FCC and Congress

Congress might have a role to play in keeping curse words and nudity off the airwaves after the FCC lost ground in the fight over indecency.

Washington, D.C. is a city that traffics in information, and as many 20-something staff members are learning, who knows what -- and when they know it -- can be the difference between professional advancement and barely scraping by.

While newspapers around the world are anxiously asking themselves what would happen if they started charging readers to view articles online, a few answers have started to emerge.

Over the last year and a half, AOL, the former Internet colossus, has spent tens of millions of dollars to build local news sites across the country through Patch.com. The idea is that the service would fill the gap in coverage left by local newspapers, many of which are operating on a string after declines in advertising revenue.