As industry executives convened in Washington, D.C. last week to debate whether behavioral targeting techniques violate privacy, Facebook was prepping a new initiative that makes anxieties about serving people ads based on their surfing history appear almost quaint.

It's no exaggeration to say the music industry is eagerly awaiting the results of Radiohead's decision to let consumers decide how much, if anything, to pay for the group's latest album. Now, preliminary results in from comScore show that about six in 10 downloaders didn't pay anything for the album since it was made available online on Oct. 10.

When Universal Music Group filed suit against MySpace last year for copyright infringement, the legal move had some unexpected ramifications.

Call it "Disclosure 2.0." That's the term Internet guru Esther Dyson used today to describe a new type of privacy notice that might be coming to the online marketing world.

The Center for Digital Democracy and U.S. Public Interest Research Group renewed their call for an investigation into behavioral targeting this morning, filing a supplement to their year-old FTC complaint.

This morning, a coalition of privacy advocates led by the Center for Democracy & Technology formally took on the behavioral targeting industry with a proposal for a so-called do-not-track list.

Just a few weeks ago, the prospect of new legislation enshrining net neutrality principles looked dim. But recent revelations about Internet service providers appear to have rallied the pro-net-neutrality forces.

The RIAA won a minor skirmish in its war against piracy late last week, when a federal district judge in Knoxville ordered the University of Tennessee to turn over the name of a student whose computer allegedly was used to share files.

Infamous adware purveyor Direct Revenue appears to have shuttered for good. Visitors to the Web page of its most recent brand, BestOffersNetworks.com, are now being greeted with the message that Direct Revenue has ceased operations. The page also offers instructions for removing the company's software, which serves pop-up ads to people as they surf the Web.

Verizon Wireless this week agreed to pay $1 million to settle an investigation by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo about the company's practice of cutting off consumers who made "excessive" use of their supposedly unlimited Web access plans.