March 4th 2009
Will Obama Break Google Up? Stop laughing. Christine Varney, Obama’s pick to head Justice’s anti-trust unit, describes Google as “quickly gathering market power in what I would call an online computing environment in the clouds”…“When all our enterprises move to computing in the clouds and there is a single firm that is offering a comprehensive […]
March 3rd 2009
According to music business blog Hypebot, there are massive lay-offs at the RIAA. The place is going boom! “It is about 90-100+ people across the US and global offices – anti-piracy, coordinated IFPI/BPI etc – trust me it’s a bloodbath… (Major label heads) Hands, Morris are squeezing the ____ out of these guys after the […]
March 3rd 2009
Mark the date. This announcement is the start of an effort by the FCC to regulate both Internet operations and content just as the Commission does in broadcast channels. After an earlier effort to regulate bloggers as lobbyists failed, this appears to set the stage for another attempt for regulation of Internet content. In a […]
March 1st 2009
Whenever one of my web domains is up for renewal, I receive a letter in the mail from Domain Renewal Group, a dba of Brandon Gray Internet Services, Inc. Despite verbiage that says otherwise, it appears to be a bill. Further, there’s an attempt to conflate the need for renewal with the option of renewing […]
February 27th 2009
Hot off the erm… screen: Another Facebook note concerning their change in the Terms of Service: they’re soliciting user input on how to shape it. So go ahead, all 175 million Facebook users. Flood Facebook central with your grocery list of demands, desires and dreams. That’ll work. Today we announced new opportunities for users to […]
February 26th 2009
Just a few months ago, an International Trademark Association (INTA) panel described ICANN’s gTLD policy as a “pending trainwreck” driven by greed and ambition. One member even discussed organizational ambitions for ICANN to relocate to Switzerland and build a substantial headquarters. The Non-Profit with Better-than-Commercial Pay It seems the trademark experts got it right. The […]
February 25th 2009
It’s bad enough that the UK seems hell-bent on placing surveillance cameras on every street corner, despite the fact that, according to a senior police official at Scotland Yard, they are an “utter fiasco.” But when the Orwellian UK government then mandates — secretly — that cameras spy on people in liquor stores and pubs, […]
February 23rd 2009
On March 4 (12:30 Eastern, 9:30 Pacific) you can participate in a free live webinar with the Kellogg Business School’s James Conley. Kellogg is arguably America’s top marketing school, and Conley is a clinical professor in technology who speaks and writes about intellectual property law and marketing. You may recall Conley’s Wall Street Journal article […]
February 20th 2009
The Governor of the State of New York wants to address their $15 billion deficit by taxing, well, almost everything. Among the specifics is the taxing of digital downloads. The so-called “iPod Tax” would be 4 percent on all music and video downloads. For years, we’ve been waiting for the axe to drop on e-commerce […]
February 18th 2009
The folks over at Facebook seem overwhelmed by the response they have received since Sunday, when the website The Consumerist posted an article about a change in Facebook’s Terms of Service. About-Face (Book) Notice of their reversal was available on their service today: Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback […]
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