New York Times

ConnectEDU, a popular college and career planning portal in Boston that had collected personal details on millions of high school and college students, filed for bankruptcy. Now federal regulators want to stop the company from selling off students’ names, email addresses, birth dates and other intimate information as assets.

Jessica Rich, the director of the bureau of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission, argued that such a sale would violate ConnectEDU’s own privacy policy, a potentially deceptive practice. The company’s privacy policy states that, in the event of a sale of the company, it “will give users reasonable notice and an opportunity to remove personally identifiable data from the service.”

“Information about teens is particularly sensitive and may warrant even greater privacy protections than those accorded to adults,” Rich wrote. “These users, as well as their parents, would likely be concerned if their information transferred without restriction to a purchaser for unknown uses.”

Rich recommended either that ConnectEDU give each student who had registered for its sites the choice to remove his or her personal records from company databases in advance of a sale -- or that the company destroy the entirety of the personal details it had collected.

YouTube’s plans for a subscription music service have stalled over a dispute with independent record labels, which contend that the online video giant has offered unfair licensing terms and threatened to block their music from the site.

Members of the Worldwide Independent Network, an umbrella for various trade groups around the world, complained that the contracts YouTube had offered independents are “out of step with the marketplace for streaming,” and less favorable than those that have apparently been agreed to by the three major labels -- Universal, Sony and Warner.

Negotiations between independents and YouTube, which is owned by Google, have dragged on for months. But according to several people with direct knowledge of the talks, the indies’ decision to speak out was driven by a recent warning that if labels failed to agree to YouTube’s licensing terms, music on the indies’ official YouTube channels would be blocked.

In addition, those labels would be unable to collect advertising revenue from user-uploaded videos that included their music. In response, a YouTube spokesman said, “We have successful deals in place with hundreds of independent and major labels around the world; however, we don’t comment on ongoing negotiations.”

[Commentary] Amazon is confirming its critics’ worst fears and it is an ugly spectacle to behold. For years, authors and publishers have warned that Amazon, Jeff Bezos’ book-selling giant, would one day use its power for ill.

Sure, so far, Amazon has marketed itself as a book buyer’s best friend. It sells books at terrifically low prices, it delivers them amazingly quickly, and it constantly invents new technologies to improve the way we read. Amazon has also invested heavily in publishing new authors and it has pushed exciting new formats made possible by electronic distribution. Yet the literary community has always greeted Amazon’s moves with suspicion.

The fear is mostly about the future. What will happen to books when Amazon controls the entire industry? How will authors and publishing houses reckon with Amazon’s unchecked power? Most recently, as part of a contract dispute with the publisher Hachette, we’re seeing Amazon behaving at its worst. The company’s willingness to nakedly flex its anticompetitive muscle gives new cause for concern to anyone who cares about books -- authors, publishers, but mainly customers.

At least five times in May, a Pakistani bureaucrat who works from a colonial-era barracks in Karachi, just down the street from the former home of his country’s secularist founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, asked Twitter to shield his compatriots from exposure to accounts, tweets or searches of the social network that he described as “blasphemous” or “unethical.”

All five of those requests were honored by the company, meaning that Twitter users in Pakistan can no longer see the content that so disturbed the bureaucrat, Abdul Batin of the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority: crude drawings of the Prophet Muhammad, photographs of burning Qurans, and messages from a handful of anti-Islam bloggers and an American porn star who now attends Duke University.

The blocking of these tweets in Pakistan -- in line with the country-specific censorship policy Twitter unveiled in 2012 -- is the first time the social network has agreed to withhold content there. A number of the accounts seemed to have been blocked in anticipation of the fourth annual “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” on May 20.

This censorship comes as challenges to Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy law have become increasingly deadly, amid a flurry of arrests, killings and assassination attempts on secularists.

Amazon, under fire in much of the literary community for energetically discouraging customers from buying books from the publisher Hachette, has abruptly escalated the battle.

The retailer began refusing orders for coming Hachette books, including JK Rowling’s new novel. The paperback edition of Brad Stone’s “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” -- a book Amazon disliked so much it denounced it -- is suddenly listed as “unavailable.” In some cases, even the pages promoting the books have disappeared. Anne Rivers Siddons’s new novel, “The Girls of August,” coming in July, no longer has a page for the physical book or even the Kindle edition. Only the audio edition is still being sold (for more than $60).

The confrontation with Hachette has turned into the biggest display of Amazon’s dominance since it briefly stripped another publisher, Macmillan, of its “buy” buttons in 2010. It seems likely to encourage debate about the enormous power the company wields. No company in American history has exerted the control over the American book market -- physical, digital and secondhand -- that Amazon does.

[Commentary] Should a speedy Internet be available to everyone equally or are some users, in Orwell’s terms, “more equal than others”? Should there be “haves” and “have-nots” on the Internet, with the winners being large corporate or commercial users, as opposed to small businesses or regular people?

That’s the essence of the debate behind the high-stakes subject of “net neutrality,” which the Federal Communications Commission voted on recently.

“I’ve long become accustomed to news articles as well as editorials in the Times asserting that black is white or white is black, but for you to insist that the actions of the FCC will protect and enhance Internet neutrality is way over the top,” wrote one reader, William Edwards. And another, Robert Ofsevit, wrote a detailed critique, comparing the headline in The Times, “FCC Vote Paves the Way for New Open Internet Rules” unfavorably with a more direct headline on a Reuters story that ran on Huffington Post: “FCC Votes for Plan to Kill Net Neutrality.”

He wrote: “The writer denigrates and marginalizes ‘some opponents’ of Chairman Wheeler’s plan, and “net neutrality purists” who view the plan as killing net neutrality. In fact, these are not fringe views held only by ‘purists.’” My take: I’m with the critics on this one. While I’m no expert, I don’t think the issues here really are all that muddy. Maybe this makes me a purist, but as I see it, this FCC vote was a clear strike against the commonly understood idea of net neutrality, and The Times should have written and presented it that way.

Joaquín Almunia, the European Union’s antitrust chief, said that he might yet take a tougher stance toward Google in a long-running case that he and the company have been in talks to settle for more than a year.

The announcement is a potential blow for Google, which reached a tentative deal with Almunia in February by agreeing to display rivals’ links more prominently in its search results.

Google has been trying to resolve the three-year case and avoid a potential fine of up to $5 billion. But whether the announcement was an indication of a new hard line by Almunia or a diplomatic nod to the company’s many critics in Europe was not clear. And any action would still be months away.

American officials insist, when speaking off the record, that the United States was never acting on behalf of specific American companies. But the government does not deny it routinely spies to advance American economic advantage, which is part of its broad definition of how it protects American national security. In short, the officials say, while the National Security Agency cannot spy on Airbus and give the results to Boeing, it is free to spy on European or Asian trade negotiators and use the results to help American trade officials -- and, by extension, the American industries and workers they are trying to bolster.

Now, every one of the examples of NSA spying on corporations around the world is becoming Exhibit A in China’s argument that by indicting five members of the People’s Liberation Army, the Obama Administration is giving new meaning to capitalistic hypocrisy.

In the Chinese view, the United States has designed its own system of rules about what constitutes “legal” spying and what is illegal. That definition, the Chinese contend, is intended to benefit an American economy built around the sanctity of intellectual property belonging to private firms. And, in their mind, it is also designed to give the NSA the broadest possible rights to intercept phone calls or email messages of state-owned companies from China to Saudi Arabia, or even private firms that are involved in activities the United States considers vital to its national security, with no regard to local laws. The NSA says it observes American law around the globe, but admits that local laws are no obstacle to its operations.

Every major Internet browser has a feature that lets you tell a website that you don’t want it to collect personal information about you when you visit. And virtually every website ignores those requests. Tracking your online activities -- and using that data to tailor marketing pitches -- is central to how Internet companies make money.

Now California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris, wants every site to tell you -- in clear language -- if and how it is respecting your privacy preferences.

The guidelines, published on Wednesday, are intended to help companies comply with a new state privacy law that went into effect on Jan. 1. That law requires sites to prominently disclose all their privacy practices, including how they respond to “do not track” requests.

[Commentary] Few industries have been as deeply embroiled in merger mania as the telecommunications industry, particularly after AT&T’s $48.5 billion bid for DirecTV. Now, with another mega-deal in the works, how will others respond?

Perhaps with even more consolidation. AT&T‘s acquisition most clearly affects the country’s other major satellite television provider, Dish. Dish Chairman Charles Ergen has made no secret that deals were an important part of his strategy, whether they be a foiled attempt at buying Sprint or a withdrawn bid to acquire the bankrupt broadband wireless provider LightSquared. And in recent months, news reports contended that Ergen was interested in pursuing deals either for T-Mobile USA or DirecTV.

At the same time, analysts had long speculated that Dish might make an attractive acquisition target for AT&T. A bigger and more emboldened AT&T may also have repercussions for Sprint, whose majority owner, the Japanese telecom Softbank, has long coveted a deal with T-Mobile to gain much-needed scale.

Yet a tie-up of the two has already drawn hints of vocal opposition from several officials at the Federal Communications Commission, who have worried that a merger of the two would constitute an unacceptable level of consolidation.

Sprint and SoftBank have argued not so subtly that acquiring T-Mobile would create more competition in the wireless industry, blunting the power of Verizon and AT&T.