A French court has ruled that Facebook can be sued in France for suspending the account of a Parisian teacher who posted a photo of Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting The Origin of the World, which shows a nude woman. The court rejected Facebook's argument that its terms of service require users to bring lawsuits in California.

The California Public Utilities Commission said it will decide on May 12 whether to approve Charter's proposed merger with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. Previously, the commission anticipated issuing a final decision on June 10. An agency spokesperson told Bloomberg the change “has no bearing on the outcome.”

Donuts, which operates the top level domains .movie and .theater, will work with the Motion Picture Association of America to take down material that infringes copyright. Variety reports that Donuts will require "clear evidence of pervasive copyright infringement and that the MPAA has first attempted to contact the third-party registrar and hosting provider for resolution."  

Broadband provider CenturyLink will soon start charging subscribers overages for exceeding their data caps, which range from 150 GB to 250 GB, the company said at an earnings call this week. "Regarding the metered data plans; we are considering that for second half of the year," CenturyLink CFO Stewart Ewing said on the company's earnings conference call, according to DSLReports. "We think it is important and our competition is using the metered plans today and we think that exploring those starts and trials later this year is our expectation."

The U.S. Senate voted today to permanently prohibit state and local governments from taxing Web access. The House has already passed a similar measure, which will now go to President Barack Obama for signature. The law will require seven states currently tax Web access to phase out those laws.

Politwoops, which tracks tweets that politicians delete, is back online in the U.S. Twitter cut off the service's API access last year, but reversed the decision after co-founder Jack Dorsey returned to the company.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler intends to include privacy regulations in his new proposal to unlock set-top boxes. "The cable companies are collecting information on you today, and they have a set of rules they have to live by," Wheeler told The Washington Post. "There are rules for device manufacturers and service providers at both the federal and the state level, and what we're going to do in our rulemaking is say [to new entrants], 'You have to have the same kind of rules that cable companies have.' "

Two lawmakers in Congress introduced legislation today that would preempt state and local governments from passing laws that weaken encryption technology used by smartphone manufacturers. The ENCRYPT Act comes in response to proposed laws in California and New York to ban smartphone encryption.  

A Utah lawmaker has proposed a new state law that would make it a crime to "dox" people by posting their personally identifiable information online in an attempt to harass them. The digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation says the bill's wording is so broad that the measure is "clearly unconstitutional."

A Florida appellate court has upheld an order requiring a divorcing couple to pay $350,000 for posting defamatory remarks about the wife's attorney on Yelp and the online legal site Avvo. The divorcing couple accused the attorney of charging higher fees than initially quoted. "In a lesson that all online reviewers should heed, the appeals panel said that the Internet is not a forum with carte blanche freedom to say whatever irks you," Ars Technica writes.