Overnight Tech: Rubio, Cruz take up internet domain fight

LEDE: The Republican push to delay the U.S. government’s handoff of oversight for the internet domain name system is being led by two senators fresh off their failed bids for the presidency.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is circulating legislation on the issue and recently pressed the administration about his concerns. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sent his own letter Tuesday expressing concerns, and spoke in favor of a delay during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing.

{mosads}Concerns about the transition have festered for a long time, and Republicans have successfully blocked funding to complete the transition in recent years. That push is revving back up — with backing from some of the most prominent names in the Republican Party — as officials hope to finish the transition by the end of the fiscal year.

You can read about Tuesday’s hearing here, and more background on the transition here.

CHAIRMAN ON DELAY?: Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.) said “I haven’t made a final decision” on whether he supports a delay. But during Tuesday’s hearing he said the idea does not seem “unreasonable.”

DEM SAYS GOP IN ‘KNOTS’: Sen. Brian Schatz, the leading Democrat on a Technology and Communications subcommittee, said Republicans are twisting themselves in knots by trying to delay a plan for the government to handover its oversight role to the private sector.

“I think they’ve got themselves twisted in knots on this one,” he told The Hill. “The governments that oppose this transition are primarily China and Russia. And that should tell you something about what interests are behind trying to keep government control over the internet.”

FCC MAY MEETING: The Federal Communications Commission holds its monthly open meeting tomorrow, where it will consider three items. One relates to public file rules, another deals with reporting network outages and the third is a report and order on setting up a “competitive bidding process” for Phase II of the Connect America Fund. The livestream will be available here.

TWITTER TO LET 140 CHARACTERS GO FURTHER: Twitter on Tuesday announced that it would soon start allowing people to link to videos, photos and GIFs without it counting against their 140-character limit. It appears that links to news stories will still count against the standard character count. The company is also making a number of other changes that affect replies, retweets and the popular “.@” convention. Read the full announcement here.

THUNE SATISFIED WITH OUTCOME OF FACEBOOK INQUIRY: Senate Commerce Committee John Thune (R-S.D.) appears pleased with Facebook’s response to his letter, from two weeks ago, about allegations bias in their trending topics feature. He called their lengthy response a “good outcome” and said that though he was open to continuing his inquiry if more information came to light, he felt satisfied with their reaction. “We’re open to more information if somebody came forward with it,” he said. “But I thought Facebook was very straightforward in their response, they took it seriously, they’ve adopted some changes in their procedures. Our whole issue was to make sure that their decryption of what they were doing actually matched what they were doing. And I think that what this revealed was that there were some issues that they needed to address and I think they’ve made some modifications.” For more on Facebook’s response to the allegations of bias, click here.

FCC WON’T EXTEND COMMENTS BECAUSE OF GLITCH: The commission said it would not extend comment deadlines en masse because of a glitch in the Electronic Comment Filing System [ECFS] that delayed the posting of some comments. “[W]e do not find it necessary to grant a broad extension of comment deadlines in pending rulemaking proceedings,” the commission said in a notice. “The Commission expects that already-planned system upgrades to ECFS that are expected in the near future will limit the likelihood of such delays in the future.” The agency said the issue in question stemmed from a delay not in the submitting of comments, but in the process that converts them into PDFs. Read the public notice here.

YAHOO SALE UPDATE: Yahoo’s chief financial officer said that the company is “well along the way” to a sale. No surprise here, but he also thinks it’s going “very, very well.” Bloomberg has more.

#GOOGACLE JURY DELIBERATES: The jury in Google v. Oracle (take two) spent the day in deliberations. Sarah Jeong has a Storify here — including the moment when jurors asked for help with the court-furnished computer because they were struggling to open source code on the device.

ON TAP:

At 10:30 a.m., the FCC holds its May open meeting. Livestream here.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:

The largest names in the tech industry are pressing senators to approve the House’s widely supported email privacy bill without changes.

The chair of the House’s small business panel on Tuesday probed ways in which the tax system is failing workers in the so-called on-demand economy.

A top consumer protection regulator will consider this fall the ways companies disclose information, including their privacy policies, to customers.

A large group of tech companies and advocates wants a public probe of new service offerings from wireless carriers, which they say could run afoul of net neutrality rules.

The House cleared a trio of communications bills Monday night, including one meant to make it easier to dial 911 in some situations and another that supporters say makes the Federal Communications Commission more transparent.

Apple rehired the cryptography expert behind the secure communications platforms Silent Circle, PGP Corp and Blackphone to boost the security features on its devices, Reuters reported Tuesday.

A man linked to the 2014 leaks of nude celebrity photos, known as “Celebgate,” has pleaded guilty to felony computer hacking charges.

Please send tips and comments to David McCabe, dmccabe@digital-release.digital-release.thehill.com and Mario Trujillo, mtrujillo@digital-release.digital-release.thehill.com Follow us on Twitter: @dmccabe, @_mariotrujillo, @HilliconValley