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Bits Blog: Marissa Mayer Puts Her Stamp on Yahoo.com

February 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment

8:39 a.m. | Updated On Wednesday, Yahoo introduced a fresh new home page with Marissa Mayer’s stamp all over it.

Yahoo’s home page has long been a sort of sad reflection of the company. A jazzed-up Craigslist of sorts, the site was often cluttered with low-quality ads and irrelevant content and in no way reflected the fact that Yahoo is one of the most visited sites on the Web. With more than 700 million monthly visitors, Yahoo is still a leading source of information for sports, finance and entertainment.

Ms. Mayer took the reins as Yahoo’s chief executive last July. Before that she was a long-time executive at Google, where she was widely credited with the simple look of the Google search page. Now she seeks to apply that same, clean aesthetic to one of the most chaotic sites on the Web.

In an interview Tuesday, Ms. Mayer said she wanted to make Yahoo’s site “fresh and dynamic and add an element of surprise and serendipity.”

Gone are the low-quality ads. She has added an infinite, Twitter-like news feed and a stream of content recommended by users’ Facebook friends. Instead of trying to jam every Yahoo feature onto the site, the new design gives special prominence to Yahoo’s most popular Web properties: Yahoo’s e-mail and news service, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, its movie listing site and OMG, its popular entertainment site.

Users can now easily share content they see on the home page via e-mail, Twitter or Facebook with one click. They also have limited ability to customize the site to their liking. They can turn off home page features like horoscopes, stock quotes and sports stats. Ms. Mayer pointed out that the more items users switch on and off, the smarter the Yahoo algorithm gets and the more relevant content Yahoo will serve up.

Yahoo’s redesigned home page is the third major aesthetic improvement Ms. Mayer has introduced since joining the company. In December, she redesigned Yahoo’s e-mail service and its once-popular photo-sharing service Flickr.

In the interview, Ms. Mayer said these would be the “first of many releases” and she would turn her focus to a dozen or more Yahoo products. Her next priority for the home page, she said, will be adding content sources. In December, Yahoo signed three deals, with CBS Television, NBC Sports and ABC News. In each case, the media companies will work with Yahoo to promote each other’s content and produce original video content for the Web.

“We’re introducing a new way to welcome people to Yahoo,” Ms. Mayer said.

But it’s more than aesthetics. Ms. Mayer is betting that the renewed focus on Yahoo’s products will turn around the company’s ailing display ad revenue. Yahoo, once the biggest seller of display ads in the United States, went from a leading 15.5 percent share of all digital ad revenues in the United States in 2009, to an 8.4 percent share last year, even as total digital ad spending grew, according to eMarketer. Meanwhile, its competitor, Google, increased its share to 41 percent.

Last month, she told analysts, “More personalized content and increased product innovation will be key to getting us back to the path for display revenue growth.”

Article source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/marissa-mayer-puts-her-stamp-on-yahoo-com/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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French Publishers Forge Deal With Google, Breaking Ranks With Europe

February 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment

PARIS — Publishers in France say they have struck an innovative agreement with Google on the use of their content online. Their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, however, say the French gave in too easily to the Internet giant.

The deal was signed this month by President François Hollande of France and Eric E. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, who called it a breakthrough in the tense relationship between publishers and Google, and as a possible model for other countries to follow.

Under the deal, Google agreed to set up a fund, worth 60 million euroes, or $80 million, over three years, to help publishers develop their digital units. The two sides also pledged to deepen business ties, using Google’s online tools, in an effort to generate more online revenue for the publishers, who have struggled to counteract dwindling print revenue.

But the French group, representing newspaper and magazine publishers with an online presence, as well as a variety of other news-oriented Web sites, yielded on its most important demand: that Google and other search engines and “aggregators” of news should start paying for links to their content.

Google, which insists that its links provide a service to publishers by directing traffic to their sites, had fiercely resisted any change in the principle of free linking.

The agreement dismayed members of the European Publishers Council, a lobbying group in Brussels, which has been pushing for a fundamental change in the relationship between publishers and Google. The group criticized the French publishers for breaking ranks and striking a separate business agreement that has no statutory standing.

The deal “does not address the continuing problem of unauthorized reuse and monetization of content, and so does not provide the online press with the financial certainty or mechanisms for legal redress which it needs to build sustainable business models and ensure its continued investment in high-quality content,” Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the publishers council, said in a statement.

German publishers were also scornful, with Anja Pasquay, a spokeswoman for the German Newspaper Publishers’ Association, saying: “Obviously the French position isn’t one that we would favor. This is not the solution for Germany.”

Germany has been in the forefront of the push to get Google to share with online news publishers some of the billions of euros that the company earns from the sale of advertising. A proposed law, endorsed by the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel and working its way through the federal legislature, would grant a new form of copyright to digital publishers. If enacted, it could allow publishers to charge search engines or aggregators for displaying even snippets of news articles alongside links to other Web sites.

Mr. Hollande had vowed to introduce similar legislation this winter if Google and the publishers did not come to terms. It appears that Google, which had threatened to stop indexing French Web sites’ content if it had to pay for links, has sidelined the threat of legislation, at least for now; the agreement will be reviewed after three years, Mr. Hollande has said.

Under the deal, Google says it will help the publishers use several of its digital advertising services, including AdSense, AdMob and Ad Exchange, more effectively.

Publishers are already free to use these services, and it was not immediately clear how they would be able to generate more revenue from them; this part of the accord remains confidential, both sides say, because they are still negotiating the fine print.

“This agreement can help accelerate the move toward greater advertising revenues in the digital world,” said Marc Schwartz of Mazars, a consulting firm, who is serving as an independent mediator in the talks. “I’m not saying we have done everything, but it’s a first step in the right direction.”

More has been said about the planned innovation fund. Publishers will submit proposals to the fund, which will select ideas to finance and develop, with the involvement of Google engineers.

“The idea is that it would inject innovation into the sector in France,” said Simon Morrison, copyright policy manager at Google.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/technology/a-first-step-on-continent-for-google-on-use-of-content.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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A First Step on Continent for Google on Use of Content

February 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment

PARIS — Publishers in France say they have struck an innovative agreement with Google on the use of their content online. Their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, however, say the French gave in too easily to the Internet giant.

The deal was signed this month by President François Hollande of France and Eric E. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, who called it a breakthrough in the tense relationship between publishers and Google, and as a possible model for other countries to follow.

Under the deal, Google agreed to set up a fund, worth €60 million, or $80 million, over three years, to help publishers develop their digital units. The two sides also pledged to deepen business ties, using Google’s online tools, in an effort to generate more online revenue for the publishers, who have struggled to counteract dwindling print revenue.

But the French group, representing newspaper and magazine publishers with an online presence, as well as a variety of other news-oriented Web sites, yielded on its most important demand: that Google and other search engines and “aggregators” of news should start paying for links to their content.

Google, which insists that its links provide a service to publishers by directing traffic to their sites, had fiercely resisted any change in the principle of free linking.

The agreement dismayed members of the European Publishers Council, a lobbying group in Brussels, which has been pushing for a fundamental change in the relationship between publishers and Google. The group criticized the French publishers for breaking ranks and striking a separate business agreement that has no statutory standing.

The deal “does not address the continuing problem of unauthorized reuse and monetization of content, and so does not provide the online press with the financial certainty or mechanisms for legal redress which it needs to build sustainable business models and ensure its continued investment in high-quality content,” Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the publishers council, said in a statement.

German publishers were also scornful, with Anja Pasquay, a spokeswoman for the German Newspaper Publishers’ Association, saying: “Obviously the French position isn’t one that we would favor. This is not the solution for Germany.”

Germany has been in the forefront of the push to get Google to share with online news publishers some of the billions of euros that the company earns from the sale of advertising. A proposed law, endorsed by the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel and working its way through the federal legislature, would grant a new form of copyright to digital publishers. If enacted, it could allow publishers to charge search engines or aggregators for displaying even snippets of news articles alongside links to other Web sites.

Mr. Hollande had vowed to introduce similar legislation this winter if Google and the publishers did not come to terms. It appears that Google, which had threatened to stop indexing French Web sites’ content if it had to pay for links, has sidelined the threat of legislation, at least for now; the agreement will be reviewed after three years, Mr. Hollande has said.

Under the deal, Google says it will help the publishers use several of its digital advertising services, including AdSense, AdMob and Ad Exchange, more effectively.

Publishers are already free to use these services, and it was not immediately clear how they would be able to generate more revenue from them; this part of the accord remains confidential, both sides say, because they are still negotiating the fine print.

“This agreement can help accelerate the move toward greater advertising revenues in the digital world,” said Marc Schwartz of Mazars, a consulting firm, who is serving as an independent mediator in the talks. “I’m not saying we have done everything, but it’s a first step in the right direction.”

More has been said about the planned innovation fund. Publishers will submit proposals to the fund, which will select ideas to finance and develop, with the involvement of Google engineers.

“The idea is that it would inject innovation into the sector in France,” said Simon Morrison, copyright policy manager at Google.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/technology/a-first-step-on-continent-for-google-on-use-of-content.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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U.S. Regulators Approve Random House Merger With Penguin

February 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment

PARIS — The U.S. Justice Department has cleared the proposed merger of Random House and Penguin, which would create the biggest book publisher in the world, their parent companies said Thursday.

The Justice Department imposed no conditions on the German media company Bertelsmann, which owns Random House, and its British counterpart Pearson, the parent of Penguin, thereby removing a significant hurdle to the deal. Still, the proposed formation of Penguin Random House faces other regulatory reviews, most notably by the European Commission.

“This positive first decision by one of the antitrust authorities is an important milestone on the path to uniting two of the world’s leading publishing companies into a truly global publishing group,” said Thomas Rabe, chief executive of Bertelsmann, in a statement.

Bertelsmann and Pearson announced plans last year to merge the two publishers into a single concern that would have about 25 percent of the English-language consumer book market. Under the agreement, no money is changing hands, but Bertelsmann is set to control 53 percent of the combined entity.

Executives say greater scale will help the publishers develop new digital publishing models, as they hope to profit from the growth of e-books. It would give them greater heft to negotiate with Internet giants like Amazon, Apple and Google, which play an ever more important role in the distribution of books. Penguin and Bertelsmann say they also hope to expand their presence in emerging markets.

“Penguin Random House points the way to the international future of the book,” Mr. Rabe said.

Analysts had generally expected the U.S. antitrust authorities to approve the deal, saying Europe was more likely to pose problems. The European Commission scrutinizes any merger in the culture sector with special care, as evidenced by the tough conditions it recently imposed on Universal Music Group in its purchase of the recording company EMI.

Executives of Pearson and Bertelsmann have said they will seek to wring cost savings out of the combined back-office operations of the two publishers, without cutting from the editorial operations.

Both companies said Thursday that they still expected the agreement to close in the second half of this year.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/business/global/us-regulators-approve-random-house-merger-with-penguin.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Journalists’ E-Mail Accounts Targeted in Myanmar

February 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The warnings began appearing last week, said Aye Aye Win, a senior journalist in Myanmar and longtime correspondent for The Associated Press who was among those who received them.

Other journalists included employees of Eleven Media, one of Myanmar’s leading news organizations, and Bertil Lintner, an author and expert on Myanmar’s ethnic groups who is based in Thailand. The journalists received the warning when they logged into their Gmail accounts.

Taj Meadows, a Google spokesman in Tokyo, said he could not immediately provide specifics about the warnings, but said Google had begun the policy of notifying users of suspicious activity in June.

“I can certainly confirm that we send these types of notices to accounts that we suspect are the targets of state-sponsored attacks,” Mr. Meadows said.

Google has not said how it determines whether an attack is “state-sponsored” and does not identify which government may be leading the attacks. Mr. Meadows referred a reporter to an announcement in June by Eric Grosse, the vice president for security engineering at Google, that said the company could not provide details of its warnings “without giving away information that would be helpful to these bad actors.”

Ye Htut, a Myanmar government spokesman, and Zaw Htay, a director in the president’s office, could not be reached for comment Sunday.

The news media in Myanmar were highly censored and restricted during five decades of military rule, but the government has lifted many of those restrictions since President Thein Sein came to power nearly two years ago.

The country, formerly known as Burma, now has thriving weekly publications that are beginning to report on subjects once considered taboo, like government corruption and the military’s battles with ethnic rebels.

But at least two leading private publications, Eleven Media and The Voice Weekly, a news journal, have suffered cyberattacks. Eleven Media’s Web site and Facebook page were shut down by hackers several times in the past month, said U Than Htut Aung, the chairman and chief executive of the group.

“This is a direct attack on the media and a step backward for democracy,” he said.

Eleven Media Group posted an article over the weekend saying that the editor of The Voice Weekly and the correspondent for the Japanese news agency  Kyodo had also received warnings from Google.

Some journalists speculated that attempts to hack into e-mail accounts might be linked to the conflict in northern Myanmar, where ethnic Kachin rebels have engaged in fierce fighting with government troops in recent weeks for control over territory near the border with China.

Eleven Media was among the first publications to report that the Myanmar military was deploying aircraft to attack the Kachin rebels, a policy that the government denied until reports and photographs appeared in Eleven Media.

“It’s their most sensitive state security issue,” Mr. Lintner, the expert on ethnic groups, said.

Mr. Than Htut Aung of Eleven Media said he had heard reports from his staff that members of the Myanmar military were “very angry” with their reporting on the Kachin conflict, but he said it was too early to say whether the military had a role in the cyberattacks.

The Myanmar military has received training on cyberwarfare from Russia, according to Mr. Lintner.

Cyberattacks are not new to the Burmese news media. During military rule, news Web sites run by exiled Burmese activists in Thailand and elsewhere were attacked by hackers numerous times.

Wai Moe contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/world/asia/journalists-e-mail-accounts-targeted-in-myanmar.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Google Submits Proposals to Resolve European Antitrust Concerns

February 1, 2013 by Leave a Comment

European officials were not willing early Friday to describe the proposals, and Google could not immediately be reached for comment. But it has been expected that Google will offer revisions to the way it conducts its online search business in Europe to address regulators’ concerns that the company’s activities are unfair to other Web publishers and its online competitors.

The European Commission, the executive agency of the European Union, has taken a tougher line with Google than the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which decided in January that the company had not broken antitrust laws after a 19-month inquiry into how it operated its search engine.

Joaquín Almunia, the European competition commissioner and top E.U. antitrust official, has been formally investigating Google since November 2010. He has insisted that Google make changes to the most sensitive area of its business, online search.

If Mr. Almunia ultimately accepts Google’s offer, the company would avoid further investigation that could lead to a fine of as much as 10 percent of its annual global sales, which came to about $50 billion last year. Google would also avoid a guilty finding that could restrict its activities in Europe.

Mr. Almunia must first assess the offer made by Google and then decide whether it addresses his concerns sufficiently to allow the complainants to review it during a period of what is known as “market testing.”

In its deal with the F.T.C., Google agreed to make concessions in two areas that concerned European regulators. In one, Google will allow rivals to opt out of allowing Google to “scrape,” or copy, text from their sites. Google was expected to agree to the same terms with European authorities.

But in a second area of European concern — whether Google deliberately favors its own content in search results — the F.T.C. did not require changes.

Mr. Almunia has also demanded that Google put fewer restrictions the way it handles advertisements that are displayed alongside search results when a user types a query in a Web site’s search box.

The deadline for Google to submit the proposals by Thursday, the final day of January, was set in mid-December, when Mr. Almunia, after a meeting with Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, asked for “a detailed commitment text in January 2013.”

While Google is the dominant search engine in the United States, it holds even greater sway in Europe, accounting for more than 90 percent of searches in a number of major markets. That is one factor giving the Europeans greater leverage in trying to set rules on how Google ranks competing services.

Another factor is European antitrust law, which has long given competitors more protection than U.S. law provides.

Some experts have said that U.S. authorities could be playing a tactically clever hand by allowing the Europeans to push Google an extra mile. They suggested that the F.T.C. would be shielded from accusations it was attacking a U.S. champion, even though any concessions Google made to the Europeans on search could end up applying globally.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/business/global/google-submits-proposals-to-resolve-european-antitrust-concerns.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Netflix to Deliver All 13 Episodes of ‘House of Cards’ on One Day

February 1, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Binge-viewing, empowered by DVD box sets and Netflix subscriptions, has become such a popular way for Americans to watch TV that it is beginning to influence the ways the stories are told — particularly one-hour dramas — and how they are distributed.

Some people, pressured by their peers to watch “Mad Men” or “Game of Thrones,” catch up on previous seasons to see what all the fuss is about before a new season begins. Others plan weekend marathons of classics like “The West Wing” and “The Wire.” Like other American pastimes, it can get competitive: people have been known to brag about finishing a whole 12-episode season of “Homeland” in one sitting.

On Friday, Netflix will release a drama expressly designed to be consumed in one sitting: “House of Cards,” a political thriller starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright. Rather than introducing one episode a week, as distributors have done since the days of black-and-white TVs, all 13 episodes will be streamed at the same time. “Our goal is to shut down a portion of America for a whole day,” the producer Beau Willimon said with a laugh.

“House of Cards,” which is the first show made specifically for Netflix, dispenses with some of the traditions that are so common on network TV, like flashbacks. There is less reason to remind viewers what happened in previous episodes, the producers say, because so many viewers will have just seen it. And if they don’t remember, Google is just a click away. The show “assumes you know what’s happening all the time, whereas television has to assume that a big chunk of the audience is always just tuning in,” said Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer.

The producer Glen Mazzara took a similar approach to AMC’s “The Walking Dead” this year. In the second half of the season, which will start in mid-February after a two-month break, “we decided to pick up the action right away — to just jump right in,” Mr. Mazzara said. Fans of the show, he said, have little tolerance for recaps, since many of them will have just watched a marathon of the first half to prepare for the second.

That the fans even have a choice in the matter is a testament to the fundamental changes under way in the television business. Digital video recorders, video-on-demand capabilities and streaming Web sites have given viewers command of what they watch and when, not unlike the way the invention of supermarkets gave food shoppers a panoply of new choices. In both cases, some consumers love to binge.

While a large majority of TV is still watched live, not recorded, the ratings for some series — like FX’s “Sons of Anarchy” — double after a week of recorded viewing is counted. A first-of-its-kind Nielsen study last fall found that a handful of shows gain an extra 5 percent after another three weeks.

Nielsen does not routinely count viewers who wait more than a week to watch an episode, nor does it count most of the viewers who watch online, so it’s hard to estimate the true amount of bingeing. Some hoarders wait years: Mr. Mazzara, for instance, said he’s waiting to watch HBO’s “Girls” until the whole series is over, several years from now. This stockpiling phenomenon has become so common that some network executives worry that it is hurting new shows because they cancel the shows before would-be viewers get around to watching them.

Kevin Reilly, the Fox Entertainment chairman, whose network has already canceled two of the three shows it introduced last fall, alluded to this problem at a news conference earlier this month. “If I bumped into one more person that was doing a ‘Breaking Bad’ marathon in the middle of our fall launch…,” he said, trailing off as reporters laughed.

But the networks are adapting to the generational shift from on-a-schedule to on-demand viewing. When Fox introduced its biggest bet of the season, “The Following,” last week, it bought ads saying “Set your DVR now!” And sure enough, episode No. 2 this week out-rated the premiere, suggesting that the ad campaign had worked.

In recognition of the change, some networks are pushing to expand the metrics that determine advertising rates — from the current three-day ratings to a seven-day rating that would better account for on-demand habits.

Binge-viewing has been around at least since the advent of videotapes, when companies started to sell box sets of shows. But it has come of age because of the catalogs on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and other Web sites.

Some media executives like to call the behavior “marathoning,” since bingeing can have negative connotations. Either way, the behavior “extends the life of a show,” said Anthony Bay, the vice president for digital video at Amazon.

That’s been true for “Lost,” which ended its run on ABC three years ago, but is still a hit on Netflix and Hulu. Damon Lindelof, a co-creator of the mystery, said he has found that some people enjoyed it more by watching from start to finish, without the weeklong and monthlong waits for answers. Bingers, he said, “were spared the anxiety and the stress of the weekly episodes.”

For a creator, he added, speaking to a roomful of producers and distributors in Miami this week, it’s comforting to know that “ultimately the way your work is going to be viewed is more like reading a novel.”

That said, the traditional TV cliffhanger is far from dead. The producers of shows — even the five beginning on Netflix this year — know they have to satisfy multiple types of audiences. Said David Fincher, the acclaimed film director who is working with Mr. Willimon on “House of Cards” for Netflix, “I want to make sure that people who set the book down on the night stand are able to connect the dots, but I also want the people who are rabidly turning pages to go, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got all that.’ ”

In some corners of Hollywood there is deep skepticism about Netflix’s all-at-once release of “House of Cards.” Mr. Willimon acknowledged the advantages to stretching out a season — it’s a format viewers are used to, there’s more time for marketing — but said that as a storyteller (he’s best known for the play “Farragut North,” which inspired the film “The Ides of March”) he prefers the “House of Cards” approach.

As television becomes less beholden to the schedule and more acclimated to the Web, he said, “it might even dispense with episodes altogether. You might just get eight straight hours or 10 straight hours, and you decide where to pause.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/business/media/netflix-to-deliver-all-13-episodes-of-house-of-cards-on-one-day.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Google Maps’ New Target: Secretive North Korea

January 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The new map, built with the help of what Google called “a community of citizen cartographers,” provides people who normally visit the site for driving directions with a peek at places they previously only read about, probably in articles about the North’s nuclear program. The map of Pyongyang, the capital, shows everything from landmarks — the tower that celebrates the country’s self-reliance doctrine of Juche and the main square where military parades are held — to hotels, schools and hospitals.

Users can zoom in for photos and even post comments. The map that was on the site until Tuesday was mostly blank.

The posting of the map — and Google’s call for more mapping information on the North from netizens — focused new attention on the North at a time when the country is locked in a tense standoff with the United States and its allies over tightened sanctions and has promised to conduct a third nuclear test.

Google’s initiative came three weeks after its executive chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, visited Pyongyang in a highly publicized yet contentious trip organized by Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico. Mr. Schmidt, a proponent of Internet connectivity who likes to describe the Web as the enemy of despots, said he urged North Korean officials he met in Pyongyang to let more North Koreans use the Internet.

The map is still not very detailed in much of the country, though it does include four enormous prison camps, highlighting them in gray shading. Google Maps is unlikely to provide important new information to policy makers and others who already have satellite maps from years of surveillance to depend on. But the crowdsourcing project provides a tool for Internet users anywhere in the world to help identify at least some features in the isolated country that the regime in Pyongyang doesn’t want the world to know. (The regime cherishes secrecy to such an extent that its propagandists liked to boast: “When our enemies try to peek into our republic, they only see a fog.”)

At the moment, the map released Tuesday is far less detailed than North Korean maps available in South Korean bookstores, or on a digital atlas using Google Earth published on the Web site 38 North.

In recent years, Internet bloggers and activists have relied on Google Earth, and defectors from North Korea, to locate several places believed to be prison camps. In each of the gulags, international human rights groups have said, thousands of political prisoners have been forced into hard labor for crimes like criticizing the ruling Kim dynasty in Pyongyang.

“So far, Google’s efforts are largely symbolic,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea specialist at Dongguk University in Seoul. “It won’t be easy to make a Google map of North Korea of the kind you see of other countries.”

The premise of the crowdsourcing tool called Google Map Maker — Internet users filling in information about their neighborhood to help update and perfect a map — is severely limited for North Korea. The country is cut off from the Internet, except for its tiny elite, and even that group’s access is controlled.

Google can try to enlist the more than 24,000 North Korean defectors who live in South Korea, one of the world’s most wired countries. But most of them come from the north of the country and, given the tight control on people’s movements, their knowledge of other parts of North Korea before their defection is limited.

There was no immediate North Korean reaction to Google’s announcement on Tuesday.

Google said that although its map of North Korea is incomplete, it could be important to some South Koreans who originated from the North and who could now identify their old home villages.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/world/asia/google-maps-new-target-secretive-north-korea.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Advertising: Playing Whac-a-Mole With Piracy Sites

January 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Lately, though, new attention has turned to an aspect of online commerce that critics say finances online piracy: advertising.

Prodding from the White House and a recent academic report have put pressure on the online advertising industry to prevent ads — for jeans, say, or car insurance — from appearing on a page offering a free download of Season 2 of “Game of Thrones.” Yet these efforts have also been slow to produce results, in part because of the complexity of the online ad system.

This month, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab released a report that ranked 10 ad networks on the amount of business they do with sites suspected of engaging in piracy, with Google and Yahoo placing high on the list. Ad networks use advanced computer algorithms to place ads on Web sites. They can be run by agencies, publishers or others.

The implicit criticism of the report is that the operators of these networks know which sites traffic in copyright infringement and therefore could keep ads — and ad money — away from them if they wanted to.

“Brands make sure that their ads never show up on porn sites, so we’re basically saying, why not do the same with piracy sites?” said Jonathan Taplin, the director of the Innovation Lab, which is part of U.S.C.’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

But some of the ad networks cited by the report have disputed its methodology and meaning. And even its supporters complain that the online ad system — a chain of Web sites, ad servers, digital publishers and agency trading desks that buy and sell ads at a rapid pace — operates in a way that makes it difficult to know where to point the finger.

The researchers studied the fragments of computer code that were appended to the ads they found on sites suspected of piracy over a year. The sites were drawn from a report by Google listing sites that had received the most complaints from copyright holders.

Representatives of Google and OpenX, two of the largest companies on U.S.C.’s list, did not deny the prevalence of their codes. But they disputed its meaning, saying that their technology is widely used by third parties — like ad agency trading desks and advertisers — so the presence of their code did not necessarily implicate them in a transaction.

“To grossly overcalculate our network, you’re also grossly overcalculating how many of these sites we are funding,” said Andrea Faville, a Google spokeswoman. Mitch Stoltz, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was more aggressive, calling the U.S.C. report “a little bit of analysis resting on false premises.”

The report comes a year after the failure of the Stop Online Piracy Act, a Congressional bill that would have given additional powers to federal law enforcement to prosecute copyright infringement. The bill was supported by the media and entertainment world, but activists and technology companies said it would violate due process and privacy.

Since then, the government has tried to press industry to regulate itself.

“We believe that effective enforcement must involve private sector stakeholder efforts,” Victoria Espinel, the United States intellectual property enforcement coordinator, said in a statement. “Voluntary best practices must be practical and effective, must respect privacy, due process, competition, free speech, and must protect legitimate uses of the Internet.”

A lack of progress toward self-regulation has frustrated media companies. They say the opacity of the online ad system makes it nearly impossible to hold any party responsible for the ads.

“The ecosystem for online ads is incredibly complicated,” said Cary Sherman, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America. “Everybody can point the finger at other people.”

One example is programmatic buying, a technique used by networks to place ads on sites based primarily on demographics. As a result, a brand may not know every site where its ad will appear.

One solution floated in the ad business is a blacklist of offending Web sites. Dick O’Brien, the executive vice president and director of government relations at the American Association of Advertising Agencies, a trade group, said this would be difficult. “If an organization like ours tries to create a list and organize a boycott, that opens us up to antitrust issues,” he said.

Advertising agencies, including OMD, a digital agency part of the Omnicom Media Group, one of the largest agencies in the world, said they were examining the report, but so far little significant action has been taken. Stephen Kline, the senior counsel for privacy and regulatory matters at the Omnicom Media Group, described the challenge for brands and agencies to identify piracy sites that appear as quickly as they disappear as “a little bit of Whac-a-Mole.”

As Mr. Taplin of the Innovation Lab sees it, Google has effectively provided a blacklist with its Transparency Report, which lists the sites that have received the most takedown requests from copyright owners. But these are only requests, not proof of illegal behavior.

The next edition of the U.S.C. report is due in mid-February. Mr. Taplin said it would name brands that advertise on pirate sites. In an interview, he said he was not ready to identify those brands, but he noted that insurance companies were among the biggest offenders.

Mr. Taplin said the report had not been done for any media company or organization, but, as a veteran of the music and film industries, he also made no secret of his sympathies with Big Content.

He told the story of his friend Levon Helm of the Band, who died last year. (Mr. Taplin was a producer of the band’s 1978 concert film, “The Last Waltz.”) Mr. Helm, he said, had to tour, despite having cancer, to make up for money he lost from royalties, in part because of piracy.

“That didn’t seem fair to me.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/business/media/playing-whac-a-mole-with-piracy-sites.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

France Proposes an Internet Tax

January 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The idea surfaced Friday in a report commissioned by President François Hollande, which described various measures his government was taking to address what the French see as tax avoidance by Internet companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook.

These companies gather vast reams of information about their users, harnessing it to tailor their services to individuals’ interests or to direct customized advertising to them. So extensive is the collection of personal details, and so promising the business opportunities linked to it, that the report described data as the “raw material” of the digital economy.

“They have a distinct value, poorly reflected in economic science or official statistics,” the report said.

Google generates more than $30 billion a year in advertising revenue, including an estimated €1.5 billion, or $2 billion, in France. Yet, like other American Internet companies, it pays almost no taxes in France. That state of affairs upsets France’s policy makers, as public finances have been stretched thin and French Internet companies struggle to gain traction.

“We want to work to ensure that Europe is not a tax haven for a certain number of Internet giants,” the digital economy minister, Fleur Pellerin, told reporters in Paris on Friday.

But getting Google and other U.S. technology companies to pay more corporate taxes on their profits in France could take a long time, the report acknowledges, because this will require international cooperation.

In the meantime, France has discussed a variety of other taxes. Under the predecessor to Mr. Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy, the government proposed a levy on Internet advertising. But that idea languished after local companies complained that it would affect them more than Google. Mr. Hollande’s government is also overseeing talks between Google and French online publishers, who want the search engine to pay them for linking to their content.

The report published Friday said a tax on data collection was justified on grounds that users of services like Google and Facebook are, in effect, working for these companies without pay by providing the personal information that lets them sell advertising.

The report says tax rates would be based on the number of users an Internet firm tracked, to be verified by outside auditors. The authors did not recommend tax rates or estimate how much money such a levy could raise.

Google said in a statement that it was reviewing the nearly 200-page report.

“The Internet offers huge opportunities for economic growth and employment in Europe, and we believe public policies should encourage that growth,” the company said.

The new tax would require legislation, which the government said could be introduced by the end of the year. But other revenue-generating proposals championed by Mr. Hollande have encountered difficulty. A plan for a 75 percent income tax rate on earnings of more than €1 million a year was rejected by the highest court in France, which called it discriminatory.

Any proposal to generate taxes from the gathering of personal information could also draw scrutiny from the French privacy regulator, which has raised concerns about the amount of data that companies like Google and Facebook collect.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/business/global/21iht-datatax21.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,
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