E-Commerce

The Internet's governing body has agreed to settle several outstanding lawsuits involving domain registrar VeriSign, an agreement that will keep that company in charge of the key dot-com domain until 2012. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said the settlement is still s...

The former chief executive officer of online marketing firm Intermix has agreed to give up profits allegedly made through the distribution of spyware as part of a settlement with the state of New York. New York state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said Brad Greenspan, the founder and former CEO of I...

AOL confirmed this week the layoff of about 700 employees, most of whom were working in customer call centers across the United States. The once-dominant Internet service company blamed the job cuts on its dwindling dial-up customer base, but industry watchers also viewed the layoffs as a ploy to pl...

Google has begun to digitize books in eight European countries, pushing forward on a global scale with a project that has been the subject of fierce criticism and now faces a second lawsuit from publishing interests in the U.S. Google said that the scanning of books was under way in Austria, Belgium...

Even as rumors swirl that it might sell part or all of America Online to one or more big-name suitors, Time Warner has formally launched a US$50 million marketing campaign designed to let the world know that much of the once walled-off content of the Internet community is now freely available at AOL...

Federal authorities have broken up a massive piracy ring that they say was capable of producing millions of counterfeit music and software CDs. Three California men face a range of charges after being indicted by a federal grand jury in San Francisco on counterfeiting charges. The charges resulted f...

Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN have agreed to work to make their instant messaging platforms more compatible, a bid to set aside competitive differences to tackle the continued dominance of America Online's own chat platform. The companies said their agreement represented the first time two major IM pro...

Web usability guidelines aim to help you keep and serve your customers, rather than driving them to your competitors' sites out of frustration. Usability is important for every Web site, but becomes absolutely vital when a large portion of your revenue comes from Web sales. Over the years, I've read...

Looking to beef up its PayPal online payment service and enhance its reputation with online merchants outside of its online auction kingdom in particular, eBay said it would acquire the payment gateway system of security company VeriSign. EBay said its PayPal unit, which it took over in a US$1.5 bil...

Rising gas prices may be withering consumer confidence these days, but online retailers see a silver lining in the disturbing trend. "People are going to be less inclined to drive to shopping centers," Bernard Baumohl, executive director of the Economic Outlook Group in Princeton Junction, N.J. told...

Yahoo has put its money behind a team effort to bulk up the amount of valuable content available on the Web. The search engine company will foster the Open Content Alliance, a consortium set up to digitize materials in the public domain, such as classic books, and those published under the less-rest...

United Kingdom-based music act managers are seeking to pressure Apple on royalty payments, saying too little of the proceeds from each song download is actually reaching the artists that created the songs. Members of the UK chapter of the Music Managers Forum met today to launch a public awareness c...

Sales of digital music soared during the first half of 2005, nearly tripling over 2004 levels, but weren't quite robust enough to help the music industry see overall growth, according to sales figures from international music trade group IFPI. Worldwide, music sales for the first six months of this...

Looking to fend off competition from Internet-based entertainment providers and others, DirecTV and XM Satellite radio have signed a deal to offer subscribers of DirecTV access to streaming radio offerings of XM. The two satellite-based companies said starting in mid-November DirecTV subscribers wi...

Computer maker Dell is ending its long-standing practice of offering free home delivery of personal computers, a move seen as an effort to protect its historically robust bottom line from price competition. Though Dell has remained among the most profitable computer makers, its most recent earnings ...