Easy, cheap access to broadband has been central to the Internet industry's rapid economic growth, but it's not getting any easier for competitors to enter the U.S. market, which means it's not getting any cheaper for consumers. Meanwhile, the U.S. also languishes mid-table among the rich OECD countries in terms of broadband speed. Japan is the undisputed leader with an average download speed of 95 megabits per second. France and South Korea are second and third, respectively, with speeds that are less than half as fast. Why the vast difference in speeds? In the U.S. "a lack of …

Google philanthropy guru Larry Brilliant laid out his strategy for Google.org, the company's massive philanthropy initiative. It's an interesting one, too, because unlike, say the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google.org will pursue for-profit ventures in addition to charitable ones. The project is funded by 1 percent of the company's equity, annual profits and employee time. Dr. Brilliant became head of the project in February 2006. Described as an old hippy whose colourful past includes a stint as doctor of the Grateful Dead, Brilliant also has a history of running Silicon Valley tech firms and solving big-scale social …

"Webolution" will no doubt be one of the most closely watched panels at this year's Sundance Film Festival as the independent film industry struggles to tackles the prospect of reinventing itself through the Web. That struggle is best exemplified by the festival's own online offerings, which have been slashed this year, even as video takes off on popular sites like YouTube and MySpace. Indeed, the so-called "Webolution" has been a slow go for smaller video providers like Veoh and Joost (both are panelists) that offer professional and amateur content. While the writer's strike and subsequent lack of new original …

China will soon pass the United States as the nation with the most Internet users, according to figures released by the China Internet Network Information Center. The state-controlled entity said the total number of Internet users in China soared 53 percent to 210 million at the end of 2007, up from 137 million at the end of '06. China is now just 5 million short of passing the U.S.-who wants to bet that it's already done so? This means China continues to be a massive growth area for multinational Web companies like Google and Yahoo that have set …

According to leaked documents, Time Warner's cable distributor, Time Warner Cable, is considering changing its ISP service to so-called "metered" access. Metered access, in which consumers pay for the bandwidth they consume, is a fact of life for many Web users across the globe. A memo leaked to the Broadband Reports forum shows that Time Warner will roll out what it calls "Consumption Based Billing" on a trial basis in the Beaumont, Texas, region. The payment lets consumers choose from a variety of plans that contain different bandwidth caps. The services provide tools to monitor online usage …

Google and other search engines may cede ad revenue to Facebook and Bebo as marketers devote more of their budgets to social networking, says a new study from the UK. The "Impact of Social Networking in the UK" report from Web measurement firm Hitwise claims that 2008 will see social networks improve their monetization, particularly with regard to search. It makes sense: social networks know more about their users than traditional search engines, which rely on user history to target ads. The information, which is served up by the users themselves, could command higher ad rates than …