A deeply divided Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 on Tuesday to enact net neutrality rules that prohibit wireline providers from blocking or degrading traffic. The FCC's vote split along party lines with the Democrats supporting the order as necessary to preserve the Web's historic openness to consumers, engineers and innovators, while the two Republicans dissented from the order, arguing both that regulation is unnecessary and that the FCC had exceeded its authority. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in his prepared remarks that the rules were needed to preserve the Internet's historic openness. "Today, for the first time, we are adopting rules to preserve basic Internet values," he said. "For the first time, we'll have enforceable rules of the road to preserve Internet freedom and openness." The exact text of the rules has not yet been made available. But Genachowski described the order as banning wireline providers from engaging in "unreasonable discrimination," which he said can include paid prioritization agreements for fast-lane treatment for certain types of content. "We are making clear that we are not approving so-called 'pay for priority' arrangements involving fast lanes for some companies but not others," he said. "The order states that as a general rule such arrangements won't satisfy the no-unreasonable-discrimination standard -- because it simply isn't consistent with an open Internet for broadband providers to skew the marketplace by favoring one idea or application or service over another by selectively prioritizing Internet traffic." The order also prohibits wireless providers from blocking sites or competing applications, but doesn't prohibit wireless carriers from creating fast lanes for companies that pay extra. Democrats Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn voted with Genachowski, though both expressed the view that neutrality rules should apply equally to mobile providers. Copps also said he unsuccessfully urged the FCC to reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service, subject to common carrier regulations. Republican Commissioners Robert McDowell and Meredith Attwell Baker sharply criticized the new rules. "Not only is today the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year, but it marks one of the darkest days in recent FCC history," McDowell said in his prepared dissent. He said he opposed regulating the Web at this time for several reasons, including that "nothing is broken in the Internet access market that needs fixing." Baker added that the FCC's order focuses on preserving the status quo, which, she said, will "distort tomorrow's Internet." Both McDowell and Baker said that the new regulations are vulnerable to a court challenge, given that an appellate court ruled earlier this year that the FCC had no authority to enforce neutrality principles because broadband access is regulated as an "information service" rather than a telecommunications service. Some net neutrality advocates criticized the rules as weak and loophole-filled, but others said that Tuesday's vote marked a good first step. Free Press said it was "deeply disappointed" with the rules, which would allow wireless providers to prioritize traffic. Public Knowledge's president Gigi Sohn, however, called the order "a step forward, but not as large a step as it could have been." Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said he has "real reservations about treating wireless broadband differently from wired broadband," but nonetheless called the FCC's vote "a meaningful step forward." Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) likewise said the order "falls short" for treating wireless and wireline broadband differently. "In some areas of the Order, the FCC gets high letter grades, but in others, the agency gets an incomplete," he said in a statement. Comcast, meanwhile, which was sanctioned by the FCC in 2008 for violating neutrality principles by throttling peer-to-peer traffic, praised the rules as a "workable compromise." Executive President David Cohen said in a blog post that the rules "generally appear intended to strike a workable balance between the needs of the marketplace for certainty and everyone's desire that Internet openness be preserved."
Don't call it a social play, but AOL has acquired personal profile network About.me. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but they must be modest -- considering that the startup literally launched less than a week ago. Quite simply, About.me lets anyone quickly build a personal "splash page," including a profile, email address, and links to online channels from Facebook and LinkedIn to Flickr and Twitter. "About.me is one of those 'duh, why hasn't someone done that' type of ideas," according to founder Tony Conrad. "While a simple concept, it's clear that it has struck a nerve given the accelerating adoption." Indeed, since the site began letting people reserve personalized urls back in September - for example, say, about.me/john -- over 400,000 sites have been created, TechCrunch reported earlier this week. A serial entrepreneur, Conrad actually sold his last company, search service Sphere, to AOL in 2008. Still, might it have been wise for About.me to remain independent for just a little while longer? Say, for two weeks? Not at all, insists Conrad. "We are joining Aol at an opportune time," he said in a blog post. "Aol is doing what great, sustainable business do every so often -- they're reinventing themselves. As the business model of the oldest and one of the most venerable Internet businesses evolves, about.me becomes an important piece of their strategy to reach across and engage the web." According to Conrad, About.me will fall under the direction of Brad Garlinghouse, president of Consumer Applications at AOL. "We think it's a huge advantage to ... become part of a suite of communication (AIM, Aol Mail) and community driven (Patch, Seed) services," said Conrad. "This is truly a win-win for our users, investors, team and Aol." Prior to AOL stepping in, the company had raised a reported $425,000 in angel funding. Amid a rapidly evolving digital landscape, AOL has pursued an aggressive acquisition strategy over the past year. In November, AOL said it had spent $97 million during the third quarter to buy tech blog network TechCrunch, social media startup Thing Labs, and mostly, online video distributor 5min Media. Earlier this year, AOL launched its social networking aggregator Lifestream as a stand-alone product. Lifestream lets users view status messages and posts from "friends" on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, YouTube and other popular platforms as a single stream. As a stand-alone service, Lifestream added updates from Foursquare and MySpace.
eBay unveiled the local shopping tool GiftsNearby Tuesday, allowing last-minute shoppers to search for products online and then pick them up in brick-and-mortar stores. The site shows consumers in real-time a list of categories, products, stores, prices and availability through technology it acquired for $75 million from the search engine Milo.com earlier this month. GiftsNearby supports the top 25 national retailers such as Target, Sears and RadioShack. Best Buy inked a deeper integration with eBay, allowing consumers to reserve and purchase the gift online, and then skip the lines by picking the item up at their local store. Consumers also earn eBay Bucks, the company's rewards points. The site, which lets consumers search on 70 popular retail brands, runs through the end of the year and will likely morph into something else. Engineers at eBay continue to integrate features like keyword search, but it's not clear how the next iteration will appear. "This is one of our first experimentations," says Christopher Payne, head of eBay North America. "The current iteration will not be available, but the concept will remain." So, the eBay team will work through 2011 to determine what the finished product will become. Most of the categories today center around consumer electronics such as video game consoles, digital cameras, power tools, video recorders, and televisions. The Consumer Electronics subcategory drew 53.3 million visitors in November to Web sites -- up 30% compared with the prior month, according to comScore. BestBuy.com led the category with 27.4 million visitors during the month, up 84% versus October. Buy.com rose 9% to rank second with 4.6 million visitors; followed by RadioShack with 4.6 million visitors, up 68%; eBay Electronics with 4.3 million, up 21%; Samsung Group with 3.5 million, up 74%; and Sony Electronics with 3.4 million, up 83%, according to comScore. eBay also added the comparison shopping tool into its barcode scanning application RedLaser for iPhone and Android, Payne says. "Sometimes you just need to have the gift now and we want to meet that need," he says. "Local commerce is intersecting with ecommerce and it's creating a lot of opportunities to empower consumers." Payne says success will come from eBay's ability to drive foot traffic into brick-and-mortar stores through sites like GiftsNearby and mobile phone apps. The company has long been known for "ubiquitous selection and choice." Years ago, technologists thought this type of service required technologies such as radio frequency identification (RFID) or near field communication technologies (NFC), but the back-end infrastructure of the Web has come together to make it a reality sooner rather than later.
With a round of layoffs cutting 4% of staff, ongoing executive turnover, and confusion over different properties being shut down, Yahoo isn't exactly ending the year on a high note. But the embattled Web portal did get a glint of good news Tuesday with the latest comScore figures showing that Yahoo in November displaced arch rival Google as the most popular U.S. Web site for the first time since August. Yahoo last month drew about 181 million unique visitors, just ahead of Google's 179 million. Microsoft was third with 176 million, followed by Facebook's 152 million, and AOL's 114 million. The fact is, Yahoo and Google have been in a virtual dead heat in the last several months, with the search giant in October edging out Yahoo, 181 million to 180 million. Still, at least until next month, Yahoo has bragging rights as the Web's No. 1 site. With the start of the holiday shopping season in November, comScore also took a closer look at e-commerce-related traffic trends online. In that vein, coupons were the top-gaining site category last month, with visits surging 40% from October, followed by jewelry/luxury goods, up 36%, toys, 35%, consumer electronics, 30%, and department stores, 25%. When it came to the fastest-growing sites month-over-month, Best Buy led the way with a 75% traffic gain followed by ShopLocal.com (72%), ToysRUs (71%), FrostWire (70%), and BearShare.com (67%). Hot group-buying site Groupon had a 54% increase in November, with its audience growing to nearly 10 million. Within the retail category, Amazon attracted the biggest online crowd, with 84 million unique visitors last month, up 4% from the prior month. The total traffic of 179.5 million heading to retail sites in November was an all-time high. comScore has predicted an 11% increase in holiday e-commerce spending this year to $32.4 billion. Read more here.
Sony Pictures Television on Tuesday debuted its online platform for Latin America, featuring a new tool for advertisers to integrate their products to an array of online video content. "Advertisers will now have the opportunity to connect their brand with rich engaging content," said Irving Plonskier, SVP and general manager of Sony Pictures Television ad sales for Latin America. The new online division will be led by Juan Carlos Sanchez, ad sales business development director at SPT Ad Sales Latin America. Like most media companies, SPT recognizes the growing prominence of Web content worldwide. Indeed, according to a recent Nielsen report, 70% of the world's consumers spent time watching online videos in March. To get in on the action, SPT is pursuing a strategy that hinges on original Web series, which seek to attract advertisers with the promise of presenting their products through video pre-rolls and post-rolls -- between five and thirty seconds. "We've noticed an increasing trend by Latin American consumers, even more than in Europe and the USA, in repeatedly going to the Internet in search of high-quality entertainment videos," added Plonskier. "This phenomenon has created a direct and sophisticated alternate point of contact between brands and consumers." The first miniseries that SPT will launch online is "Urban Wolf," with 15 four-minute episodes targeting males between 18 and 34 years of age. "Private" -- another of SPT's new miniseries, created by the producers of "Gossip Girl" -- has 20 webisodes which last between four and six minutes each, and targets females between 18 and 24 years of age. SPT's third digital production available to advertisers is the Video Game Awards, which profiles talent, musical interpretations, and international Web and TV debuts, and recognizes the best games and the creators that make them happen. Marketing partners include Ford, Telcel, and Sony Electronics.