Internet

Google Inc.'s CEO said Wednesday the Internet search company is in active negotiations with the Chinese government and expects some resolution in its dispute with Beijing soon.

Speaking at a media conference in the Middle East, Eric Schmidt declined to provide specifics or predict how long the discussions would last, saying that the company has decided not to publicize details of the talks.

It took three years, but former Yahoo executive Dan Rosensweig believes he has found another great Internet gig.

Rosensweig's career shifted in a new direction this week when he took over as CEO of Chegg.com, a Silicon Valley startup that says it has rented about 2.4 million textbooks to cash-strapped college students since its 2007 inception.

Microsoft has taken a step toward getting the federal government to pay attention to cloud-computing services. The Redmond, Wash.-based company is asking for a cloud-computing law.

Microsoft's senior vice president and top legal counsel, Brad Smith, has proposed that Congress institute the Cloud Computing Advancement Act to help foster trust in cloud-computing services and address privacy concerns.

The world is finally waking up to the full implications of Google's business, and they're not all pretty.

Leading the rebellion is News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, who is threatening to keep his newspaper content beyond the reach of Google searches. Murdoch wants to keep Google from reaping so many of the financial benefits of advertising placed adjacent to News Corp. content. He's being aided and abetted by Microsoft.

Egypt will apply for the first Internet domain written in Arabic, its information technology minister said Sunday at a conference grouping Yahoo's co-founder and others to discuss boosting online access in emerging nations.

Tarek Kamel said Egypt on Monday would apply for the new domain -- pronounced ".masr" but written in the Arabic alphabet -- making it the first Arab nation to apply for a non-Latin character domain. The effort is part of a broader push to expand both access and content in developing nations, where the Internet remains out of reach for wide swaths of the population.

On Thursday, Google launched a new feature that aims to silence privacy advocates who have criticized the search industry's data-collection and storage practices. If the initiative appeases the critics, other search engines could move to adopt similar strategies.

If the customer is king, then the customer's data are the crown jewels.

Over the past two decades, mobile operators have been privy to increasingly detailed information about their users. Aside from people who buy prepaid service with cash, mobile operators have always known the identity and location of customers. Now, thanks to big advances in the capabilities of mobile devices and the sophistication of applications and services, mobile users are leaving ever more wireless footprints all over the place.

Twitter Inc. is turning Japanese. Or at least trying to.

The popular microblogging service on Thursday launched a Japan-based mobile version, hoping to penetrate a country where other U.S. social networking sites including Facebook and MySpace have failed to capture much ground.

Japanese is Twitter's sole foreign language platform so far, and the company's efforts here indicate it's serious about making it in Japan.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has ended its decade-long arrangement with the U.S. Department of Commerce. The move gained applause from the European Commission, which had called for ICANN to consider a system run by the private sector.

Yahoo Inc. believes a lot of its good work has been overlooked by investors and the media so it's spending more than $100 million to get the word out to consumers directly.

The money is going toward the Internet company's most expensive marketing campaign since Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo started Yahoo's Web site 15 years ago. Yahoo provided a peek at the 15-month blitz Tuesday in New York.