KlearGear, the online retailer that gained notoriety after charging a married couple $3,500 for writing a bad review, failed to appear in court to defend itself on allegations that it violated fair credit laws. As a result, a federal judge found the retailer had "defaulted."

Last year, around 3.9 million Web users visited the Network Advertising Initiative's opt-out site, where they can opt out of receiving "interest-based" ads, according to the group's annual compliance report. Of those people, more than 600,000 opted out, says Marc Groman, executive director of the group. The NAI also reported that, for the most part, its members opt-outs worked as intended. While the group's automated crawler found some glitches, they were resolved within 24 hours.

Now that the Federal Communications Commission has said it will consider passing new net neutrality rules, various groups are starting to weigh in with comments. Among them is the longtime neutrality supporter Writers Guild of America East. That group warned today that rules against blocking and discrimination "are essential to maintaining the Internet as a place of innovation and access."

No one should be able to create a Web site that ends with the term ".sucks," the head of the Senate Commerce Committee said on Wednesday. Such a top-level domain "has little or no socially redeeming value," Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said Wednesday in a letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. He adds that allowing people to use ".sucks" as a top-level domain -- meaning the letters to the right of the last dot in a site's URL -- would subject companies to shakedowns.

CBS chief Les Moonves suggested today that the company could move to a Web-only model, if Aereo prevails at the Supreme Court. "If Aereo ... can win, which we don't think they can, we can go OTT," he reportedly said, referring to "over-the-top" Internet television. "If the government wants to give them permission to steal our signal, we will find another way to get them our content and get paid for it."

Streaming television service Aereo has been forced to shut down -- at least for now -- in Salt Lake City and Denver. A panel of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals said on Friday that it voted 2-1 to preserve an earlier ruling shuttering the service down in six western states. The move means that Aereo can't continue to stream TV shows in those states, including Colorado and Utah, where it had already signed up thousands of subscribers.

A lawsuit against Instagram stemming from a highly publicized revision to the company's terms of service has hit a dead end. The case, brought by Instagram user Lucy Rodriguez, was dismissed last week by a California state court judge. The move appears to put an end to the fallout from Instagram's December 2012 decision to change its terms.

For three years now, Google has been defending itself from accusations that it violates people's privacy by scanning Gmail messages in order to serve ads. Now, that high-profile case has sparked a new battle -- one that could be as significant as the original case about Gmail ads.

Liberation Music has agreed to pay monetary damages to Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who sued the company for demanding that YouTube remove one of his lectures.

TV broadcasters' arguments against Aereo could end up setting back cloud computing, a coalition of trade groups and the Center for Democracy & Technology warn in new court papers.