SiliconBeat

OK, it’s an old joke about Al Gore saying he invented the Internet.  But a press release this morning from Dot Eco LLC Partners says Gore and his Alliance for Climate Protection will support that group’s effort to secure and promote the .eco domain.

The release notes that ICANN will soon take applications for new domains, meaning we’ll soon start seeing URLs that just don’t end in .com, .org, .edu and .gov.  In fact, cities are applying, so perhaps we’ll be seeing .paris and .sanjose addresses.

More from the release: “The proposal for .eco would establish a permanent address for web sites and email addresses concerned about global warming and environmental issues. The profits will mainly be dedicated to supporting environmental causes.”

Dot Eco LLC was formed in 2008 by Fred Krueger and Clark Landry. Its advisory board includes actor Roger Moore, a former 007, and Davis Guggenheim, who directed Gore’s star vehicle, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The group’s Web site is here.

Confirming recent scuttlebutt, Google announced Wednesday that it was walking away from its advertising partnership with Yahoo. According to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice, the agency had told the pair that it planned to file a suit to block the deal:

“Yahoo! Inc. and Google Inc. abandoned their advertising agreement after the Department of Justice informed the companies that it would file an antitrust lawsuit to block the implementation of the agreement. The Department said that, if implemented, the agreement between these two companies accounting for 90 percent or more of each relevant market would likely harm competition in the markets for Internet search advertising and Internet search syndication.

“The companies’ decision to abandon their agreement eliminates the competitive concerns identified during our investigation and eliminates the need to file an enforcement action,” said Thomas O. Barnett, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Department’s Antitrust Division. “The arrangement likely would have denied consumers the benefits of competition–lower prices, better service and greater innovation.”

As I wrote the other day, I think the notion that this deal raised anti-trust issues was wrongheaded. And I think Google and Yahoo could have won a court fight. The problem was that this would take time and money. And the deal didn’t really matter that much to Google from a financial perspective to invest all those resources in fighting to save it. Google was doing it, probably, just to thumb its nose at Microsoft and disrupt its bid for Yahoo.

For Yahoo, on the other hand, this is a body blow. Read the rest of this entry »

In case you forgot to mark your calendar, today is OneWebDay. That means today is the day we all do, um, something, or other. Okay, I’m not really sure.

I’ve had several folks ask me about OneWebDay. And I feel like it’s something that as a good citizen and a mediocre business columnist in Silicon Valley that I ought to know about. Certainly, all the cools kids seem to be talking about it today.

But I’m still trying to figure out what it’s all about, and what I’m supposed to do, or think about, or not do, as the case may be. So here is what I found. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the Associated Press reported that Kevin Martin, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said he would recommend that the other four commissioners rule that cable giant Comcast had violated the agency’s principles regarding open access to the Internet. While the ruling is not final, the statement marks a major victory for Free Press, a non-profit advocacy group that filed the original complaint against Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company.

On Monday, I interviewed Marvin Ammori, general counsel for the Free Press. We talked about what happened last week, what happens next, and why we should all care.

For background, the original complaint is here. And more background on the history of the fight can be found here.

Going forward, Martin needs two more commissioners to sign on to his proposed decision within the next couple of weeks for it to become official. While the FCC is not recommending a fine, Ammori said his group would be satisfied with the ruling that Martin has proposed.