China’s announcement that it is not preparing to investigate Microsoft seems more like a warning shot than reassurance. Hats off to Computerworld’s Preston Gralla, who points out the strangeness of communist governments complaining about monopolies. Hypocrisy and gamesmanship are likely to be reoccuring themes in the two giants’ relationship.

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Nike has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Eastern Mountain Sports (EMS) in the Federal District Court for the District of Oregon over the use of the term “Dri-FIT.” Dri-FIT is a trademark of Nike.

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On Thursday the board of The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved the biggest ever expansion of the scheme for having Generic Top Level Domains (GTLDs).

So instead of being limited to gTLDs which describe the purpose of traffic on the domain, such as .gov, .edu, end users could apply for their own top level domains. The city of Boston could be .Boston; the Res Sox could claim .RedSox; Steven Colbert and American Airlines could wrestle each other over .American.

So, who gets to have their own gTLD? 
Here’s the criteria so far:

1. Money: ICANN hedges the details by saying they will set a price “based on the volume of applications”.  But to initially expect a minimum $100,000 fee. 
2. Popularity: ICANN will evaluate the applicants business and technical use of the domain. Imagine the process of being voted on to cheer leading squad. (Sorry ”.xxx domain” you’re popular, but in the wrong sort of way.)
3. Opposition Period: just as with intellectual property applications, there will be a public opposition period. There are four stated reasons for opposition:
   1. String Confusion
   2. Existing Legal Rights
   3. Morality and Public Order
   4. Community Objection

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NPR suspended its skepticism and asked Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, how can Twitter change the presidential debate? Well gosh.

Here’s a short list of ways Twitter might change political debate in America.

1. It will delay the real political change that only debate in Haiku can provide.
2. Twitter abbreviations such as “They h8 us bcse we’re free” will politically re-energize fans of Prince lyrics.
3. It will focus the nation on the vital issue of improving Twitter’s uptime to more than six hours a day.
4. Obama aces the debate with: “We nd chng in wshntn, chng we cn belv in.”
5. Speed thumb-typing on cell phones will become a new political specialty. Consultants will add this to their resumes.
6. Everyone will finally get it. Complex policies are best summarized in 140 characters or less. Lesson from the 2004 election: nuance is for losers.

Have another change you’d like to add to the list? Add your comment below. (Use as many characters as you like.)

This week, ICANN waded into the issue of providing Internet addresses in non-roman characters. BusinessWeek has detailed coverage of the politics and complexity of countries with multiple languages and dialects who want Internet addressing translated to their native characters and words. The BBC calls this “the biggest Internet shake-up in decades.”

Ask a Dumb Question, Get a Dumb Answer
In an attempt to illustrate the dire need for fully multilingual addressing, Edmon Chung, the Hong Kong-based CEO of the .Asia domain, asked readers to:

“Imagine for a moment how inconvenient it would be if the Internet had been invented in China and each time you typed in an address you had to use Chinese characters.”

But to imagine this realistically, Mr. Chung, is to to imagine the world without the Internet at all. The Internet wasn’t invented, it was developed. And if it had been developed in China, it would have been designed for state use, run by officials, firewalled, monitored, and certainly not extended to other countries. Now that would be inconvenient.

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Tom Regan of The Christian Science Monitor provides some perspective on the Web’s influence on the US presidential race. In January, Obama raised a record $32 million, a previously unimaginable amount. All but 12% of it came through the Web. And then there’s Ron Paul, who had $5 million single-night online fundraisers.

About ten years ago, I worked for the first Massachusetts Governor who had a computer in her office. Technology policy fit somewhere in economic development, governors new about as much about it as they did biotechnology. They new it was the kind of business their state’s needed, even if they didn’t know what DNA base codes were.

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Once you’ve read the federal CAN-SPAM legislation, you’ll see it does little to stop the sending of unsolicited messages. One might in fact call it the “Yes, you CAN spam” act.

Yet even if you can spam, there are good reasons not to. Recently, James B. Zagel of the U.S. District Court in Northern Illinois rulled in e360 v. Comcast that Internet service providers (ISPs) are not liable for mistakenly blocking even permission-based e-mail when it’s part of a good-faith effort to protect subscribers from spam.

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I’m delighted to be speaking at Exact Target’s 1:1 marketing tour as it comes to Boston to discuss two of my favorite topics.

• 1:1 Marketing: Today, prospective customers spend much more time on the web researching their purchases before they ever speak to your sales staff. That means marketing needs to communicate more individually to prospects, and nurture their interest far more. There are easy-to-use tools and processes that even small organizations can use to step up to this opportunity.
• Internet Strategy: From social networking to YouTube to Twitter, RSS feeds, podcasts, video, and a ton of advertising modes, the online options available to marketers are myriad. How do you determine what your organization’s core capabilities should be, which electives to experiment with, and what can be left out to allow you to focus on what really matters?

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The Christian Science Monitor reports that as blogging has become more popular, so has the oppression of bloggers by governments.

Bloggers seem particularly susceptible to political imprisonment: The vigilante tone of many citizen journalists sends them down a prickly path with government censors; and they are often one-man operations, meaning there’s no editors or company lawyers to fight an unfair arrest.

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The USPTO faces a backlog of over one million patent applications. To keep up, patent examiners have less than 20 hours per application to determine if a 20-year monopoly should be issued, which can determine the future of entire industries or the direction of basic research.

Over the last year, the USPTO has cooperated with New York Law School and a network of corporate collaborators to use social networking to help turn up prior art during the patent review process. Peer-to-Patent is the first social networking project with a direct link to decision-making by the federal government.

The program has just completed its first year of operation, and has posted some encouraging results.

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