Yahoo Japan, the biggest portal in the nation, has said today it will use Google’s search engine to power its search instead of following Yahoo Inc.’s decision to use Microsoft’s Bing for search.
By teaming up with Google, the venture will control almost 100 percent of the search market in the world’s second largest economy.
Yahoo went with Microsoft after U.S. regulators blocked a deal with Google under anti-monopoly laws. Yahoo Inc. owns about 30 percent of Yahoo Japan.
Additionally, Yahoo Japan will “also adopt Google’s search-linked advertisement delivery system and feed its data to Google sites,” says Reuters.
Yahoo Japan President Masahiro Inoue said they thoroughly looked into both Microsoft’s and Google’s search technology and they found Microsoft’s “not strong” enough for its needs. A main example cited was Japanese language search capabilities.
Result for: economy
A new proposal in Britain, taken up by the House of Commons today, wants to make it law that ISPs are forced to block access to all sites that offer unauthorized movies, music and other pirated content like games and books.
Content holders say the amendment will finally give them “the tools to tackle the piracy problem at the supply and demand levels,” says the NYTimes, but critics see censorship of the Internet and general undermining of the development of England’s digital economy.
The Open Rights Group, which has been fighting against Internet censorship, says the new law will certainly be abused, allowing individuals or companies to “suppress any Web content they find objectionable, under the pretext of protecting their copyright.”
The British government says curbing piracy will bring hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue to the entertainment industry, which accounts for 6 percent of economic output, but critics say the policies will be expensive for the ISPs, and taxpayers will be forced to help pay for the enforcement of policies they couldn’t care less about.
Result for: economy
Rock star Bono, of the group U2 made some interesting quotes today, in regards to illegal file sharing and the music and movie industries.
“The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files,” says Bono, adding that in just a few years, bandwidth will be so abundant, and connections so fast that entire movies can be downloaded in under a minute, regardless of size.
“A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us,” he added.
Bono does believe that Internet content can be tracked, and cited the US’ effort to stop child pornography as well as China’s to suppress online gaming and pornography.
“Perhaps movie moguls will succeed where musicians and their moguls have failed so far, and rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world, where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly four percent of gross domestic product,” Bono concluded.
