Regulation

Think of them as the good cop and the bad cop.

Two individuals hold central positions in Google's antitrust challenges from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the EU's European Commission. As the European commissioner for competition, Joaquin Almunia has tremendous influence over what happens to Google. And in the United States, George Mason University professor Joshua Wright is expected to get some influence soon as an incoming FTC commissioner.

They contrast sharply. Almunia has been highly critical of Google and how it's done business since becoming dominant in search. Wright, though, not only advocates minimal … Read more

commentary The Russian Federation is calling on the United Nations to take over key aspects of Internet governance, including addressing and naming, according to documents leaked on Friday from an upcoming treaty conference.

The Russians made their proposal on November 13 in the lead-up to December's World Conference on International Communications in Dubai. The conference will consider revisions to the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs), a treaty overseen by the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The treaty has not been revised since 1988, before the emergence of the commercial Internet.

Russia's proposals would, if adopted, dramatically affect Internet … Read more

Sen. Joseph Lieberman spent years fighting unsuccessfully for a so-called Internet kill switch that would grant the president vast power over private networks during a "national cyberemergency."

Now Lieberman (I-Conn.), who did not seek re-election, is hoping a more modest version of his proposal will be approved before he leaves office in January. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has inserted the cybersecurity bill into the Senate's post-election calendar, and a vote could happen as early as this week after debate on a proposal to open more public land for hunting and fishing.

That move has reignited … Read more

Google is trying to convince the courts to throw out a book-scanning lawsuit filed against it by the Authors Guild.

In a brief submitted to the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals last Friday, Google argued that a suit filed on behalf of all authors whose books have been scanned shouldn't be allowed because most authors support the scanning.

Backing up its claim, the company yet again cited a survey that found 58 percent of the authors polled approved of Google scanning their books so the content could be searched online. A full 45 percent said they had … Read more

Google has experienced a precipitous drop in traffic from China, which a Web-monitoring group attributed to the search engine being "blocked" by the government.

Data provided by Google's Transparency Report shows a sharp drop off in traffic -- to roughly half the normal amount -- to Google's Web sites as of early this morning California time.

GreatFire.org, which performs real-time monitoring, suggested that the drop meant the Chinese government is "one step closer to fully separating the Chinanet from the Internet."

It wasn't immediately clear whether the block was intended to be … Read more

Silicon Valley leaders are hoping that immigration reforms known as "Startup Act 2.0," which have been stalled in the U.S. Congress, will fare better under President Obama's second term.

"I think the main issue the tech industry should focus on is Startup Act 2.0," Andreessen Horowitz's Marc Andreessen told CNET yesterday. "That would be amazing not just for Silicon Valley but for American job creation -- since the companies that are founded by skilled immigrants create so many jobs for Americans."

So far, at least, the left coast's … Read more

Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army soldier accused of providing WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of classified documents, has offered to plead guilty. Sort of.

During a pre-trial hearing in military court today, Manning's attorney, David Coombs, proposed a partial guilty plea covering a subset of the slew of criminal charges that the U.S. Army has lodged against him.

"Manning is attempting to accept responsibility for offenses that are encapsulated within, or are a subset of, the charged offenses," Coombs wrote on his blog this evening. "The court will consider whether this is a permissible … Read more

California voters yesterday approved a new law billed as curbing human trafficking. A lesser-known section of Proposition 35, however, requires residents convicted of indecent exposure and other sex-related crimes to register their social-networking profiles and e-mail addresses with police.

That violates the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech, including anonymous speech, the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a lawsuit (PDF) filed today.

Prop 35 takes effect immediately and sweeps broadly. It says that California residents convicted of crimes since 1944 including misdemeanor indecent exposure -- courts have included in that category nude dancing on a … Read more

The most controversial technology topics in President Obama's second term are likely to be two political flashpoints: piracy and privacy.

When Internet activists allied with an hastily assembled coalition of Silicon Valley companies blocked votes on a pair of Hollywood-backed copyright bills early this year, they didn't end efforts to slap stiffer anti-piracy sanctions on the Internet. They merely postponed the fight.

The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are dead, of course. Those names have become radioactive on Capitol Hill, thanks to a broad public outcry that involved millions of Internet users and actually … Read more