RUMOR: SONY PREPARING INTERNET TV ALTERNATIVE

The Wall Street Journal reports Sony has approached "several big media companies" about distributing their channels over the internet. This comes on the heels of its report on comments by CEO Howard Stringer about significant R&D efforts going into a "different kind of TV", and the four screen strategy Sony would like to implement. According to the report, Sony's idea is to offer small bundles of channels over the internet to its TVs, Blu-ray players, and the PS3.

Cutting deals with companies like CBS, that doesn't want to jeopardize its cable and satellite TV-based revenue, could be difficult. As for the competition, similar rumors about Microsoft turned into an effort that mostly works with partners like Comcast, U-verse, and FiOS, while Google is also pursuing a route of adding to, but not necessarily replacing, cable TV.

Sony has positioned itself well, adding IPTV services including sports to the PS3 and live TV tuning capability, and its tested the waters of going over the top before, but so far whether it will actually pursue this new plan is unknown.

COMCAST ANNOUNCES $10 INTERNET ACCESS FOR LOW INCOME FAMILIES

Cable and Internet provider Comcast is launching a new initiative aimed at bridging the digital divide, offering discounted web access and home computers to families that meet income requirements. The plan, called Internet Essentials, will be available wherever Comcast offers Internet services, which it currently does in 39 states. When the Comcast-NBC/Universal merger was approved, regulators also required the company to help low-income households get online.

The requirements the household must meet are:

• Is located where Comcast offers Internet service;
• Has at least one child eligible to receive a free school lunch under the NSLP;
• Has not subscribed to Comcast Internet service within the last 90 days;
• Does not have an overdue Comcast bill or unreturned equipment.

SMARTPHONE USERS IGNORING OTHER DEVICES TO GET ONLINE

According to Pew Research 83 percent of American adults own a cellphone, 35 percent have a smartphone, and 87 of percent smartphone owners use their handset to browse the internet and read email, apparently having decided that the things are good for more than just making phone calls and keeping papers from blowing away. Also of interest is the fact that 28 percent of the 2,277 people surveyed actually use their small screen devices as their primary method for accessing the internet.

MAJOR ISPs AGREE ON COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT ACTIONS

AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon have reached an agreement with music and movie publishers that will help enforce copyright infringement while giving the ISPs a chance to level with their customers. According to Ars Technica, copyright owners will continue to scour the dark corners of the net looking for anyone downloading and illegally sharing their content. If an IP is found to be downloading or sharing illegal content — likely via P2P networks — the music and movie companies will alert the ISP directly. ISP’s will then send a note to the offending customer, without passing off private information unless there is a court order to do so.

Users may get up to four alerts from the ISP, but after that the ISP can choose to start implementing “temporary reductions of Internet speeds, redirection to a landing page until the subscriber contacts the ISP to discuss the matter or reviews and responds to some educational information about copyright, or other measures that the ISP may deem necessary to help resolve the matter.” If a user believes he or she has been targeted without merit, an appeals process can be started for a $35 fee but, as Ars Technica notes, it’s unclear who will be the judge in that process. The six (yes, SIX!) step process is listed below.

First Alert: In response to a notice from a copyright owner, an ISP will send an online alert to a subscriber, such as an email, notifying the subscriber that his/her account may have been misused for content theft, that content theft is illegal and a violation of published policies, and that consequences could result from any such conduct. This first alert will also direct the subscriber to educational resources which will (i) help him/her to check the security of his/her computer and any Wifi network, (ii) provide explanatory steps which will help to avoid content theft in the future and (iii) provide information about the abundant sources of lawful music, film and TV content.

Second Alert: If the alleged activity persists despite the receipt of the first alert, the subscriber may get a second similar alert that will underscore the educational messages, or the ISP may in its discretion proceed to the next alert.

Third Alert: If the subscribers account again appears to have been used for content theft, he/she will receive another alert, much like the initial alerts. However, this alert will provide a conspicuous mechanism (a click-through pop-up notice, landing page, or similar mechanism) asking the subscriber to acknowledge receipt of this alert. This is designed to ensure that the subscriber is aware of the third copyright alert and reminds the subscriber that content theft conducted through their account could lead to consequences under the law and published policies.

Fourth Alert: If the subscribers account again appears to have been used for content theft, the subscriber will receive yet another alert that again requires the subscriber to acknowledge receipt.

Fifth Alert: If the subscribers account again appears to have been used for content theft, the ISP will send yet another alert. At this time, the ISP may take one of several steps, specified in its published policies, reasonably calculated to stop future content theft. These steps, referred to as Mitigation Measures, may include, for example: temporary reductions of Internet speeds, redirection to a landing page until the subscriber contacts the ISP to discuss the matter or reviews and responds to some educational information about copyright, or other measures that the ISP may deem necessary to help resolve the matter. ISPs are not obligated to impose any Mitigation Measure which would disable or be reasonably likely to disable the subscribers voice telephone service (including the ability to call 911), e-mail account, or any security or health service (such as home security or medical monitoring). The use of the mitigation measure is waivable by the ISP at this point.

Sixth Alert: Whether or not the ISP has previously waived the Mitigation Measure, if the subscribers account again appears to have been used for content theft, the ISP will send another alert and will implement a Mitigation Measure as described above. As described above, it’s likely that very few subscribers who after having received multiple alerts, will persist (or allow others to persist) in the content theft.

APPLE'S iPAD ACCOUNTS FOR 97% OF US TABLET TRAFFIC ONLINE

It's no secret that the iPad commands a serious lead in the battle for tablet mindshare, but comScore's new Device Essentials traffic-tracking service shows just how much that translates into market dominance. According to the web monitoring company, the iPad and its successor account for 89 percent of tablet internet use globally, and 97 percent here in the US. Of course, the slate segment is still young and accounts for only a tiny percentage of total traffic. And, it's worth noting, the iPad has a significant advantage in being the first to hit shelves.

ICANN APPROVES NEW TOP LEVEL DOMAINS

The Board of ICANN today gave final approval to the most dramatic change to the Internet in four decades — allowing the expansion of new Top-Level Domains (TLDs). This monumental decision will allow companies and organizations to turn their own brands into Internet domain extensions (that is .brand) or to create broad generic strings such as .CAR, .SPORTS or .BANK. ICANN's TLD expansion plan was first announced three years ago on June 26, 2008 at the 32nd ICANN Meeting in Paris. The ICANN board members voted 13 for, 1 against, 2 abstain during its 41st international meeting currently underway in Singapore.

ICANN has indicated that it anticipates between 300 and 1,000 new TLDs could be created under the new program, providing an alternative to existing TLDs such as .com or .net.

NEW RESEARCH REVEALS INTERNET AND TELCO TV ARE ERODING CABLE TV MARKET SHARE

According to new data from ABI Research, internet TV and and television services run by telecoms – such as Verizon or AT&T— are slowly eating away at cable TV’s market share. Cable TV subscriptions dropped from 72% in 2009 to 69% in 2010, and cable providers in North America and Western Europe saw the greatest subscriber losses.

Despite the customer losses, the overall pay-TV market continues to grow — there were 11.3 million new pay-TV subscribers in Q1 2011, and that the total number of subscribers is expected to exceed 759 million by the end of this year.

Cable TV is continuing to grow in Latin America, however, and penetration in Brazil is expected to reach 10% in 2011. “The emergency of digital TV in different pay-TV platforms begins to offer more choices to consumers,’ Khin Sandy Lynn, an ABI research analyst, said. “Digital terrestrial TV (DTT) channels and high definition (HDTV) channels are gaining popularity in pay-TV markets. ABI research expects that there will be more than 230 million high-definition TV subscriptions across different platforms at the end of 2011.”

NETFLIX THE LARGEST SOURCE OF INTERNET TRAFFIC IN US

Netflix video streaming is now the single largest source of peak downstream Internet traffic in the U.S., according to a new report by Sandvine. The streaming video service now accounts for 29.7 percent of peak downstream traffic, up from 21 percent last fall.

That puts Netflix above HTTP websites (18 percent), BitTorrent (11 percent), and YouTube (10 percent) as a source of downstream traffic during peak times in North America. (BitTorrent still accounts for half of all upstream traffic). As whole, “real-time entertainment” (which is mostly video streaming, but also includes streaming music) accounted for 49 percent of downstream traffic in March, 2011, versus 19 percent for P2P file sharing, and 17 percent for Web browsing.

Video files are so big that it does not take much usage for it to take over in terms of bandwidth consumed. But these numbers definitely point to a future where video accounts for more and more of the traffic on the Internet. As recently as last November, Web video alone accounted for an estimated 37 percent of Internet traffic.

But as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings points out, bandwidth to the home keeps increasing along with demand—he expects a gigabit to the home to be commonplace within ten years. As he told me earlier this month, “streaming is the core of our business,” but he also points out in the video below that most of the video to the home is cached on the edge of the network rather than going through the backbone.

US SENATOR INTRODUCES INTERNET TAX BILL

A bill called the Main Street Fairness Act, sponsored by Rep. Bill Delahunt, was introduced in the House in July of last year. The bill would allow states who are members of the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement to collect state taxes for online sales. The agreement is an attempt to simplify tax collection and administration in an effort to make the ability for online merchants to collect state taxes more realistic.

CNet is now reporting that the House bill may be getting some assistance in the Senate thanks to Dick Durbin, a senator from Illionis. Durbin plans to introduce a bill by the same name as the House bill soon after Tax Day. It’s not surprising a Senator from Illinois would be introducing such legislation. In March, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed the state’s Main Street Fairness Bill which would require any online retailer with affiliates in the state to collect state sales tax for remote purchases. As a result of the new Illinois law, Amazon killed its affiliate program in the state.

If the Main Street Fairness Act makes it to the President’s desk and is signed into law, online retailers like Amazon wouldn’t be able to avoid the collection of state taxes by simply killing affiliate programs. The bill would make tax collection for those states who are part of the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement the law of the land.

PAUL BARAN, ONE OF THE CREATORS OF THE ARPANET, DIED SATURDAY

Baran helped create the “technical underpinnings” for the Arpanet, which was the government-sponsored precursor to the Internet. Baran worked at the RAND Corporation and outlined the fundamentals for packaging data into what he called “message blocks,” or discrete bundles. These bundles were then sent on different paths around a network and reassembled at their destination, much like the idea behind Willy Wonka’s “Television Chocolate” room where you could beam a whole piece of chocolate from one end of the room in particles to the other end of the room to become a whole chocolate bar. In the tech industry though, this is known as “packet-switching.”

According to the NYT, Baran wanted to build a “distributed communications network,” which was less open to attack than conventional networks. He thought that networks should be designed with “redundant routes” so that if one path failed or was destroyed, messages could still be delivered through a similar path.

This sounded like a crazy idea, and in fact, AT&T insisted it wouldn’t work when Baran approached the company with the idea in the mid-1960s. In 1969, the Defense Departments’s Advanced Research Projects Agency built the Arpanet, which included Baran’s ideas. Packet switching is still a main part of the Internet’s internal workings.

Though Baran is often called the founding father of the Internet, he said in a 2001 interview that the “Internet is really the work of a thousand people.”

Sadly, Baran died on Saturday from complications of lung cancer.

AT&T TO IMPOSE CAPS ON DSL AND U-VERSE INTERNET

AT&T says it will implement a 150GB monthly cap on landline DSL customers and a 250GB cap on subscribers to U-Verse high speed internet starting on May 2nd. AT&T will also charge overage fees of $10 for every additional 50GB of data, with two grace periods to start out -- in other words, the third month you go over the cap is when you'll get charged. DSLReports says it has confirmation from AT&T that these rates are legitimate, and that letters will go out to customers starting March 18th.

According to AT&T the new caps will only impact two percent of consumers who use "a disproportionate amount of bandwidth," and poses the caps as an alternative to throttling transfer speeds or disconnecting excessive users from the service completely. Customers will be able to check their usage with an online tool, and get notifications when they reach 65 percent, 90 percent and 100 percent of their monthly rates.

OPERA BROWSER GETS AN OVER-17 RATING IN APP STORE; RESPONDS HUMUOROUSLY

You might not yet be aware of this, but Apple's policy towards web browsers is to treat the entire internet as their content. As a result, all browsers on the iOS App Store come with a minimum age requirement of 17 and the same rule will apply to them on the Mac App Store. Opera, the first non-native web explorer to make it in Apple's new desktop app repository is taking a humorous approach to things, with VP Jan Standal saying he's "not sure if, at that age, people are ready to use such an application. It's very fast, you know, and it has a lot of features."

All that said, Opera's willing to be reckless if you are, and will totally let you download its Mac software through its homepage -- no age or credit card checks required, though you might want to ask for your parents' permission first.

LIBYA BLOCKS FACEBOOK; INTERNET CONNECTIVITY SPOTTY

Access to social networking site Facebook was cut in the Libyan capital on Friday and access to the Internet was intermittent amid deadly anti-regime protests, computer users reported.
From early evening it was impossible to access the popular Facebook site, and connections to other sites were either very slow or not possible, they said.
The state of Internet connections in the rest of the country was not known.
The regime of Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi vowed on Friday to snuff out attempts to challenge the Libyan leader, after an opposition "day of anger" became a bloodbath.
According to reports compiled by AFP from different local sources, at least 41 people have lost their lives since demonstrations first erupted on Tuesday. [Yahoo News]

RUMOR: CLEARWIRE DITCHING RETAIL; GOING WHOLESALE ONLY

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Clearwire plans to exit the retail business and become solely a wholesale WiMax (and perhaps someday LTE) operator. An anonymous source (potentially at Sprint, who benefits the most from the news) doesn't specify when exactly this will happen, though they say the company has no plans to shut their 140 stores "at the moment." Reuters, who also spoke to two anonymous insiders, notes that Clearwire is stuck in leases so they can't cut retail presence just yet -- but they can cut advertising costs and put that money toward funding network expansion:

One of the sources said that while it would be difficult for Clearwire to get out of lease agreements for its stores it could instead pull back in areas such as advertising in order to prioritize spending on expanding its network. "It's more about not putting any more investment into areas like new ads," the person said.

That may not necessarily be a bad thing. Clearwire hasn't shown they're a particularly good retail residential ISP, their fixed service suffering from poor reviews, and their new WiMax service fairing only somewhat better, with users complaining of inconsistent coverage, signal quality issues, and random service throttling.

The move could certainly be good news for Sprint, who would then operate as the sole retail arm of the network -- something Sprint executives have preferred all along. It could also be good for Clearwire, who could now see more funding from a happier Sprint. Clearwire and Sprint's relationship had been fracturing over the last few years, with indicates that Sprint might just go ahead and build their own LTE network. Those plans could be less likely under a Clearwire LTE/Mobile WiMax wholesale model with Sprint as the primary retail player.

EGYPT BACK ONLINE!

As of 9:30am local time, two of Egypt's ISPs have turned the internet back on for the country. The Egyptian government shut down internet access after Egyptians started protesting the government en masse. The shut down affected over 80 million people in that country including news organizations. Google and Twitter did release a workaround for the five day outage, which allowed some Egyptians to at least access Twitter.

EGYPT PULLS PLUG ON INTERNET AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS DURING UNREST

In a stunning development unprecedented in the modern history of the Internet, a country of more than 80 million people has found itself almost entirely disconnected from the rest of the world.
The near-disconnection--at least one Internet provider is still online--comes after days of street protests demanding an end to nearly three decades of autocratic rule by President Hosni Mubarak. Those followed this month's revolution in Tunisia, another country with little political freedom and high levels of corruption, and reports of overnight arrests and clashes with security forces.

Jim Cowie, chief technology officer at Internet-monitoring firm Renesys, said that at approximately 2:34 p.m. PT, his company "observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet's global routing table." (See CNET's earlier coverage of network disruptions.)

"Virtually all of Egypt's Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide," Cowie wrote in a blog post this evening.

A major service provider for Egypt, Italy-based Seabone, reported that there was no Internet traffic going into or out of the country after around 2:30 p.m. PT (12:30 a.m. local time), according to an Associated Press dispatch.

Al Jazeera English reported that the Mubarak government "denied disrupting communications networks" in advance of widespread protests planned at more than 30 mosques and churches on Friday, which is a day off in Egypt with banks and many businesses closed. (A spokesman for the Egyptian embassy in Washington, D.C. also denied earlier reports that Facebook and Twitter were selectively blocked.)

While the cause of the disruption remains unknown, it seems clear that yanking Egypt's Internet addresses was a conscious decision, not the result of a fiber cut or a natural disaster. That means Egypt will be conducting a high-profile experiment in what happens when a country with a $500 billion GDP, one that's home to the pyramids and the Suez Canal, decides that Internet access should be restricted to a trickle.

That trickle can be found at the Noor Group, which appears to be the only Internet provider in Egypt that's fully functioning. (Cairo-based bloggers are speculating that its unique status grows out of its client list, which includes western firms including ExxonMobil, Toyota, Hyatt, Nestle, Fedex, Coca-Cola, and Pfizer, plus the Egyptian stock exchange.)
An analysis posted by network analyst Andree Toonk, who runs a Web site devoted to monitoring networks, shows that yesterday there were 2,903 Egyptian networks publicly accessible via the Internet. Today, there are only 327 networks.

Noor is "the only provider that doesn't seem to be impacted by this," Toonk wrote.
That's led Egyptian Internet users, at least the ones still connected, to go on Twitter to urge others to use Noor's dial-up numbers if their own network was down.

Unconfirmed reports from Egypt suggested widespread telephone outages as well. Early in the morning in Cairo, a series of complaints of mobile phone outages said Mobinil, the country's largest mobile provider, was no longer providing service. Other reports said only land lines were working. Complaints about SMS outages have become common.

There are some parallels. Wired magazine's HotWired, succeeded by Wired.com, reported in 1996 that "the U.S. government has quietly pulled the plug on Iran's Internet connection." During a state of emergency in Bangladesh in 2007, satellite providers were ordered to cease airing any news shows. And in Burma later that year, the country's ruling military junta pulled the plug on the nation's limited Internet access.

Twitter and Facebook have become effective communications tools during social unrest and protests--in Iran and Moldova, along with Tunisia and Egypt, more recently. YouTube videos, too, have documented the massive street protests in Cairo.

Egypt's Internet disruptions coincided with activist action. Anonymous, the group that launched distributed denial-of-service attacks on Web sites of financial institutions and others opposing WikiLeaks last year, released a video in which it threatened to launch DoS attacks on Egyptian government Web sites if the authorities did not curtail censorship efforts. Earlier today, five people were arrested in the U.K. in connection with those attacks.

The threats weren't necessary. Egypt's new firewall has brought down almost every entry on a list of the 25 most popular Web sites in the country, including egypt.gov.eg, presidency.gov,eg, and cabinet.gov.eg. The exceptions are ones like jeep.com.eg, which are hosted in the United States. The Web site for the U.S. Embassy in Egypt was unreachable.

In a YouTube interview today, President Obama stressed that Mubarak has "been an ally of ours on a lot of critical issues" and has "been very helpful on a range of tough issues in the Middle East." Obama added, however, that political reform "is absolutely critical to the long-term well-being of Egypt."

Egypt receives over $1.3 billion annually from U.S. taxpayers in the form of military aid, according to the U.S. State Department. [CNet]

GOOGLE RELEASES CHILDREN'S BOOK ON BROWSERS AND THE WEB FOR FREE

Wondering how to explain the brave new world of Web 2.0 and HTML5 to your children… or simply want to correct your own childlike understanding of how the internet works? Search giant Google has just the picture book for you… and best of all, it’s both free and charming.

The book is called 20 Things I Learned About Browsers And The Web

Sure, we all use the internet every day, and most of us are pretty astute with it… but it’s surprising how little many know about the inner workings of the web behinds its various sites and interfaces.

As such, 20 Things I Learned About Browsers And The Web is a breath of fresh air, offering eminently understandable primers about HTML, Javascript and Ajax. It’s also a future-looking book, spelling out many of the developments we can expect next from both browsers and web apps. Even security, privacy, open source and design are touched upon.

The book reads like a picture book written as a Christmas present from the Google Chrome team to its children, and in fact it is: the collective Chrome team is the book’s author, and we — the users — are their children. [Geek]

iOS 4.2 DELAYED DUE TO WIFI ISSUES

On November 1st Apple released a pre-release build of iOS 4.2 for developers. It didn’t take long for complaints to start rolling in about an issue with Wi-Fi using the new build. Basically, it wasn’t working correctly and users were finding it difficult to get a connection that allowed access to the Internet. A connection to a network is found, but then either doesn’t allow web browsing or disconnects itself after a few minutes.

Roll on to today, when iOS 4.2 final was expected, and it’s nowhere to be seen. It looks as though Apple has delayed it in order to figure out what’s causing the Wi-Fi issue.

iOS 4.2 may get a new release date next week, but it could be two weeks before it becomes available and another pre-release version is released in the interim. It’s the right thing to do as Apple don’t want millions of iPad owners complaining they don’t have access to the web after updating. [Geek]

HOW GOOGLE TV WORKS

Wonder how Google TV works or even what it is?  Check out the video below for a great demonstration of the service at the Sony event held yesterday.

In a nutshell, Google TV is the full internet experience on your TV (hopefully it's an HDTV), without having to leave the program you are watching.  It allows you to access the internet, twitter, Google maps and any other website without hooking up a PC or changing inputs.  Google TV will be directly integrated into some Sony TV models as well as set-top boxes from Logitech and others and some Sony Blu-ray players. [Geek]

DROPBOX UPDATES MOBILE APPS

Dropbox the internet syncing service has updated it's mobile apps.  You can now use Dropbox on the iPhone, iPad, Android or Blackberry devices.  Dropbox also noted that there are over two million mobile users are now using Dropbox on their mobile devices and over 100 million mobile applications are using the Dropbox API. [BGR]