The city of Los Angeles sued AT&T Mobility in Los Angeles Superior Court, seeking $4.9 million in unpaid “communications user tax,” plus penalties and interest. The lawsuit said the taxes date back to 2005. AT&T Mobility, a subsidiary of AT&T Inc., appealed the taxes in 2008 and was ordered by the city’s Board of Review to pay up, the city said. Since that time, the company has “failed to pay the amount due and owing,” the lawsuit said.
[Commentary] Privacy groups and some members of Congress are up in arms, and rightfully so, over a new study revealing that many online advertising companies continue to follow people's Web activity, even after users believe they have opted out of tracking.
Consumers have legitimate worries about the information that's being collected and used online. It's time for the Internet industry to come to a collective agreement about the privacy protections it will guarantee. Six months ago we warned that if innovators did not find a way to police online tracking, Congress would feel compelled to regulate the industry. Washington does not have a good track record when it comes to imposing rules on technology; too often it has either slowed Silicon Valley innovation or done significant damage to tech firms' bottom line. But there is little confidence the industry will do the right thing, either. The Do Not Call registry, enacted in 2005, shows that Congress can act when consumers' privacy is in jeopardy. The Internet industry must move quickly to assure lawmakers and the public that it is capable of responding to these legitimate consumer concerns.
Republicans may have pulled ahead of Democrats in the race to dominate the social media landscape, according to a Congressional Management Foundation report.
In a survey of 260 Congressional staffers between October and December of 2010, Democrats reported their offices spent too little time in online communications when compared with their Republican colleagues. A quarter to a third of Republican staffers reported their offices spent too little time on Facebook, Twitter and online town hall meetings, among others. But Democrats posted much higher numbers of discontent across the board, ranging from 32 to 42 percent. “In every single category of online activity, Democrats feel…that their office spends too little time on online communications,” said Bradford Fitch, president and CEO of CMF. “Other studies have shown that, in terms of volume, Republicans were certainly more active on Twitter, but it was surprising to us that the Democrats feel that way in every category,” he added. Fitch compared the findings with research of Congressional websites that showed Senate Democrats and House Republicans dominated earlier in the decade, a lead that took years to balance out.
[Commentary] There are dueling studies about how much revenue state and local governments forgo by not collecting taxes from Internet sales. But experience seems to side with the low estimates. A far better solution would be for states to levy sales taxes based on where products are coming from rather than on where they’re going -- or for Congress to tell them to do so.
Under an origin-based tax rather than a destination-based tax, for example, Washington state would have the power to tax Amazon.com’s sales. For physical stores, sales taxes would keep being collected as before. This would be a much simpler tax system with lower compliance costs. It would tend to constrain sales taxes by increasing competition among the states: A state that raised its rates too high would induce businesses, particularly catalog or Internet businesses that can sell remotely, to locate elsewhere.
By the time Marshall McLuhan died in 1980, the once provocative voice that had propelled him to international stardom rare for an academic had been silenced by a stroke. In his home country, Canada, he had become something of a national embarrassment, often seen as an eccentric at best, a charlatan at worst. All seems to have been forgiven. Last week events in Europe, Washington and three Canadian cities honored the centennial of the birth of the man who is now widely credited as the world’s first media theorist and who introduced ideas like “the medium is the message” and “the global village” into everyday use. The festivities have helped renew debate over the meaning of his often dense and cryptic, yet challenging, work. Instead of being viewed as an academic fraud, McLuhan is now widely celebrated as the man who prophesied both the Internet and its impact on society.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s arrests of 14 people last week were the most ambitious crackdown yet on a loose-knit group of hackers called Anonymous that has attacked a string of government agencies and private companies over the last eight months. But at least some of the suspects are not your typical hard-core hackers, judging from interviews with two of them and the online traces of others. Some did not bother to cover their digital tracks as they participated in what they saw as an online protest.
And some say they were unaware that their feverish clicks on a home computer may have been against the law. The suspects, mostly in their 20s and living unremarkable lives in small towns and suburbs across the country, now face up to 15 years in prison. Among them are a college student, an ex-Marine, a couple of self-taught computer programmers, even a young man whose only celebrity before last week’s arrest was that he dressed up as Harry Potter for a movie premiere. While federal law enforcement officials are clearly keen to quash the notion that online attacks are a form of social protest, the arrests highlight a far bigger challenge facing the authorities as they try to stop digital raids carried out by a large and ideologically motivated group of people scattered across the globe.
In 2003 after PartyPoker.com advertised on one episode of "World Poker Tour," then on Travel Channel, the website saw a surge in traffic, making it one of the most popular poker-gambling websites in the US. "It showed the power of the television medium and what it was able to provide for the online business," says Steve Lipscomb, founder of World Poker Tour.
That power quickly attracted the U.S. Justice Department, which in June 2003 warned in a letter to media companies and the National Association of Broadcasters, that they should "know the illegality of offshore sportsbook and Internet gambling operations since, presumably, they would not run advertisements for illegal narcotics sales, prostitution, child pornography or other prohibited activities." Soon, the Federal Bureau of Investigation in St. Louis started targeting media companies that were accepting advertising from online gambling sites and in 2004 it seized $6 million from Discovery Communications Inc. for "World Poker Tour" ads, according to court documents and Rebecca Wu, a spokeswoman for the FBI.
New regulations that require bars, restaurants, hotels and bookstores to install costly Web monitoring software are prompting many Chinese businesses to cut Internet access and sending a chill through the capital’s game-playing, Web-grazing literati who have come to expect free Wi-Fi with their lattes and green tea.
The software, which costs businesses about $3,100, provides public security officials the identities of those logging on to the wireless service of a restaurant, cafe or private school and monitors their Web activity. Those who ignore the regulation and provide unfettered access face a $2,300 fine and the possible revocation of their business license. It is unclear whether the new measures will be strictly enforced or applied beyond the area of central Beijing where they are already in effect. But they suggest that public security officials, unnerved by turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa partly enabled by the Internet, are undaunted in their efforts to increase controls.
Campaigners will seek to use Vodafone’s annual meeting on July 26 to call on the mobile phone group to prevent a repetition of how its network in Egypt was used to carry propaganda on behalf of the country’s former ruler. Access, a New York-based non-governmental organization, wants Vodafone and other telecoms operators to sign up to an action plan that would commit them to resisting any efforts by governments to take control of their networks.
[Commentary] The BBC has been enjoying Rupert Murdoch’s troubles. In the humbling of News Corp, it has cheered the despatch of an implacable enemy. Britain’s public broadcaster should be careful about gloating. It has business of its own to attend to, starting with the rediscovery of its public service mission. Like everyone else in the public realm, the BBC must come to terms with straitened times. A cash freeze in the licence fee implies a cut of 20 per cent in its budget by 2015. The corporation should not expect sympathy. To the contrary, it should see an opportunity in austerity.
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