By the time Microsoft Corp. settled its antitrust case with the U.S. Justice Department, the Internet browser war that precipitated it had already been fought - with Microsoft the victor.

Web surfers may be able to talk to their computers one day using a browser announced Tuesday by Opera Software.

America Online announced Monday that Ronning Lipset Radio, a New York-based sales firm, will sell audio ad spots for its 175 online radio stations. "The growth of Internet radio in the past year has been explosive. It is quickly becoming the soundtrack to our members' online experience," said Evan Harrison, vice president and general manager of AOL Music, a subsidiary of the Time Warner unit, in a statement.

My first thought is about vendors. Specifically, about the relationship between those of us who work at media agencies and those people we call our vendors. We media people need vendors. We rely on vendors. We couldn't do our jobs without vendors. Yet too often we don't treat those vendors very well. At all.

Microsoft confirmed on Monday that it will offer live audio and video of Major League Baseball games onto PCs, heightening competition with rival RealNetworks and signaling rising costs for online video programming.

In six short years, two Stanford grad students turned a simple idea into a multibillion-dollar phenomenon and changed our lives. Now competitors are searching for a way to dethrone the latest princes of the Net.

Is the Google bubble over before it even began? Even before Google Inc. reaches its hotly anticipated initial public offering, the Web's top search portal finds itself facing tougher competition from both deep-pocketed rivals and an upstart, Linux-like cooperative. It also faces skepticism from potential investors who worry that expectations for Google have outrun the reality of a more competitive market.

In an effort to make it easier for consumers to distinguish between advertisements and listings ranked by popularity on search results pages, Microsoft plans to unveil a new face on search this July. Microsoft's MSN will no longer give Yahoo's Overture listings a significant presence on the left-hand side of search results pages, said Lisa Gurry, director of MSN, in an interview with CBS MarketWatch.

A Southern California computer programmer was charged Friday with attempting to blackmail Web-search company Google Inc. for $100,000 by threatening to unleash a software program that would disrupt a lucrative Google advertising program, potentially costing the company millions of dollars.

For nearly a decade, American movie theater owners have been talking about the money-making potential of new digital theater, but the only hard numbers they saw were about costs, not profits. Now, Regal Entertainment Group, the No. 1 movie theater chain in the United States, says it has changed that with its own digital content network.