Regulation

The Do Not Track proposal seems to be causing confusion and frustration among some W3C members charged with approving it.

Once ratified, the DNT policy would require advertisers and other third parties to turn off tracking for Internet users whose browser settings specifically restrict it.

The push for DNT has already created a chasm between advertisers, who naturally want the policy to be as lean as possible, and privacy advocates, who want tough standards.

Browser makers have also been caught in the furor. Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer already include DNT settings. But Microsoft has caused waves by … Read more

Robert Bork, the fiery former federal judge whose U.S. Supreme Court nomination battle galvanized a generation of conservative activists, spent the late 1990s arguing that Microsoft should be carved up into multiple pieces because of antitrust violations.

Bork, an antitrust scholar and author of a landmark book on the topic, is now saying that Google is no Microsoft.

In a new analysis released at an event in Washington, D.C., today, Bork offers a point-by-point refutation of claims that Google has violated the law or acted in an anticompetitive fashion. Rather, Bork says, it's a case of competitors' … Read more

People in Iran can apparently once again access their Gmail accounts after the service was blocked last week.

Both Gmail and the secure HTTPS version of Google were persona non grata in the country on September 24 after an Iranian official named Abdolsamad Khoramabadi announced that "Google and Gmail will be filtered nationwide until further notice." Khoramabadi is the secretary of a committee in Iran that examines the Internet for content considered illegal or criminal, according to the Iranian Labor News Agency.

The action was reportedly taken in response to an amateur movie posted on YouTube considered critical of the Prophet Muhammad among Muslims, … Read more

The Federal Communications Commission has begun the long process of reclaiming broadcast TV spectrum for wireless use.

The five commissioners unanimously approved a proposal intended to free up spectrum now held by broadcasters and auction it to wireless broadband providers. (See the FCC press release embedded at the end of this article.) CNET followed the hearing via the FCC's public webcast.

The complicated process, which is the first of its kind, will have three components.

First there is the reverse auction, in which TV broadcasters will voluntarily sell their spectrum back to the government. Then there's a "… Read more

As the Federal Communications Commission establishes the rules for its upcoming incentive spectrum auction, competitive carriers say they do not want to see a repeat of what happened with the 700MHz spectrum auction in 2008.

"The 700MHz auction was a disaster," Patrick Riordan, CEO of the rural Wisconsin carrier Cellcom, said at the Competitive Carrier Association's annual conference this week. "The FCC needs to get this one right. We all need spectrum too much. It has to be a level playing field."

On Friday the FCC will open comment on a proposal for how the … Read more

Federal police are increasingly gaining real-time access to Americans' social-network accounts -- such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter -- without obtaining search warrants, newly released documents show.

The numbers are dramatic: live interception requests made by the U.S. Department of Justice to social-networking sites and e-mail providers jumped 80 percent from 2010 to 2011.

Documents the ACLU released today show police are using a 1986 law intended to tell police what phone numbers were dialed for far more invasive surveillance: monitoring of whom specific social-network users communicate with, what Internet addresses they're connecting from, and perhaps even "… Read more

A trade association of 41 European telephone companies responded last week to mounting concerns over its controversial proposal to turn Internet traffic management over to the International Telecommunications Union, a regulatory body of the United Nations.

The European Telecommunications Network Operators Association, or ETNO, made its proposal in June, part of a year-long process to revise an ITU treaty known as the International Telecommunications Regulations. Changes to the treaty, which has not been revised since 1998, will be finalized later this year in Dubai at the World Conference on International Telecommunications.

Only national governments can vote on the new treaty. … Read more

Facebook has finally satisfied the European Union by disabling facial recognition tagging.

Facebook, which was subjected to an audit by Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), was under pressure to implement a variety of changes in Europe, mostly dealing with privacy and security issues. Last December, Facebook had promised to make the changes outlined in the audit document in order to comply with European regulations.

One stumbling block was facial recognition tagging, which prompts your Facebook friends to "tag" or identify you in photos in which you appear.

Facebook has now turned off the feature for European users. … Read more

A Netflix-backed bill to update an antique 1988 privacy law, crafted a generation before social networks and cloud computing became popular, was derailed today because of last-minute opposition from law enforcement officials.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who heads the Judiciary committee, postponed discussion on the proposal to update the dialup-era privacy law, likely pushing a final vote into the new Congress that will convene in 2013.

The delay comes two days after a phalanx of law enforcement organizations objected to the legislation, asking Leahy to "reconsider acting" on it "until a more comprehensive review of … Read more