Like a relay race, some Internet commerce plans get handed off a few times before they cross the line to become real businesses.

For Alan Bell, opting for an Internet phone service allowed him to move his retail auditing firm from Plant City, Fla., to nearby Tampa.

Web companies doing business with Californians are beholden to a new state law protecting consumer privacy, and industry executives believe many sites have yet to comply.

Regulators from about 60 countries began a meeting at the UN's top telecommunications agency to try to stop the growing tide of unsolicited e- mails or "spam" that threaten to drive users and businesses off the Internet.

Although he's been called the Spam King, been labeled one of the most prolificspammersin the world by Spamhaus's Registry of Known Spam Operations, and been sued for spamming, Scott Richter calls his business electronic marketing. His company, OptInRealBig.com, sends more than 100 million e-mail messages every day. He is settlinga lawsuitfiled against him by Microsoft and the New York State Attorney General. An edited transcript of PC World's conversation with Richter follows.

The hottest political news of the summer arrived on a tide of spam Tuesday morning as Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry sent an e-mail announcing Sen. John Edwards would be his running mate.

Students are giving file sharing -- downloading music, movies and television shows from the Internet -- the old college try once again. But now it's at blazing speeds.

More than 15,000 people will converge on Boston later this month to cover the Democratic National Convention -- including, for the first time, bloggers.

When everything is working right, an e-mail message appears to zip instantaneously from the sender to the recipient's inbox. But in reality, most messages make several momentary stops as they are processed by various computers en route to their destination.

In the age of instantaneous Internet downloads, music fans have more to consider than just the name of the artist when they buy a recording.