• Eager to get some PR going just before the long summer break, the EU was on a roll and had sent shivers up to the top of Microsoft, the mobile operators in Europe and then finally Sony/BMG (although they remained quite cool about it - still). The latter came not from the European Commission but the European court who disagreed with a former approval of the Sony-Bertelsmann music label merger. Warner and EMI are now also getting nervous I assume.
• Net neutrality discussion is quite heated in the US currently. Two groups are in the ring: Network operators (phone, cable) vs. Internet players (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo). The Center for Democracy & Technology offers some middle way trying to preserve the openess of the Internet (without it we would have never seen that innovation) but also creating space for premium networks for which one has to pay to give an incentive for investments.
• The FAZ had an interesting article on the huge popularity of the Chinese blogosphere. Once more this was also triggered by sexual content when a journalist (alias "Muzimei") published her news. The first blog server four years ago was named "Bokee" which means "smart person". That is a good name since most bloggers have a higher education: 175 of the most prominent bloggers on the top 10 blog servers have occupations in IT, journalism, are students or stars from the show business. Most come from the largest cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Canton or Shenzhen. 48% talk about personal opinions on various topics, 24% on their day-to-day life, 17% give generic information, 11% show sexual content. The top ten blog servers are: Bokee, Donews, Anyp, Blogcn, Blogdriver, Tianyablog, Blogbus, Blog.csdn.net, Yculblog and Yourblog. Not surprisingly, there is no political content to be found and most bloggers keep their really hot news for sale to the media rather than breaking it for free on their blog site. This also reflects the business sense of the Chinese.
• i,cringley had written a very nice article on "WiMAX isn't what it seems, but then nothing else is, either" describing how the ISPs oversell and underdeliver (provision their wholesale networks with just 1% of what marketing claims). Now this week he gave some insight into what Skype's P2P network is all about and that they live off other people's computer resources, using them as nodes whenever (increasingly the case) no direct link between IP addresses can be established due to NAT or firewalls hiding them. Very clever way to build a "big" network with hardly any money. I wonder if eBay understood that they were buying a wooden cottage that has to be torn down first before one can build more space on top.

Today the EU commission announced for the first time ever in its 49 year history a decision to punish a company for illegal competitive behaviour. The total amount is 290 million EUR, which means 3 million EUR daily from July 31 on, that Microsoft will have to pay.

This comes at the same day when the EU also announced that it wants to cut the international wireless roaming charges in Europe by 70%.

In both cases female commissoners from the Netherlands are pushing the cases and give the accused a hard time.

• Viviane Reding, Information Society and Media Commissoner, against the European wireless operators
• Neelie Kroes, Competition, against Microsoft

In Microsoft's case there is practically no time left anymore so it is to be expected that the charges will indeed become effective.

In the other case it will take until mid-2007 before a final vote will become legal. So some more time for them to do it better than Microsoft and to not try to speculate that the bureaucracy of the EU could save them.