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Cingular, Priceline, and Travelocity agreed to pay fines of $30,000-$35,000 and investigate their method of delivery for online advertisements. While the fines themselves don’t even amount to a slap on the wrist, the requirements for the future seem promising, including a more stringent process of using ads: “through companies that fully describe their adware, that obtain customer consent to install it and that make it practical for consumers to remove those programs from their computers.”

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iStock, a site that hooks up people who take pictures with people who are looking for pictures, has hit a rough patch. It appears a contributor to iStock recently had his video rejected. No, it wasn’t porn, nor was it a copy of somebody else’s work. It was a goldfish escaping from his bowl. You can see his video here.

The problem? He received the following from an iStock ‘inspector’:

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The big news, obviously, is the introduction of the Snowe-Dorgan net neutrality bill. See our coverage here and here.

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The recent AT&T merger and Senate net neutrality bill (see our takes here and here) have understandably given rise to a flood of commentary. Although Internet types seem to come out nearly unanimously in favor of net neutrality, the battle has been and is likely to continue to be controversial.

With everything being said on the subject, the controversy really comes down to one primary issue: is there enough competition in the market for broadband service to prevent harmful monopolistic practices by telecommunications companies?

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On Tuesday a Senate net neutrality bill was introduced by Sens. Olympia Snowe and Byron Dorgan. It’s mostly the same as the one they introduced last year, but with Democrats in control of Congress it has a better chance of being passed.

It seems to be good bill as far as it goes. According to Harold Feld’s excellent analysis (via Susan Crawford), the bill allows for some degree of network management and prioritization (e.g., all VOIP packets can be treated a certain way, but VOIP packets from a particular source can’t be singled out) and for broadband providers to charge customers–but not third parties–for certain extra options. One particularly interesting update from last year’s bill is a change that would prevent companies from claiming the privileges of being both a cable service and a broadband service simultaneously. In other words, it would not have allowed the terms of the recent AT&T merger under which certain services were exempt from the agreed-upon net neutrality provisions (see Prof. Crawford’s take on the problem with that merger). (For more details, Feld’s article is highly recommended.)

But where the story gets interesting is in the politics.

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So unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the past couple days, you’ve inevitably heard that Apple released its highly anticipated iPhone, fusing the ubiquitous iPod with the even more ubiquitous cellphone. Apple Computer even went as far as changing it’s name to Apple Inc. to illustrate just how serious this move is. The company has officially graduated from computer company to consumer electronics superstar.

But Cisco, the company that owns the iPhone trademark (incidentally, the latest rendition of the Cisco iPhone was hurriedly released three weeks ago: a VOIP phone that was and is talked about more for its name than anything), is now suing Apple.

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The other day I was looking up an article on Wikipedia – The
Battle of Agincourt. Every time I visit Wikipedia,
I come away impressed at the breadth and depth of the articles. This time was no different. The article on Agincourt was well organized, deep, and lightly peppered with images and tables.

For some reason I got a hankering to see what this now
impressive article looked like in its first draft. Did it start out as just a place holder? Maybe a person saying, “Hey, somebody ought
to cover the Battle of Agincourt, any takers?”

The beauty of a wiki is, of course, that it allows me to do just
that. With a few clicks of my mouse I
had opened up and was looking at the very first draft of the Battle of Agincourt.

What I found surprised me.

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Net neutrality has been in the news. The must-read article of the week is by Lawrence Lessig in Wired about the regulation of technology. He says that in hindsight, Microsoft may not have needed so much government intervention–competition (e.g., Linux) proved more capable at tempering the monopoly than regulation was. How does this relate to net neutrality? Well, that’s different, he says. We do need regulation there, because there’s nothing even close to breaking the monopoly power on Internet access. (I’ll have to think about that one.)

The recent FCC approval of the AT&T merger
has also spurred a lot of net neutrality commentary. The requirement for AT&T to
observe net neutrality principles for at least two years is called a "limited but
important victory" in a NY Times editorial. Susan Crawford,
on the other hand, thinks the deal "missed a major battleground": the
verbosely-titled AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet U-verse Enabled is exempt from that promise.

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