E-Commerce

Google is tightening its copyright and piracy protection procedures, instituting new measures that will facilitate Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests and will better oversee search advertisers that use copyrighted or trademarked terms. Specifically, Google will roll out four changes:...

Google announced Wednesday it has changed its search algorithm to make sure bad merchants don't soar to the top of search results due to strings of complaints against them. The decision to alter its algorithm was a response to a story The New York Times ran last weekend about an eyeglass merchant, D...

The bones of a plan to balance consumer privacy and businesses' need to gather data online was aired yesterday by the Federal Trade Commission and was greeted with both praise and criticism. In a 122-page preliminary report, the agency called for any company collecting or using consumer data that ca...

All I wanted to do was save a little money. Is that too much to ask? So I decided to try something I never tried before. I went to check out the Black Friday sales at the local stores the morning after Thanksgiving. Yes, before sunrise. Actually in the middle of the night. Someone should have braced...

The European Commission has opened an antitrust probe of Google for allegedly discriminating against competing search services by restricting its advertising partners from placing ads on their sites. It also is investigating whether Google has restricted advertisers from moving their data to competi...

An internal struggle has broken out at the FCC over Chairman Julius Genachowski's surprise announcement minutes before midnight Wednesday that he intends to pursue a full Commission vote on Net neutrality rules four days before Christmas. "I strongly oppose this ill-advised maneuver," said FCC Commi...

Google is about to go head-to-head with Amazon and Apple as it readies an e-book store that will debut before the end of the year. Named "Google Editions," the service will be an outgrowth of its Google Books project that allows users to browse and preview titles. The news surfaced on the Google ...

PCI DSS has evolved substantially since the five major credit card holders got together to publish a consolidated security standard in 2006. The standard has been updated regularly with the most recent version, PCI DSS 2.0, released in October 2010. PCI is here to stay, and the requirements are only...

Level 3 Communications on Monday complained when Comcast demanded the content delivery network pay a recurring fee for transmitting online moves and games to Comcast customers. Level 3 said the move violates the principles of Net neutrality. Comcast notified Level 3 on November 19 that it would begi...

Rumors are spinning across the e-commerce and investment banking world that Google will snap up Groupon. Though the talk started weeks ago, it has acquired new credibility with a news report claiming an unnamed insider confirmed the deal. Groupon is a shopping website that offers a daily deal on loc...

Competition has been increasing in the cable television world in recent years, and we have been expecting prices to come down, but they haven't. I have been scratching my head wondering why competition from satellite and telephone companies wasn't working. Well, it's taken years, but apparently the ...

Look for an overall bigger holiday spending pie with e-commerce grabbing a bigger slice. ComScore has forecast that Internet retailers will enjoy an 11-percent gain over last year's holiday billing. The firm expects e-commerce spending to total $32.4 billion during the November-through-December peri...

With more than 500 million people around the globe spending 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook, there is no question that it is the most important and pervasive social ecosystem in the world. It's no wonder that brands of all shapes, sizes and offerings are leveraging the user base to connect...

Netflix is favoring the trend toward streaming rental videos by introducing a streaming-only plan and raising its prices for discs delivered by mail. The company has launched a monthly subscription plan for streaming-only at $7.99. The cost for a combo of streaming-video plus mail delivery will incr...

The Apple iTunes App Store has generated revenue of more than $400 million revenue since its launch, according to analyst firm Piper Jaffray. Aside from being a successful online e-commerce solution for customers, the App Store has spurred tremendous innovation by Apple's development partners, which...