Regulation

NebuAd has made few friends, thanks to a business built on monitoring broadband customers' Web surfing to deliver advertisements. It certainly found none on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based start-up was forced on the defensive during a hearing in which politicians charged that deep packet inspection of Internet traffic was far too privacy-invasive. Only if customers gave affirmative consent by opting in, they said, might the practice be acceptable.

Texas Rep. Gene Green called NebuAd's opt-out procedures "contemptible." To Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Doyle, the practice "goes against everything the country's been … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Bob Barr hopes his enthusiasm for electronic privacy will boost his Libertarian Party campaign for the White House. Call it a long-shot bid for the geek vote.

Absent Barack Obama and John McCain found in flagrante delicto with, say, Osama bin Laden and a 12-year old, Barr will not be the next president of the United States. But he is polling surprisingly well, with a Zogby poll last week putting him at 6 percent nationally, meaning he could siphon away enough limited-government votes from McCain to affect the November election.

Barr was a GOP member of Congress best known … Read more

Yahoo defended its planned advertising deal with Google at a U.S. Senate hearing on Tuesday, while Microsoft assailed it as anticompetitive and perhaps even "illegal."

The hearing before an antitrust panel replayed arguments that the three companies have made before: Microsoft is trying to raise antitrust objections as a way to derail the deal, and the two Silicon Valley firms say it's perfectly fine and a boon to competition.

One reason Microsoft is so irked is that the ad deal amounts to a poison pill that would raise the price of buying Yahoo by as much … Read more

The U.S. Senate is holding a hearing Tuesday on the antitrust implications of the Google-Yahoo ad deal, and the two companies, along with Microsoft, are testifying. You should expect sober, selfless discussions conducted with the public's best interests in mind.

Or not. In reality, Microsoft will offer fanciful claims about the alleged detrimental impact of a Google-Yahoo partnership, just as Google offered fanciful claims a few months ago about the alleged detrimental impact of a Microsoft-Yahoo combination.

According to his prepared testimony, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith will call the Google-Yahoo deal possibly "illegal under the antitrust … Read more

LAS VEGAS -- Whole Foods CEO John Mackey doesn't exactly disagree with Bill Gates' recent call for "creative capitalism."

Gates, of course, gave a high-profile speech in January that called for corporate executives to engage in "market-based social change" to to do "work that eases the world's inequities." The non-financial rewards? "Recognition" instead of, or in addition to, profits.

But Mackey doesn't completely agree with Gates either. At a speech here at a political conference on Thursday, the co-founder of the exclusive grocery chain sketched out a more free-market … Read more

It's no secret that politicians tend to churn out press releases touting their accomplishments, no matter how mean or insignificant. But it is still possible to be surprised on occasion, which brings us to today's announcement by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat.

In his press release, which was reproduced uncritically, Cuomo claimed that AOL has "agreed to eliminate access to child porn newsgroups, a major supplier of these illegal images" and said that the company will "purge" its "servers of child porn websites." By newsgroups, Cuomo is referring to … Read more

The Democratic-controlled Senate handed President Bush a major political victory on Wednesday by voting to derail lawsuits against telecommunications companies that unlawfully opened their networks to the National Security Agency.

Senators voted 69 to 28 for the bill, which would rewrite federal wiretap laws by granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies as long as the government claims the request was "lawful" and authorized by the president.

Wednesday's vote followed a last-minute effort by liberal and libertarian activists to convince enough Democrats to kill or modify the bill. DailyKos called the bill "a pardon to Bush"; … Read more

Monitoring customers' Web browsing to serve up targeted advertisements is coming under increased political scrutiny on privacy grounds, making the future of the controversial technique among Internet service providers less than certain.

A hearing convened by a U.S. Senate panel on Wednesday is the latest potential obstacle to widespread adoption of the practice, which relies on intercepting customers' Internet packets and building anonymized profiles that can be used for topic-based advertisements.

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., suggested that the procedure amounts to "wiretapping" and promised a followup hearing in the near future to explore the subject further. &… Read more

A housing bailout bill that would also create a national fingerprint registry is facing some unexpected delays in the U.S. Senate and may not be voted on until next month.

We wrote about the proposed law last month after it had been approved by the Senate Banking Committee. After that, it was supposed to be on the fast track to President Bush's desk, but a fuss over an amendment for renewable-energy tax credits--which, of course, have nothing to do with foreclosures and the bursting of the housing bubble--is creating the delay.

The legislation would require any mortgage "… Read more