Google may be in legal trouble again. The search giant may be violating European Union law by storing information on its customers' queries for as long as two years. After a stretch of high-profile acquisitions, all the big Web firms, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, have come under scrutiny for the way they capture user-surfing information. EU regulators last week suggested such practices might violate civil liberties. "Google may have initiated personalization efforts which are more advanced in some ways, but it's an industrywide issue," said Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence in Oakland, California. …

Cyberattacks are possibly even scarier than terrorist attacks, because so many people can be affected by the efforts of so few. Last month, Estonia, one of the European Union's most promising emerging economies, got its first big taste of this, as protesters organized a massive attack, flooding government, newspapers and banking Web sites with data, effectively shutting many down. The cyberattack came in retaliation for the Estonian government's decision to relocate a Russian World War II-era statue. Estonia is a former member of the Soviet Union. The Times noted that "for people here, the Internet is almost as vital …

Facebook just took giant steps toward expanding into a global technology company. The social network's decision to extend its technology platform to software developers should "create a raft of new opportunities for companies of all sizes," Kirkpatrick says, because it now allows anyone to build applications for social computing. In conjunction with the announcement, Facebook announced that 65 partner companies were unveiling more than 85 applications its members could install immediately. Sounding Google-like, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said "we want to make Facebook into something of an operating system, so you can run full applications" similar to how Microsoft's Windows …

Why are Google, Yahoo and Microsoft putting money and resources behind online ad exchanges? Yahoo recently purchased Right Media, while Google, pending approval, will acquire DoubleClick, which announced it would offer its own ad exchange shortly before the Google deal. Online ad exchanges aim to bring ad buyers and sellers together into an open marketplace where unsold publisher inventory is assigned a value based on advertisers' interest. Advertisers set the price they're willing to pay for the spot, then the exchange notifies the publisher, which will run the spot if the price meets publisher expectation. By bringing together a …

As promised, MTV Networks is developing several more virtual worlds as part of its bold strategy to capitalize on its more popular brands. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Internet Conference in Las Vegas, MTVN Global Digital Media President Mika Salmi pointed to the company's more than 230 microsites containing TV, games and other forms of content, saying it would add more virtual worlds for its shows and different music genres. He added that MTV next plans to integrate users' avatars into TV shows. MTVN already has five virtual worlds, including one tied to the hit show "Laguna Beach" and another …

CNN is ditching the idea of charging a subscription fee for its CNN Pipeline video news service, which will now be absorbed into a newly designed Internet package. Launched in late 2005, the $25-per-year service (which was later $2.95 per month and $.99 per day), provides four streams of video with footage of breaking news. The international news service doesn't say how many subscribers Pipeline has, but on its best day--the fifth anniversary of 9/11--Pipeline pulled in 1.2 million viewers, a day when Pipeline was free. With Pipeline, CNN planned to reach American office workers who check news periodically …

Newspaper companies love to hate Google's article aggregation and search site Google News. On the one hand, the free service drives traffic to their sites. On the other, Google News displays articles from just about every news outlet, so a newspaper company's work can easily get lost in the glut of information. Also, they have no control over how the news service ranks stories. Two years ago, the French news agency Agence France Presse and later, Belgium's Copiepresse, sued Google for copyright infringement for indexing their content without permission. Google contended--and lost in EU court--that Google News is …

Facebook on Thursday said it was opening its social-networking platform to allow software developers to create programs within the social network and to allow independents to use Facebook's template as a launch pad for their own social media services. To be sure, it's a bold, open source-like move to Facebook, already the sixth most-visited site on the Web with 24 million monthly unique users. Last year, Facebook opened up its site to users of all ages. At the product's unveiling, "a carefully orchestrated event with more the air of a college job recruiting fair than a trade show," per …

During its first quarter earnings call on Tuesday, Anheuser Busch, the nation's largest brewery and one of the globe's largest ad spenders, said the company would begin slashing costs, starting with superfluous marketing expenses like the branded entertainment site Bud.TV. AB said Bud.TV would "probably fade a bit" this year in response to weak demand and rising costs for manufacturing its beverages. The beer maker spent more than $12 million to create 2,000 minutes worth of proprietary content on the branded site. Since the site's launch on Super Bowl Sunday in early February, Bud.TV has been met with …

Microsoft chief advertising strategist Yusuf Mehdi on Wednesday put the stop to rumors linking Microsoft to a potential Yahoo acquisition. Earlier this week, financial and Web industry analysts surmised that Microsoft would make a move for the Sunnyvale, Calif. Web giant following its $6 billion acquisition of the interactive ad holding firm aQuantive, in order to better compete with Google in online content and advertising services. "We think we have all of the pieces to reach our target," Mehdi said, though he added that smaller acquisitions are a possibility, which would rule out Yahoo. The Web giant's current …