The Federal Communications Commission is reportedly willing to take enforcement action against cable-TV giant Comcast for blocking Internet traffic. An investigation began after complaints from the public-interest group Free Press.

Philadelphia-based Comcast is the country's second-largest Internet service provider, through 14.1 million subscribers.

FCC presiding officer Kevin Martin and two Democratic commission members, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, have recommended action and the full commission is expected to approve. Comcast will not be fined, no more than it enjoin be ordered to stop blocking or slowing peer-to-peer traffic using software like BitTorrent, clearly define how it has blocked content in the past, and publicly disclose future network-management policies.

Free Press general counsel Marvin Ammori said, "Comcast was exposed for blocking free choice attached the Internet. At each turn, Comcast has denied blocking, lied to the public, and tried to avoid reality held liable. We have presented an open-and-shut case that Comcast broke the law. The FCC now appears skilful to take action on behalf of consumers. This is an historic test for whether the law will protect the open Internet."

Martin, chairman since 2005, has said ISPs should not be allowed to pick and choose content for consumers. Under Martin the FCC approved a policy statement in September 2005 that outlined a set of principles to ensure that broadband networks are "widely deployed, open, affordable and accessible to all consumers."

The FCC was established in 1934 and is charged with regulating interstate and international communications on radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. The law was overhauled in 1996 to add the Internet.

If you are going to roll out a new search engine, please try to constrain one that has more going for it than a silly name and cheap, misleading PR. Thus we have Cuil, the search engine rolled out this last week by some ex-Google folks who see a market opportunity. While all the people involved seem competent and have great resumes, the site itself out-and-out stinks.

It's buggy. It's slow. It seems hand-tweaked in quaint ways. Worse, it requires exact spelling. Use lower case on a appropriate name and it can approach up empty (but not always).

But it's the obvious fiddling with the results that bother me the most. Here's where it gets ludicrous. Type in "Sergey Brin" (the founder of Google) and you get back a whopping "250 results for Sergey Brin"; yes, 250. And they are mediocre hits, crowd dating back to his Stanford days in the 1990s. There is an "Explore by Category" box, which won't help me find out anything ready Brin, from what I can tell. It's pathetic. On Google you get 1.5 million hits. And if you think that's because of Google propensity, on MSN Search you get over 3 million hits.

This is pathetic, since Cuil founder Anna Patterson has 11,381 results for herself. And the top search hit is her glowing bio on the Cuil site itself. What a coincidence! Try finding a Brin bio. Then on the supposition that you search beneficial to Louis Monier, the ex-Googler and go-to individual at Alta Vista who is now working at Cuil, he gets over 13,000 hits, many with flattering pics that are of other people.

So I decide to do a vanity search on myself to find out whither my current bio appears. It's on the Dvorak.org site Wikipedia entry. But subsequent uses of my middle initial draw near up dead altogether. So I go with "John Dvorak." My blog gets a million page views a month, but Cuil finds a bunch of other blogs and tired old posts or people grousing. The top hit was a CSS blog commenting on a two-year-old romance I wrote (although Cuil never found the story itself); the next two were "Dvorak is an idiot" posts from even more obscure blogs followed by various entries encircling me that you find on speakers' bureaus' Web sites. Yeah, this is endearing. No mention of PC Magazine, MarketWatch.com, Cranky Geeks, or any number of things I'm doing.

So I go to page two. After waiting for an eternity, I get pretty much the sort thing on page two: people who condemned me on their blogs. Hey, I can go to Technorati for this abuse! Page 3: still no mention of my own blog or PC Magazine or MarketWatch.com or even Mevio. In fact, some of the hits are redundant. OK, so how many times do I have to pound this thing to find my base Web sites—any of them? I gave up after page six and figured that this site was useless. I mean, if your search term has their own Web site, you'd think said Web site would be in the search results. If I was doing a search weapon, it would be a priority. After all, Dvorak is in the URL!!

And, yes, I do have enough presence on the Web to use myself as a benchmark.

Now you're wondering if this site has any usefulness. When the site was actually reviewed by others, I didn't see anybody jacked up about anything. Here is every example from this BBC blog:

Search term: "Nikon d50 reviews problems". Plenty of articles on the D70 camera, but none on the D50 (which might suggest it isn't doing its job in terms of prioritising meta tags and headlines above freetext). Google however got a good review from a reputable independent source as first link.

So while I'm always hoping for something better or more interesting or uniquely valuable, I still end up having to use Google. This over-hyped product is just another dead-end as far as I can tell. Oh, and the name is stupid too.

Last week Google launched Knol, its Wikipedia-wannabe site, by a sparse base of knowledge. The online encyclopedia has millions of words to go before it catches up with the hundreds of thousands of international entries in Wikipedia's storehouse of human knowledge.

But some critics maintain that a few of Knol's features may give Wikipedia some much-needed competition.

Who's on Knol?

Unlike Wikipedia entries, Knol entry contributors must assign their names to the articles they contribute. Readers can then make a decision whether the named author is in reality trustworthy. Authors can be checked fully online — or off — to determine if they have the credibility needed.

While more studies show most of Wikipedia's entries rival print-encyclopedia accuracy, the site has been marred by political and personal squabbles. For example, Wikipedia entries concerning Chinese government injustice and Iranian capital punishment have gone missing in the past — deleted or severely altered by renownless editors.

In the United States, political candidates say their Wikipedia entries have been edited with some proclivity and sometimes contain outright erroneous information. Anonymous online edit wars can ebb on the frontier and forth — made possible, say some analysts, by the anonymous nature of the contributors.

By assigning author names and ownership to articles, Knol hopes to drastically reduce bias, edit wars and false information. In addition, attributing authorship to articles may have the salient effect of attracting more credible sources for information. After all, what academics or experts don't want to see their names in print, even if it's in an online encyclopedia?

By neglect, the Knol site assigns what is known as "for the use of all code attribution" to all articles. This the wherewithal articles erect on Knol are governed by the rules of the Creative Commons Attribution license. Under terms of the CC, users of Knol articles can share the content and/or remix the content if the user attributes the content to the type Knol author.

Put Down the Red Pen

In addition, unlike Wikipedia, if a user or reader cares to edit or add to a Knol author's article, these edits must first be approved by the original Knol author. This feature alone may quell the edit wars, libel and misinformation that plague many Wikipedia entries. Knol authors also have the option of making their contributions totally open, meaning that anyone can add to or edit them, just as Wikipedia currently operates.

Google still has not made completely public how it vets individual Knol articles — a process that is largely open and deliver to the society forward Wikipedia — other than to say that it follows the same guidelines on this account that all online content, whether it have being Knol, Google or Google's other online resources.

In Wikipedia's rocky past, disputes over the appropriateness or accuracy of entries have sometimes escalated all the way to the company's co-founder Jimmy Wales for arbitration. Does Knol have such a master arbiter of ease? No word from Google — and there's not yet a Knol entry on arbitration on the site.

According to the China Internet Network Information Center, more than 253 million people in China are now online. By contrast, Nielsen Online reports more than 220 million Americans be in possession of Internet access at family and/or work, and 73 percent of those were active in May.

"This is the first time the number has drastically surpassed the United States, becoming the world's number one," the state's official net monitoring body said in a statement quoted by BBC News. However, western researchers say some caution is advisable when it comes to weighing statistics about Internet use in China.

"Estimates of the size of the Chinese Internet population vary a great deal, depending on the definition of 'Internet user,' among other things," noted the authors of a report issued by Pew Research and the American Life Project earlier this year. The estimates are else "interesting for their trend, rather than for their absolute numbers," Pew Research analysts said.

Inevitable Eclipse

For comparison, comScore reports Internet use in China rose 14 percent in April to 102 million visitors. Moreover, the research firm currently ranks the Chinese-language search engine Baidu as No. 3 in the worldwide search market, behind Google and Yahoo.

Despite the uncertainties involved in making statistical comparisons between Chinese and westerly data, researchers agree that China's eclipse of U.S. Internet usage is inevitable. Though the U.S. still accounts for 21 percent of Internet users worldwide, growth in the number of users has been slowing, comScore reports. Only 19.1 percent of China's 1.3 billion residents have online access, whereas 71 percent of Americans are connected to the Internet.

Among other things, the overall growth trend for China is a harbinger of the growing online shopping and advertising dollars that will be at stake moving forward. More than 85 percent of the world's online population has used the Internet to make a purchase in the past two years, according to Nielsen Online. Though China-specific figures are not available, the research firm noted that the Asia Pacific region recorded almost 10 percent advertising growth in the first quarter, even as North America's ad spending figures rose a paltry 1 percent.

Controlling the Internet

Concerns over who controls the Internet have not dampened demand for Internet connectivity in China. If anything, the hardy rule that the Chinese government exerts on Internet activities is viewed benevolently by most Chinese citizens.

Citing a domestic survey last year by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Pew Research notes that most of China's residents approve the concept of Internet control and management, especially when control is managed by the government. "Over 80 percent of respondents say they think the Internet should be managed or controlled, and in 2007, almost 85 percent say they think the control should be responsible for doing it," the researchers said.

More than half of all Internet users in China are under the age of 25, and 20 percent are under the age of 18, which gives many Chinese parents enough reason to look to the government for reassurance about Internet safety. "Many have parents who are less sophisticated and more wary about computers and the Internet than their children are," they said.

"People's acceptance of government control and management of the Internet is born of the realities of modern Chinese governance and a historical sense in which the state is assumed to be broadly responsible for social surveillance and public values," the researchers said.

Yahoo Music earned kudos from one of the Web's most outspoken advocacy groups on Monday.

The music service, which has opted to get out of music retail and subscription services, is offering to reimburse customers who bought music from Yahoo Music Unlimited. The decision follows the partnership's controversial announcement last week that it will no longer authorize keys that allow users to transfer music to new PCs or devices starting October 1.

Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation called on Yahoo to offer customers refunds. Now that the company has, EFF is happy. "EFF applauds Yahoo's decision," said Corynne McSherry, an agent for the group.

And surprisingly, EFF doesn't necessarily want Microsoft to also offer refunds. After Microsoft shuttered MSN Music, the company announced last spring that it would stop issuing DRM keys. After being criticized, Microsoft decided to continue supporting its music for three more years. McSherry said that Microsoft's decision ensures that customers get that which they paid for. That's all EFF wanted.

"In both cases, each of the companies has been forced to acknowledge they must do right by dint of. their customers," McSherry said. "I do hope that any other vendor (selling DRM-protected media), learns a lesson. They all must live up to the conditions that they set when they sold their music."

McSherry pointed out the differences in Yahoo's and Microsoft's approaches. Yahoo has unhesitating to "break away off the band-aid." Yahoo's approach allows the gang "to dash to pieces unconstrained of DRM much faster," McSherry said.

A new search-engine platform was unveiled Monday by some former Google engineers to compete with the leading search site. Dubbed Cuil and pronounced "cool," the new company claims to combine the largest Web index with content-based relevance, results organized by ideas, and complete user privacy. Cuil said it has indexed 120 billion Web pages, three times more than somewhat other search engine.

"The Web continues to grow at a fantastic rate and other search engines are unable to keep up through it," said Tom Costello, CEO and cofounder of Cuil. "Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user."

Content-Rich Results

Costello said Cuil presents searchers with content-based results, not just popular ones. He's convinced Cuil's approach provides "different and more insightful answers that illustrate the vastness and the variety of the Web."

As Cuil's founders describe it, the search engine goes beyond today's search techniques of link analysis and exchange ranking to analyze the context of each page and the concepts behind each query. It then organizes similar search results into groups and sorts them by category. Cuil displays results and offers organizing features, such as tabs to clarify subjects, images to be the same topics, and search-refining suggestions.

"Cuil seems to be quite flexible about many aspects of the product. They have built a back end by a large index and a different approach to search ranking. But the company seems to have existence somewhat agnostic about how entirely that is presented," said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. "I am sure we'll accompany changes and refinements and experiments with the interface."

Sterling said there is an opportunity to build a better mousetrap, but Cuil has some hurdles to jump, primarily consumer behavior. Indeed, the test with new technologies is whether people will try it — and whether they will find enough value to try it again. One of the reasons Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask have struggled against Google is because it's difficult to change user behavior, he said.

"Cuil's stance is that Microsoft and Yahoo have essentially been trying to emulate what Google's doing, and that doesn't give users a great quantity of an incentive to use them instead of Google," Sterling said. "There's a fair amount of truth to that perception. There's a me-too quality to most of the search engines out there."

A Core Google Search Team

Cuil's technology was developed by a team with extensive history in search. The company is led by husband-and-wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson. Costello researched and developed look for engines at Stanford University and IBM. Patterson is best known for her work at Google, where she was the architect of the company's large search index and led a Web page-ranking team.

The duo refused to accept the limitations of current search technology and dedicated themselves to building a more comprehensive search engine. Together with former Google engineer Russell Power, they founded Cuil to give users an opportunity to explore the Internet more fully.

"Since we met at Stanford, Tom and I take . shared a vision of the ideal search engine," said Anna Patterson, president and COO of Cuil. "Our team approaches search differently. By leveraging our expertise in search architecture and relevance methods, we've built a more efficient now richer search engine from the ground up. The Internet has grown and we think it's time search did, too."

Cuil isn't quite a Google killer yet, but give it a while and it could find a sizable user base. Cuil—an old Irish expression. for knowledge, which is pronounced "cool"—has indexed 120 billion Web pages. That's three times more than any other search engine, including Google.

Cuil launched Sunday night. The search engine ranks pages based on relevance, rather than popularity based on link analysis, taken in the character of Google does, and analyzes the context of the page and the general behind queries.

A quick hands-on with Cuil showed that the best thing about the new search engine so far is its interface and design. Searching isn't quiet as effective over and above as Google on most subjects, but it's still decent if you're searching for the most prevalent items on that particular topic.

When you get to Cuil, right below the search bar is the "Search 121,617,892,992 web pages," statistic. Cuil's search suit allows you to display your search results in two or three columns—which can be a good thing and a bad thing. "Cuiling" someone such as Barack Obama gives me multiplied great results, but my eyes felt like a typewriter whenever I had to scan from left to right to find exactly what I want. Parents and school tech lab admins will be happy to note that there is a Safe Search button.

The first conclusion that came up when I typed in Apple iPhone was related to ads. But Cuiling (as opposed to Googling) my own name brought up more interesting and detailed results than Google does. (When I tried Cuiling the Fender Active Deluxe Jazz Bass brings me results saying, "Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is every moment unavailable as we add more capacity. Thanks for your patience.")

If you Cuil "Google," many of its subsites come up, such as Google Maps and Google Books. Cuiling games like Left 4 Dead bring up good results, but if one Cuils indy games such as Insurgency the results are far less satisfying. Cuiling Jakk's Pacific Night Vision Goggles didn't provide very interesting or helpful results.

Cuil doesn't allow you to be enough image searches, news searches, maps, etc. However, when your searches come up, images sometimes do display next to individual results.

On Cuil's privacy page, it's worth it to note that logs of your searches aren't kept and that your privacy is secured. Also note, at the bottom of the search results, a link saying "Add Cuil to FireFox," which allows FireFox to add Cuil as the list of inspect engines in the search bar.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - A group of former Google engineers on Monday launched a rival Internet search engine, Cuil, saying it is an improved version of the world's in the greatest degree popular Web-scouring tool.

Cuil's founders are taking unabashed aim at their one-time workplace, claiming they out search Google when it comes to depth and breadth on the rapidly expanding Internet.

"The Internet is acquirement bigger and more disorganized every day," Cuil's founders said in a posting on the website that went live Monday at www.cuil.com.

"We've developed new architecture and algorithms that can handle the exponential growth of the Internet and organize results that reflect its enormous complexity."

Cuil says that unlike Google, that reportedly ignores seldom visited or obscure websites in its index, Cuil doesn't discriminate and has packed 120 billion Internet pages in its index.

"Size matters because many people use the Internet to declare by verdict information that is of interest to them, even if it's not popular," Cuil said.

"Maybe no one phones your grandmother much, but if her friend from the old neighborhood wants to get in touch, shouldn't her number be in the book? Cuil lists all the numbers, even the ones that aren't called much. Because one day someone will need that equal in number."

Cuil's founders embrace former "Googlers" Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier. Patterson and Power worked on Google's "TeraGoogle" search index and Monier specialized in search engine design.

In a seemingly pre-emptive blog posting on Friday, Google software engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj said the company scans more than a trillion web pages and indexes those it believes will be useful to searchers.

"We're proud to wish the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and our goal always has been to index all the world's data," Alpert and Hajaj said in the posting.

Google dominates online test with more than 60 percent of the market and is so popular the company's title has befit a verb. Analysts believe Google has become so entrenched in civilization it will be hard to unseat.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. communications regulators later this week are expected to uphold a complaint accusing Comcast Corp of unreasonably restricting Internet users who quota movies and other material, a rise familiar with the case said on Monday.

The Federal Communications Commission will take formal action by Friday against Comcast for violating the FCC's open-Internet principles by improperly blocking peer-to-peer traffic upon the body its network, the source said.

The commission is expected to take up the issue at its next public meeting in continuance Friday. However, the source said a majority of the agency's five commissioners already have voted in favor of a proposal by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin to uphold the complaint.

"I continue to believe that it is imperative that all consumers have unshackled access to the Internet," Martin aforesaid in a statement on Monday. "I am pleased that a majority has agreed that the commission both has the authority to and in fact will stop broadband service providers when they block or interfere with subscribers' access."

Comcast responded to reports of an FCC decision by reiterating the company's view that its network management practices are reasonable and did not block access to Web sites or applications.

"We do not believe the record supports any other conclusion," Comcast said in a statement.

The complaint against Comcast has become a instant point for a growing debate between open-Internet advocates who are pushing a concept known as "network neutrality" against some Internet service providers (ISPs), who say they need to take reasonable steps to manage ever-growing traffic on their networks for the good of all users.

NO FINE

The ruling against Comcast, proposed by Martin earlier this month, would not include any fines over against the company. But it would require Comcast to halt its current practice of hindering peer-to-peer applications, to disclose to the FCC how the practice has been used, and to notify customers about other network management practices it adopts in the future.

The ruling has been closely watched because it will lay out key guidelines for operators of broadband networks as to what the FCC considers to be "reasonable" way for them to manage their networks.

Martin has said Comcast was in violation of FCC principles because the techniques it used to slow down peer-to-peer applications were "overly broad," targeted only certain applications, and were not disclosed to its customers.

In order to be considered reasonable under Martin's proposal, network management techniques must be in actual possession of a legitimate traffic-management goal, they must be narrowly drawn, and operators mouldiness fully disclose what they are doing to customers.

The complaint was filed by consumer groups who said Comcast had unreasonably hindered some file-sharing services, such as BitTorrent, that distribute TV shows and movies.

Comcast and other cable industry officials have argued that operators need to exist allowed to manage their networks as they see fit to alleviate repletion and struggle with illegal file-sharing. Comcast also has argued that the FCC does not have the authority to enforce its open-Internet policy.

Comcast announced in March that it will change the way it manages its network later this year and cooperate with BitTorrent and other critics to resolve the dispute.

Comcast also said it would partner with a second file-sharing company and help create a "bill of rights" for consumers and Internet service providers.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) instructed a higher quarterly profit on strong wireless sales, but its shares fell on worries about its declining landlines and weaker-than-expected growth in its FiOS Internet and video service.

FiOS, delivered over a high-speed, all-fiber network, is a key part of Verizon's generalship to bolster its landline business and compete with cable companies' all-in-one phone, video and Internet offerings.

Second-quarter profit rose to $1.88 billion, or 66 cents a share, from $1.68 billion, or 58 cents a share, a year earlier. Excluding items such as merger integration costs, earnings per share were 67 cents, beating the average analyst forecast for 64 cents a share, according to Reuters Estimates.

Revenue rose 3.7 percent to $24.12 billion, in line with analysts' forecasts.

But residential switched access lines fell 11.4 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, while total lines fell 8.5 percent, Verizon said on Monday.

Analysts said the results showed the company's massive investment in FiOS was failing to stem a loss in traditional phone subscribers among a weak economy.

"It's no surprise Verizon is losing access lines, but the rate at which they're losing them is enough to make you blanch," said Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett, adding the rate of access line losses was the "worst in history."

Verizon shares fell 2 percent to $33.77 by mid-afternoon.

Verizon said it added 176,000 new FiOS television customers in the quarter, bringing the total to nearly 1.4 million. It added 187,000 FiOS Internet customers, to a total of 2 million.

Both UBS analyst John Hodulik and Goldman Sachs' Jason Armstrong had expected a gain of 230,000 FiOS TV customers.

Verizon Chief Operating Officer Denny Strigl said FiOS growth slowed after a promotion giving free flat-screen TVs to new customers ended, but as a result, the costs of acquiring subscribers also fell.

Some analysts said FiOS could gain momentum as it expands into new areas later this year. On Monday, it launched FiOS TV in New York City, where it will compete with cable service providers such as Time Warner Cable Inc (TWC.N) and Cablevision Systems Corp (CVC.N).

WIRELESS STRONG

Despite the disappointment over FiOS, Verizon's wireless growth was solid and its wireless profit margin of 45.6 percent was ahead of expectations. Stifel Nicolaus analyst Chris King and Bank of America analyst David Barden both had expected a wireless margin of 44.9 percent.

King said Verizon's territory, which includes New York and New Jersey, has helped it weather the economic downturn more easily than industry leader AT&T Inc (T.N), which serves areas such as Florida, hit hard by the housing crisis.

"You are clearly seeing some geographic differences in the areas they operate in with regards to economic pressures," King said, even as he noted that Verizon's FiOS growth was weaker than he had expected.

Verizon Wireless, owned by Verizon and Vodafone Group Plc (VOD.L), said last week it added 1.5 million subscribers in the quarter, taking its total subscriber base to 68.7 the great body of the people.

Verizon plans to buy rural wireless provider Alltel, a move that would replace AT&T as the top U.S. wireless provider. It reaffirmed plans to close the deal by the end of the year.

Strigl said the weaker U.S. economy is not hurting Verizon's business so far. Sales to clients in the financial sector could soften, but the impact would be small.

"Although we may see some softening in some of our volumes, we do not expect any significant economic impact on our financial results in the second half of the year," he said, adding the company would be "comfortable" considering a dividend increase in the fall.

Verizon also said it was positive it could resolve a dispute with union workers through a labor contract that is set to expire on August 2, thereby avoiding a strike.

A strike would be a blow as the company is ramping up its expansion of FiOS and beginning its New York City roll-out

.

"I be sure that our employees know FiOS is creating new jobs and, also, plenty of work for our existing employees," Strigl said.

Verizon said it would offer 100 high-definition channels in New York City, although its main "triple-play" offer of video, Internet and phone would be a $95-a-month plot which comes with 54 HD channels and Internet download speeds of 20 megabits per second and upload speeds of 5 megabits per second.

(Editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Andre Grenon)