Politicos to revisit crackdown on U.S. firms in 'Internet-restricting' countries
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House panel on Tuesday is expected to approve bill aimed at regulating how American companies operate in China and other foreign locales notorious for censorship.
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Justice Department officials are revising controversial guidelines for criminal prosecutions of companies in response to pressure from business groups, civil liberties lobbyists and an influential lawmaker who is expected to introduce legislation on the issue early next week.
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The Bush-Cheney reelection campaign has barred people outside the United States from viewing its Web site following an electronic attack that took down the campaign&#39;s Internet address for six
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An effort by Beijing authorities to bar access to the Chinese Google News website would be a considerable setback for the US internet search company, which is seeking to expand its
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Efforts by countries like China to restrict the exchange of information on the Internet are ultimately doomed to failure, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told an audience of Stanford University students Tuesday.&quot;I don&#39;t see any risk in the world at large that someone will restrict free content flow on the Internet,&quot; he said. &quot;You cannot control the Internet.&quot;China has grappled with the issue of Internet censorship&#160;in recent years and Microsoft, along with several other U.S. companies, has come under fire for aiding in this effort. In late 2005,&#160;Microsoft shut down the blog of journalist Zhao Jing, also known as Michael Anti, when he blogged about a newspaper strike in the country.In the long run, however, free speech will win out, Gates said.That&#39;s because of business requirements. Restrictions on free speech will curtail business activity and so commercial forces will work against censorship, Gates said. &quot;If your country wants to have a developed economy... you basically have to open up the Internet,&quot; he said.Gates made the comments following a talk on &quot;Software, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Giving Back,&quot; which focused mainly on his two favorite topics: the future of technology and the philanthropic goals he has set for himself following his retirement from day to day work at the company he founded in 1975.Microsoft&#39;s founder will step down&#160;from his daily work at the company entirely in July, but he has set some big follow-up goals for himself: including the fight against HIV/AIDS and a campaign to eradicate polio and malaria.Another ambition is to find new ways to&#160;drive innovation that will benefit the world&#39;s poorest countries.This is a major problem, Gates said. Today, with millions still dying from malaria, 90 percent of the world&#39;s medical research relates to conditions that occur in the world&#39;s richest countries. &quot;Consider how much money should be spent on baldness versus malaria,&quot; he said.Fifty times the amount spent on researching malaria goes to finding a cure for baldness, he said.&quot;We have this disparity where, as great as our system is, if there&#39;s not a market need, it doesn&#39;t drive innovation.&quot;Gates would like to see that change.&quot;One of the things I&#39;ll be spending time on is reaching out to both universities and companies and encouraging them to get more involved in this,&quot; he said.The 52 year-old Gates seemed apprehensive about his upcoming career as a philanthropist. Stepping down from Microsoft &quot;could be traumatic for me,&quot; he said. &quot;I was 17 years old when I started working full-time on Microsoft and I&#39;ve done it basically every day of work since then. So who knows what it will be like to make the change.&quot;&#160;
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The U.S. Department of Justice is scheduled to respond this week to a lawsuit claiming restrictions on online gaming ads violate First Amendment protections of free speech.
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Two lawmakers have introduced legislation that would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or impairing Web content from competitors.Reps. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Chip Pickering, a Mississippi Republican, introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act Wednesday. The bill says it is U.S. policy to &quot;guard against unreasonable discriminatory favoritism for, or degredation of, content by network operators based upon its source, ownership, or destination on the Internet.&quot;The bill would also require the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to open a proceeding on broadband services and consumer rights. The FCC would be required to investigate whether broadband providers have adhered to its August 2005 policy that providers should refrain from blocking or interfering with Web content.&quot;The open architecture nature of the Internet ... has ensured the Internet&#39;s place as the greatest level playing field ever created,&quot; Markey said as he introduced the bill. &quot;The goal of this bipartisan legislation is to assure consumers, content providers, and high-tech innovators that the historic, open architecture nature of the Internet will be preserved and fostered. [The bill] is designed to assess and promote Internet freedom for consumers and content providers.&quot;A group of advocacy groups, as well as Google and Amazon.com, praised the bill, saying it is needed as recent news report have suggested Comcast is slowing its customer access to high-bandwidth applications such as BitTorrent. Comcast on Tuesday filed a document with the FCC defending&#160;its practice of engaging in &quot;network management.&quot;Petitions by advocacy group Free Press and online video distributor Vuze to have the FCC prohibit Comcast&#39;s traffic throttling &quot;raise important issues about the ability of broadband network operators to engage in reasonable network management to ensure that their customers can enjoy a positive broadband experience,&quot; Comcast said in its FCC filing. &quot;Network management is best left to the sound, good-faith judgment of the engineers and proprietors who run and own the networks and who are best able to remedy customer service issues promptly, rather than to regulation.&quot;The FCC has no prohibitions against Comcast&#39;s behavior, the company argued. &quot;Free Press mistakenly relies on the [2005 FCC] Internet Policy Statement as creating rules the commission can enforce,&quot; Comcast said.But representatives of the Open Internet Coalition, including Free Press and Public Knowledge, praised the new Markey legislation, saying it would remove doubt about U.S. policy on blocking or slowing Web content.In the last six months, Comcast and other broadband and mobile-phone providers have repeatedly tried to block content on their networks, said Markham Erickson, the Open Internet Coalition&#39;s executive director. Erickson called Comcast&#39;s Tuesday FCC filing &quot;remarkable.&quot;&quot;It appears to declare war on Internet users, policy makers, and even the FCC,&quot; he said. &quot;It essentially says that the FCC has no legal ability to protect consumers from discriminatory behavior.&quot;The Comcast filing called Free Press&#39; complaints about its network management &quot;inflammatory hyperbole.&quot; Asked about Erickson&#39;s comments on the filing, Comcast spokeswoman Sean Fitzmaurice denied that the company was saying the FCC had no authority to regulate net neutrality.The Markey bill is not as specific as past net neutrality bills that failed in a Republican-controlled Congress in 2006, but it would set a standard in federal law, said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge. &quot;It&#39;s the right bill at the right time,&quot; she said.Without prohibitions against blocking or slowing Web content, broadband providers could sign deals with some content providers and shut out new Internet-based companies, added Richard Whitt, Google&#39;s Washington telecom and media counsel.&quot;Keeping the on-ramps to the Web free of undue discrimination is not about Google, it&#39;s about the next Google,&quot; Whitt said.Comcast declined to comment on the Markey bill. But Hands Off the Internet, an advocacy group with members including broadband providers AT&amp;T and Qwest, said it could support an FCC study of net neutrality.&quot;There&#39;s no question that a reasoned examination of the facts will demonstrate the folly of net neutrality,&quot; the group said in a statement, &quot;However, we are concerned that an effort to seek public input is intended to be a stalking horse for federal Internet regulation. The continued push by special interests to regulate Internet neutrality undercuts the best hope Net users have for faster, more affordable broadband.&quot;
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The Justice Department is set to announce a major crackdown on cyber-crime that will include arrests, subpoenas and property seizures of alleged e-mail spammers and online scam artists, according to law enforcement and industry sources. -The Washington Post
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House panel approves "minimum standards"--backed by hefty fines--aimed at curbing American companies' cooperation with Internet-restricting governments like China's.
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A top U.S. official urged India to tighten its laws to protect intellectual property rights and ensure that sensitive information stays out of the hands of tech-savvy criminals.
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US President George W. Bush this week is expected to sign a bill making it harder to place bets on the Internet, a practice which already is illegal in the United States.
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Human rights organisation Amnesty calls for tougher action against countries who seek to repress online freedoms.
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Blog: The same pair of politicos who pushed last year for strict nondiscrimination requirements for broadband operators are looking to federal regulators to help revive their cause.
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WASHINGTON The Justice Department has announced that more than 150 people have been arrested, charged or convicted in the past three months in a crackdown on criminal activity on the Internet.
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The Bush-Cheney reelection campaign has barred people outside the United States from viewing its Web site following an electronic attack that took down the campaign's Internet address for six hours last week, according to computer security experts. -washingtonpost.com
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Internet censorship in nations such as China won't work because business needs will outweigh efforts to restrict information, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told students at Stanford University.
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The recent news that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency destroyed videotapes of interrogations of two terrorist suspects may offer a timely reminder for CIOs at private companies in the United States, tasked with electronic evidence preservation rules since last December.