Google drew a line today – delineating just how far it will not go in compromising privacy and in supporting censorship. Whether this is simply a public relations ploy for today’s “news cycle” or a genuine delineation of the limits of American-Sino economic development will be determined in the weeks and months ahead.
Will the Chinese [...]

The Wild West era of the Internet has been slowly winding down in recent years. The seminal event may have been the beat-down the music industry played on Napster. But the past several weeks have been even more interesting. It turns out that Murdoch and Microsoft are planning something quite innovative – that frankly represents a classic disruptive approach to the Internet. As pretty much everyone has learned, the plan is to limit access to Murdoch’s news content to searches conducted through Microsoft’s Bing search engine. We assume Microsoft will pay Murdoch an unspecified royalty for that content, or for the number of users accessing it, or employ another similar usage-based payment schedule. What does that mean?

A couple weeks past Oracle OpenWorld now and we are still awaiting some kind of word from the EU on the Oracle acquisition of Sun. Looking back to the conference, we saw HP participating in the keynote and various “third-party” vendors making announcements and exhibiting on the floor. As a friend of mine, representing a [...]