Be strong and you will be renewed

• RNC head Reince Priebus will address his party's rest-of-America-problem in an address Friday, Politico reports in a story that suggests he'll talk technology, a 50-state strategy, and a new and more inclusive coalition:

  Priebus will outline a number of steps the GOP should take to expand the base and get competitive in a broader swath of states. Among his suggestions: train “candidates, volunteers and operatives” on basic subjects like fundraising and campaign strategy — but through a variety of high-tech methods, including Skype sessions and Google hangouts; give the “next generation of organizers access to the brightest experts,” take the initiative on leading in the “digital space” and focus on being “welcoming” and “inclusive” without forgetting GOP “principles.”

  All of this, Priebus is quoted as saying, is in the service of "a Republican renewal."

  And it's all curiously cyclical. Over the past year, techPresident has been tracking how outside groups on the right like the Leadership Institute, American Majority and FreedomWorks (pre-implosion) have been emulating the work of the New Organizing Institute, MoveOn, and ThinkProgress on the left. Priebus calling on Republicans to abandon the concept of "red states" and "blue states" has certain shades of Howard Dean, to be sure, but he's also asking the party to internalize the kinds of outside infrastructure that helped the left defeat them in 2012. This is more than a little entertaining given that Democratic backers started putting that infrastructure in place as a response to their own defeats in the early 2000s.

  So tune in tomorrow to see the Republican Party reborn in the fires of carrousel exactly what Priebus has in mind.

Around the web

• Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Tom Carper (D-Del.) are resurrecting legislation that would facilitate more information sharing between private companies and government for cybersecurity reasons.

• Republican Study Committee Chairman Steve Scalise (R-La.) argued Wednesday that regulation of Internet companies is an attack on Internet freedom. There's video and audio from the conference right over here.

• Tech companies have beefed up their lobbying efforts.

• Susan Crawford, the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law professor and author of a book, "Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age," has detractors. Her friends point out those detractors are connected to the telecom industry, the subject of her latest critique.

• Professional detractor Evgeny Morozov is speaking at Stanford University this afternoon.

• The New York Times notes an emerging idea: If the U.S. is now on the other side of a bright line from the U.N.'s International Telecommunications Union when it comes to how the Internet should work, why should Americans be funding the international agency?

• Google's semi-annual transparency report is out, detailing requests for information it receives from government. Google is now disclosing how many requests it complied with in whole or in part, the number of user accounts involved in requests, and what type of request was made — for example, whether the government approached the search giant with a warrant.

• Completely different: What if Glenn Greenwald cared as much about Beyoncé as he did about drones?

International

• Someone has turned on Cuba's fiber-optic Internet connection.

• Look at this visualization of government spending from the U.K. Cabinet Office.

• Former UK Director for Transparency and Digital Engagement Andrew Stott has joined teh board of the Open Knowledge Foundation.

• Catalonia, home to "smart city" Barcelona, is moving towards an attempt to secede from Spain.

• EU Commissioner for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes called for more investment in European broadband infrastructure before heading to the World Economic Forum in Davos.