The Department of Justice on Wednesday said the Web's big three--Microsoft, Google and Yahoo--agreed to a settlement worth $31.5 million for promoting illegal gambling on their sites. The Web giants were charged with selling advertising to online gambling companies promoting illegal betting from 1997 to 2007. Per the settlement, the companies will have to devote millions to public service ads telling people that online gambling is illegal. Online gambling is illegal in the United States, but not in most of the rest of the world. In 2006, the U.S. dealt a harsh blow to offshore gaming companies by …

By a 4-1 vote, the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday finally approved Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of ad-serving giant DoubleClick, nearly eight months after the companies initially agreed to the deal. The commission decided that Google and DoubleClick "are not direct competitors in any relevant antitrust market." Dissenting Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour issued a separate statement, saying she voted no "because I make alternate predictions about where this market is heading, and the transformative role the combined Google/DoubleClick will play if the proposed acquisition is consummated." The first major hurdle now cleared, GoogleClick must await the …

NetSuite, a software venture from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, goes public today in a Dutch-style initial public offering that could raise nearly $161 million, which would give NetSuite a market value of more than $1.5 billion. The software maker will sell 6.2 million shares, approximately 10 percent of the company. Its target price is $26 per share, which had been raised twice in the lead-up to today's IPO. NetSuite's offering will be one of the year's most closely watched, due the overall economic climate and the lack of tech IPOs in recent years. It also comes at time when …

The FCC on Tuesday unveiled the names of those who plan to bid on the 700 MHz spectrum that goes up for auction on January 24. Google was among the 266 companies named, along with big phone companies like AT&Y and Verizon Wireless. Other interesting bidders are Vulcan Spectrum, a company started by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Cablevision, EchoStar and Qualcomm. Everyone will be watching Google, which wants the ability to offer its Android operating system to mobile users cheaply or even, for free, but Qualcomm's participation is particularly interesting, given that the telecom giant already owns …

The gloves are off as Google and Microsoft slug it out for control of several booming Web sectors, from online applications to advertising services, but lost somewhere in the middle of this epic battle is Yahoo, the Web's No. 2 player. Yesterday's "round-tripping" announcement of a $500 million partnership between Microsoft and Viacom should squeeze Yahoo even further. The Sunnyvale Calif. Web company, the largest seller of display ads, should have been in this fight, but it was not mentioned once. Chalk it up as a big loss for Yahoo to have not even been considered, especially …

Due to the ongoing strike over new media revenue and other issues of compensation, the Writers Guild of America, West, has forbidden its members from writing for either the Golden Globes on Jan. 13 or the Academy Awards on Feb. 24, an unnamed source told the Associated Press. The board's decision came in spite of a request from the academy to make a dispensation for both events. The strike is now in its seventh week and doesn't look any closer to being resolved. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers is accusing the guild of trying to …

Facebook on Tuesday settled a legal dispute with an Indiana woman who claimed the social-networking giant had been profiting from text messages it was sending her after she had assumed the former number of a Facebook member. In the suit, plaintiff Lindsay Adams said she was forced to pay 10 cents for receiving SMS messages directed at somebody else containing "explicit comments and other upsetting content." Facebook received a share of those fees, according to the complaint. Abrams said she started receiving the messages shortly after getting a new mobile number from Verizon Wireless. Abrams' lawyers had …

The proliferation of widgets, or embeddable software applications, was arguably the story of 2007. CNET reviews how widgets are changing the way people interact with the Web and what the innovation means for advertisers. Facebook really opened a can of worms in May when the company said it would let third parties develop programs specifically for its Web site. The innovation greatly enhanced the social networking giant's popularity, leading to similar vein announcements from rivals like MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo, Google and even mobile carriers like Verizon Wireless. Brand marketers are jumping on the widget-making bandwagon. The potential for …