Web pundits today are left wondering what if any affect the reinstatement of Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang will have on the beleaguered Web giant. Just about everyone agrees that Terry Semel had to go-"The short answer is he screwed up," Wired said of the company's former chief. "During his six years as CEO, he let his principal competitor, Google, grow from a pipsqueak into a giant." It's a little unfair to compare Google to Yahoo. Google makes money like an old-fashioned media company: It's core mission is to provide an outlet for content--in this case, the Web's content. So …

Google is pushing the boundaries of established privacy law. It contends there is nothing evil about its patent disregard of copyright law or its growing data bank of information about its millions of users. Indeed, its hulking legal team says Google is prepared for the Big Fight against Big, Bad Old Law. Google maintains that it stands for freedom and un-evilness. "As a leading company" being the focus of the privacy and patent law debates is "an appropriate role for us to play," says Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel. Google's intentions may be becoming more and more inscrutable, …

More frequently, we're seeing apocalyptic stories about cybercrime, net neutrality/censorship, and today, the looming Internet capacity threat. YouTube and other bandwidth-sucking streaming video and music providers might soon bring the Web to a standing halt, as the flood of data exchanged across the Internet increases and the capacity of "the pipes" do not. A current report says there's been more high-speed fiber optic cable laid than we currently need, but at the end of the day, it's about routers being able to handle billions of bits of information. Meanwhile, the heavy demand on router links grows, and if …

Social networks are now being affected by competition from aggregators. Sound familiar? The aggregation threat always seems to loom over Web content providers, and now, niche social networks are already being linked together through a series of startup aggregators. MyLifeBrand, ProfileLinker, Open ID, OtherEgo and Profilatic are all out to simplify the social-networking experience--both for consumers and marketers, which would rather make one big-buy at the same place to reach specified consumers. MySpace and Facebook aside (which tend to deliver reliable traffic) there are hundreds of social networks on the Web involved in the revolving door of "who's …

Commendable though it is, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's effort to warn more than 1 million computer owners whose PCs are being remotely controlled by "bot herders" amount to a ripple in a vast ocean of cybercrime. However, if the FBI makes enough arrests, perhaps it will prevent hackers from engaging in the malicious practice. The federal organization is known to be working on five cybercrime cases, yielding the 1 million victims and three arrests so far. Despite the FBI's good work, notifying the 1 million customers is going to be far trickier than it sounds, because Internet Service …

eBay's defensive tactics against Google probably have something to do with its flagging U.S. auctions business. In the latest quarter, eBay's net U.S. revenue from auctions was up just 1%, while listings volume was down 3.8%from last year. Analysts put this down to eBay.com's longstanding clutter/interface problem, while stiffer e-commerce competition has made it difficult for the maturing Web giant to grow. However, at the "eBay Live" conference there were some significant changes, including a new interface, a more predictive/personalized way to deliver search results and a decrease in fees for certain services and shipping charges using UPS. …

The San Francisco Chronicle has more on the about-face in partner relations between eBay and Google. The online auctioneer on Wednesday pulled all of its advertising from Google's U.S. network (eBay is Google's largest buyer of AdWords). The move was seen as punishment for Google trying to rain on eBay's user conference in Boston by throwing a counter launch party for its Google Checkout sellers. Checkout is a direct competitor of EBay's PayPal. Childish? Probably. And probably Google's fault for lowering the competition bar to a popularity contest. Either way, Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Derek Brown says, "We've seen that the …

It seems that talk of a bubble necessarily follows the emergence of any new Internet phenomenon these days. The social networking bubble was followed by the online video bubble, which was followed by a general venture capital/private-equity-led Web 2.0 bubble. Now we may be heading into a virtual world bubble. Watch, a widget bubble will be next. Mind you, none of the other "bubbles" burst. There's been consolidation and shakeout, but nothing so massive as to affect an otherwise robust Internet media economy. Talk of a bubble is almost always an offshoot of a category receiving tremendous growth with …

Last month's spate of advertising acquisitions by major Web firms and ad-holding companies has created a pile of work for the Federal Trade Commission. While Google-DoubleClick, the first such announcement, is still receiving the third degree, the FTC this week approved ad giant WPP Group's proposed acquisition of interactive ad serving giant 24/7 Real Media. Per the Hart-Scott-Rodino antitrust act, which requires government approval of mergers and acquisitions that could significantly affect competition in a given industry, the FTC will next shift its focus to two other major proposals: Microsoft's $6 billion bid for aQuantive, and Yahoo's $680 million …

Legions of dreamy-eyed entrepreneurs gathered at the Facebook Developer's Meetup, looking to develop the next big thing for the social network. The mood could best be summed up by the appearance of one entrepreneur who wrote, "I NEED an APP" on his nametag. Existing Web companies were also looking to develop Facebook apps, hoping to capitalize on the social network's 25 million-plus user base. All this made talented Web developers a particularly hot commodity. "It's fantastic," said developer Nathan Freitas. Freitas is far from alone in his enthusiasm of Facebook's decision to completely open its social network to third-party …