p2pnet headline roundups, June 20, 2008
p2pnet headline roundups | Last of the day
FTC Halts Cross Border Con Artists – FTC
A U.S. District Court Judge has ordered a halt to the illegal practices of Canadian operators who deceptively posed as domain name registrars and sent bogus bills to thousands of U.S. small businesses and nonprofit organizations for their annual “WEBSITE ADDRESS LISTING.” Many of the businesses and nonprofits believed they would lose their Web site addresses unless they paid the bill, so they paid. The Federal Trade Commission alleged that in most cases the defendants did not provide domain registration services, did not provide the “search optimization” services it claimed to provide, and bilked small businesses and nonprofits out of millions of dollars. According to the FTC, since 2004, Toronto-based Internet Listing Service has been sending fake invoices to small businesses and others, listing the existing domain name of the consumer’s Web site or a slight variation on the domain name, such as substituting “.org” for “.com.” The invoice appears to come from the businesses’ existing domain name registrar and contains terms such as “WEBSITE ADDRESS LISTING” and “ANNUAL WEBSITE SEARCH ENGINE LISTING.” The invoice also claims to include a search engine optimization service. Most consumers who receive the “invoices” are led to believe that the defendants are their current domain name registrar and that they must pay them to maintain their registrations of domain names. Other consumers are induced to pay based on defendants’ claims that their “Search Optimization” service will “direct mass traffic” to their sites and that their “proven search engine listing service” will result in “a substantial increase in traffic.”
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Samsung Instinct to Challenge Apple’s IPhone in U.S. – Bloomberg News
Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s second-largest maker of mobile phones, began selling its touch- screen Instinct handset for $70 cheaper than Apple Inc.’s new iPhone to win sales in the U.S. Sprint Nextel Corp. will offer the phone, which can access e-mail and get live television programs, starting today for $129.99 each, according to Sprint’s Web site. That’s below larger rival AT&T Inc.’s $199 price for the iPhone. Unlike Apple’s latest phone, the Instinct can also record videos.
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Watchdog says Net regulation must be addressed – Globe & Mail
The head of Canada’s Competition Bureau says policy makers are finally going to have to address the thorny question of regulating the Internet, as converging communications and media change consumer expectations and behaviour. The recent uproar over phone companies shaping Internet traffic to discourage customers clogging networks with shared video files is just one example of regulators being forced to show their hand, said Sheridan Scott, Competition Bureau commissioner. “The developments raise the urgency of a question that public policy has been tip-toeing around for a decade or more, but which we will now have to confront head-on: should the government regulate the Internet?” she told the Canadian Telecom Summit Wednesday in Toronto. Ms. Scott, who found herself in hot water this year for the tactics she used to gather information into a probe of Labatt Brewing Co. Ltd., didn’t provide a definitive answer to her question. But she laid out some specific criteria regulators need to consider.
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Yahoo The Failure: Myth Versus Reality – SearchEngineLand
As SS Yahoo appears to be sinking, let me be the contrarian about her future. I admit, I find it as hard to believe as anyone that Yahoo has much life left in it after all executive departures this week, plus the latest news of Delicious founder Joshua Schacter going. But since Yahoo’s leadership has done a piss-poor job making people believe there’s hope, I’ll step up and give it a swing. First of all, WTF? Seriously, what the hell is going on? How did Yahoo become such a loser company in anyone’s mind other than the idiotic investors who usually don’t seem to know what they’ve bought. Let’s have a little reality check about that big fat failure Yahoo supposedly is ….
China investigates Microsoft – Australian IT
China has begun an anti-monopoly investigation into US software giant Microsoft and lawsuits by local companies could follow, state media have reported. China’s State Intellectual Property Office and some research institutions have targeted Microsoft and several other global software firms over suspected monopoly activities, the Shanghai Securities News says. Firms will be organised to file lawsuits against the software giants after China’s debut anti-monopoly law comes into effect on August1, sources told that newspaper. The probe by Chinese regulators focuses on operating systems and other software developed by international companies which cost much more in China than in the US, one source says.
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Copyright cock-up – Globe & Mail
What a happy fuzz we’ve been in all these years. While Americans have been wrangling over gigantic recording-industry lawsuits, Canadians have been enjoying a pleasantly nebulous relationship with digital copyright. Nobody seems to know exactly what the letter of the law says (even lawyers say it’s debatable in parts), so we laypeople have assumed that if our intentions are fair, everything will be all right. Enough of this reverie. The Tories’ new copyright bill, unveiled last week, is a glass of cold water to the face. It spells out in meticulous detail what you can and cannot do with digital media. And unless it’s exactly what the copyright holder says you can do, odds are you can’t do it.
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