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The Wall Street Journal has reported that an Indian company is suing a blogger for defamation. A Wired blog is predicting a win for that company.

In case you aren’t familiar with the case. Here’s a quick run-down:

• “Toxic Writer”, an anonymous blogger, made some comments about the company
• The company, Gremach Infrastructure Equipments & Projects Ltd., is based in Mumbai, India
• The allegation is that the blogger is engaging in “hate speech”
• The blog’s been removed, but the Blogger.com subsidiary, based in India, is claiming no responsibility

According to some legal experts, countries that were once a British colony see these types of lawsuits often. This is perhaps the most high profile of the cases of this sort. What makes it so special, however, is one simple fact of the law: Any company doing business in any country in the world is subject to the local laws, regardless of its country of origin.

Google is a U.S. company. If the same suit happened in the U.S. then Google would likely win. But India has no first amendment and companies fighting this type of suit in those countries typically lose. That means Google will have to change its operating policies for bloggers in that country. But this is where it gets sticky.

The blogger is being threatened with loss of anonymity. Doesn’t he have a right to privacy? The real issue here is the crossroad between a blogger’s right to blog anonymously and the right of the company to have nothing defamatory said about it. If the blogger wins then all is well (except for the company). If the company wins, the blogger not only loses anonymity in India, but in every country in the world.

What if a U.S. citizen, blogging anonymously, makes an off-hand comment about an international company headquartered in India, or another country with no first amendment law? Which court has jurisdiction? Furthermore, which nation’s laws will be applied to the situation?

Will the U.S. blogger be subject to Indian laws? Will Google? Since search engine results can theoretically be viewed in any country, based on personal preferences and geographic concerns as applied by Google’s algorithms, you can see how these situations could lead to some sticky case law. Either every search engine headquartered in every country will have to adopt a different policy to reflect the local laws of each nation in which it operates or an international body governing Internet search and publishing will need to be created to maintain a consistent legal policy that governs the entire world’s policy regarding defamation, copyright, and related issues.

The only question left to answer is, Which path will be taken?

This story was first published at Blogger News Network.

Google’s market share has increased again. According to CNET, the search giant is up to 77.4% of the search ad market.

Yahoo!s share dropped by 2% to 17.8%. The Google-Yahoo! agreement that allows some of Google’s ads to be displayed on Yahoo! SERPs will give Google more than 90% of the search ad market. That has triggered some antitrust concerns with the Department of Justice and others.

Google has achieved the monolithic distinction of being among the companies that can’t wake up in the morning without crossing the line of evil business mogul. Microsoft crossed that line years ago. Now it’s Google’s turn, and from the looks of things, Yahoo! will never make it. We may soon see a search environment where Yahoo! is no longer a player and with Google dominating both the search and the search advertising industries it is possible that a forced breakup to protect consumers may be inevitable. But we’re a few years from that yet.

Close to half of Americans believe the Internet should be regulated. About the same number say they use the Internet every day or almost every day. These are interesting stats.

Presumably, the survey that produced these stats came about due to the harassment case involving a woman who pretended to a boy interested in a high school girl who killed herself when the fictitious “boy” later lost interest. This is a tragic story indeed. But harassment laws are already on the book. Of course they should apply to the Internet just as they apply to the local drug store, your church group, or the YMCA.

What these Americans are saying when they claim that they want a regulated Internet is that they would like the FCC or a similar agency to monitor Internet communications to keep out anything that they might find offensive. But there are huge, HUGE problems with that. No. 1, much of what is produced on the Internet comes from other countries. No federal agency has the authority to police what is produced in other countries. No. 2, if such an agency did exist then it is inevitable that it would eventually gain the authority to block sites not produced in the U.S. on the grounds of some type of non-objective criteria judging what is and is not offensive. Giving any government agency the authority to block any website online is not the answer and is not desirable. It would curtail the freedom that has made the Internet a fast-growing success in American culture.

We don’t need Internet regulation. It regulates itself. The search engines do an adequate job of filtering out spam and do a reasonably good job of ensuring that communications online are segmented into information categories recognized by keyword search queries. It’s not a perfect system, but is a system that has developed naturally over the course of the Internet’s lifeline. Americans need to first understand the nature of the medium before they start asking for bureaucrats who likely will understand it even less to monitor and regulate the best tool since Gutenberg’s press.

The atmosphere is thick with anticipation of the upcoming talks between company giants Microsoft and Yahoo. Reportedly, if Yahoo does not start talks this weekend, Microsoft could launch a hostile bid.

Microsoft stated that they will not raise their bid of $31 a share. They don’t feel that right now, after preliminary tests, that Yahoo is worth more than $46 billion. Yahoo stated that the proposed bid underestimates the potential value of the company.

Microsoft also stated that if talks do not take place or if an agreement cannot be reached, Microsoft will start looking elsewhere for future endeavours. Microsoft is looking to vastly improve their position in the online advertising market, especially in the highly lucrative aspect of search advertising, which Google dominates.

It doesn’t seem like Microsoft is too worried about not getting the Yahoo! advertising as was clearly displayed by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at a news conference concerning the media mogul.

Speaking to a group of nearly 2,000 Microsoft enthusiasts at a technology conference in Seattle, Ballmer asked how many people use Yahoo as their primary Internet search engine.

Only a handful of arms went up, with the majority raising their hands for Google Inc.

After the tepid response for Yahoo’s search, Ballmer said jokingly: “Wow, we offered 31 bucks a share.”

CNETs News.com reports that Yahoo! has been given the go ahead on purchasing BlueLithium. That means that important people have decided that the purchase doesn’t post any antitrust issues to be worried about. I’ll have to agree.

All of the search engines right now are involved in similar purchase. Google is seeking interest in DoubleClick and MSN is eyeing Aquantive. Each of the purchases will improve the profitability of their respective buyers. In some cases, even consumers will benefit. For instance, in Yahoo!s purchase of BlueLithium.

BlueLithium will likely expand and improve upon Yahoo!s ability to provide search engine marketing and advertising products to its end users. That’s the idea behind the search portal’s business philosophy and user model. So should anyone be surprised? Should we be disappointed? Or perhaps it’s just another beautiful day in the news and media business.

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Is Yahoo! Assist a new form of news and media or is it a waste of time? Some people are swearing by it. I’ve yet to hear anything negative.

Personally, I don’t have anything negative to say either, but I do believe it doesn’t stand up to Ask.com 3D or Google Universal. Besides the News and Media Blog coming up in the No. 5 spot for the phrase “News and Media,” I can’t imagine that there’d be anything super about it. It’s really just a no-brainer that the search engines - all of them - would go this route.

I like Yahoo! Assist as a feature. I can’t wait to see further improvements.

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The Internet has spawned an entirely new industry of search engine marketers, who attempt to manipulate the results of search engines based on keywords and links. A recent comment thread on one of my favorite blogs showcased the following comment from a fellow reader:

The keyword density argument is very similar to that on reciprocal linking. We are told that this is not of any future value. Only inbound one way links will count.

Next week we could equally be told that keyword plugging of any description is bad for your search engine health.

Why can’t the search engines work purely and simply on a “Quality& Effort” standard then it will be the same as everything else in life. We all will have an equal chance to promote our sites accordingly and be judged on merit.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about how to market oneself and one’s business on the Internet. First, it isn’t about keyword density. It’s about high value content, but you can’t write high value content without keywords.

You also can’t provide such content without links. Inbound one-way links to your website are quite valuable, especially if they are from websites related in content to yours. Truth is, the search engine algorithms consider hundreds of factors when ranking web pages for certain keywords.

This commenters notion that the search engines currently do not operate on a “quality and effort” standard is entirely false. The problem is too many website owners have figured out what the quality is supposed to be and have tried to game the system through dishonest or false keyword and link play. Google’s answer to this is to offer personalized search and future search engine developments such as latent semantic search prove to fix that problem. Right now, though, search engine marketers are stuck with the system that has been created by Google and its competition. If you want to rank high for your keywords you’ll have to work within the system, or risk being shut out for good.

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The most recent development in search engine technology is latent semantic search, or what some people call “natural language.” The idea is to make a search for a particular term and the search engine will deliver results based on the context in which you use the term rather than focusing on specific keywords that might have several, or ambiguous, meanings. Will the search method have any merit? Will it be useful?

Some of us are hoping so. One of the newest search engines, which hasn’t gone live yet, has developed a natural language technology - latent semantic search - based on artificial intelligence, which promises to deliver the types of results that searchers have been longing for. The name of the search engine is Powerset.

Powerset is not yet live, however. It won’t go public until September 2007. Meanwhile, they have begun their beta testing, which they call Powerlabs. I was selected to be one of the beta testers, an honor I don’t take lightly.

I am looking forward to sharing my insights with my readers in the coming months as I use Powerlabs to discuss changes in the search landscape. I have high expectations so I come down a little on the harsh side sometimes, well, que sera que sera. If latent semantic search does not work as a technology, wouldn’t it be better to know it now as opposed to later, after we’ve all spent considerable time and money on its investment?

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A mini-revolt leading up to today’s Yahoo annual meeting made some impact: The company said investors with a third of its stock voted to tie executive pay more closely to company performance, as pressure builds on Chief Executive Officer Terry Semel to narrow Google’s lead in market share.

This is an interesting development. Unfortunately, this measure didn’t pass as 1/3 of the stockholder vote wasn’t enough to make it company policy. Still, it does reveal a certain change in perspective among shareholders in general. It could actually happen at some company in the future where executive pay is tied to performance. A lot of people have been calling for that to become national law for some time. Scandals involving Enron et. al. at the beginning of the Millennium made that much more on the minds of many people in the last few years. I believe this sentiment will grow stronger in future years. Meanwhile, back at Google …

Trying its best to quell privacy concerns raised by European regulators - gotta keep an eye on that evil thing - Google is cutting the time it keeps the personal search records of its users.

When Google first announced it’s limit on the time it will keep personal records, privacy advocates saw it as somewhat of a victory that Google would ditch personal information after 24 months. Now, the company has announced it will ditch records after 18 months. I still think that’s too long. I say cut it to 12 months and you’ve got a deal.

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