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Several emerging countries are rallying behind a campaign to have the International Telecommunications Union, the U.N.'s global standards body for telecommunications, declare the Internet a global telecommunications system, U.S. officials testified on Thursday before the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. Led by China, Russia, India and now Egypt, which recently launched its own proposal, such a move would allow state-owned telephone networks to expand into VoIP. It would also give them the opportunity to charge fees for Internet service - and put the Internet at the mercy of international politics.

"[Russia and China] have a concept that they call 'information security,' the ambassador told Rep. Ed Markey (D - Mass.). "Their concept of information security is both what we would call 'cybersecurity' - the physical protection of their networks - but it goes beyond that to address content that they regard as unwanted. I think as much as anything else, the base motivations that Russia and China have involve regime stability, regime preservation, which for them involves preventing unwanted content from being made widely available in their countries."

ICANN Vice President and Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf told Congress he's concerned about any number of efforts by international bodies - the ITU being just one of several - to seize control of the world's Internet policy agenda.

Imagine people in developing countries thinking Facebook is the gateway to the Internet. They would log into Facebook to access email, Wikipedia pages, weather information, and food prices. If they wanted additional services like the ability to stream video, they can buy it with a simple click—through Facebook. That’s Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for Internet.org. 

“Connecting the world” is Facebook’s vision—one that can’t be achieved without the support of other organizations, including the six telecom companies it partnered with for the Internet.org initiative.  Zuckerberg said the organization is looking for an additional three to five partners to bring on board, ones that will bet big that Facebook subsidies of social services will pay off by up-selling their data plans.

By using Facebook as an on-ramp to the Internet, the next one billion people will use social logins not just to control various apps, but their entire Internet usage. 

There were 2.4 billion people on the internet at the end of 2012, up 8% from 2011.

While many Facebook advertisers justly focus on the US, UK and Western Europe, a lot can be said about considering other countries.  India, Indonesia and Brazil and Mexico are among the top 5 countries on Facebook according to Socialbakers.

Compared to TV, there is a significant discrepancy in the amount of time consumers spend on mobile devices relative to advertising spend.  While we spend 12 percent of our time on mobile devices, mobile advertising dollars only account for 3 percent of total spending.

In Norway, the leading country in the region, 63.5% of the population will use a mobile phone to access the internet at least once per month in 2014. With Denmark and Sweden a few points behind, and Italy lagging other countries with an expected 42.7% of the population using the mobile internet via phone, Western Europe will average 48.2% mobile phone internet penetration this year.

Western Europe’s mobile phone internet user base is expected to undergo steady growth, primarily driven by smartphone adoption. Between 2013 and 2017, the penetration rate of mobile phone internet users among mobile phone users will rise from 49.0% to 77.8%.

advertising technology called remarketing has proven alienating to online consumers. Remarketing, which lets advertisers follow someone around the Internet with a display ad, based on a previous search engine query, specific site visit, or other online action by the user, has increased in popularity in recent years.

The rapid spread of SnapChat--the picture sharing app that auto-deletes photos after ten seconds--shows that young people increasingly understand the need to keep some things secret, or at least to control the visibility and content of their communications. The migration of Millennials away from Facebook to the more anonymous Tumblr may be another sign. And the outcry raised by young Tumblr users in the wake of news that Yahoo! was purchasing the platform--driven by fears of more corporate control and increased advertising--only underscores the point.

Millennials are in the vanguard of mainstream online behavior: they were first on Facebook (after college students invited to the join in its earliest days), followed by their parents. A Millennial move towards greater online secrecy could represent the beginning of a larger shift that warrants additional research.

Mobile interaction is the Internet 3.0. If Internet 1.0 was static websites and Internet 2.0 was all about the first social sites designed for interaction, 3.0 is now about the mobile platforms and apps that are driving more and more online traffic and more customized user experiences. As noted above, there will be a huge increase of mobile-only Internet users in the next few years, leading to whole new ways of web usage that demand marketers’ attention.

According data from comScore, the amount of video watched via the Internet continues to climb. In June, 33 billion videos were viewed online.

Where are people getting all of this video content? Google Sites (primarily YouTube) is leading the pack. In June, Google attracted 154, 507 million unique users that viewed an impressive 1,238.1 minutes per video.

comScore shows Google led the market for video ads in June by serving up 1.41 billion ads that reached almost 25 percent of the total US population.

De todo o tráfego gerado este ano na Internet, 61,5% não foi feito por pessoas, mas sim por bots

Em comparação com o ano anterior é possível constatar um aumento de 21% no tráfego total de bots

Uma grande parte destes bots, 20,5%, correspondem a perfis falsos de pessoas que tentam interagir com os utilizadores através das redes sociais.

This past October, Newsday, the Long Island daily newspaper, was purchased for $650 million, and its website, newsday.com, was put behind a pay wall. For just $5 a week, users could gain access to the site, but after three months on the market, how many had subscribed? Thirty-five people.

close to 49% of respondents used free micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter, that doesn't mean any ever plan to spend money on the services. When asked if they'd ever pay for Twitter, 100% said no.

Rupert Murdoch's London Times had gained just 15,000 paid subscribers after putting up its new pay wall. What's more, the wall cut Web traffic by two-thirds, with some estimating it could plummet as much as 90%.

What matters is that they are even capable of viewing and collecting our personal, private data in this way. Why is it even possible that Verizon has this level of data to disclose? Why is it even possible that Apple can infer and cache our locations based on metadata? Why is it even possible that our emails can be skimmed for advertising opportunities? If we did not explicitly permit these things, then we have implicitly done so by choosing to go ahead and use the Internet this way either because the pros outweighed the cons. But now the cons are starting to add up.

we use the Internet as a sort of phantom extension of our own computers, putting things where they are accessible to us but we are not responsible for them. This was the so-called web 2.0: every personal computer and device, vastly more powerful and connected than ever before, yet acting as a thin client. Clearly, this is where we began to lose touch with reality.

How did we decide we were in control of the data we sent Google or Facebook? Why would we submit to such an obvious delusion? Does anyone really believe that these companies have our best interests in mind to any greater a degree than a dairy farmer and his cows? We submitted because they were the only option

o consumo 2.0 é uma tendência transversal a toda a Europa. Entre 2011 e 2012, o mercado do e-commerce europeu passou de 254 mil milhões de euros para mais de 305 mil milhões, uma progressão superior a 20%. Em Portugal, 79% dos consumidores espera, no futuro, fazer compras através da Internet, o que representa um aumento face aos 72% atuais.

17% afirmam não querer aderir ao e-commerce, percentagem que em Portugal chega aos 21%. Segundo o estudo do Observador Cetelem, a falta de confiança ainda é uma limitação incontornável desta forma de consumo.

Outro parâmetro analisado no estudo, é a questão do pagamento online. Na Europa Ocidental, os consumidores são ainda céticos em relação a este modelo, muito mais do que na Europa de Leste, onde os receios residem na qualidade do produto, que não é verificável através do ecrã do computador.

Total digital ad revenue is now on the verge of passing broadcast television to become the top media source in the U.S. for ad revenue.

Mobile ad revenue more than doubled from the previous year to $3.4 billion from $1.6 billion, the second year in a row that mobile ad revenue has experienced triple-digit growth. Digital video revenue increased by 29% in 2012 to $2.3 billion and search ad revenue increased by 14% to $16.9 billion.

Search ad revenue still accounts for nearly half of all digital ad revenues, but it's share ticked down slightly last year while the share from mobile ads increased from 5% in 2011 to 9% in 2012.

Digital advertising revenues climbed to a milestone high of $36.6 billion in 2012

That historic number marks a 15 percent rise over 2011’s full-year number, which itself had been the highest on record, at $31.7 billion.

2012’s fourth quarter numbers, at $10.3 billion, rose by 14.9 percent from $9 billion in the final quarter of 2011. These 2012 Q4 figures represent an uptick of 11.6 percent over Q3 2012, which came in at $9.2 billion.

How big is the smartphone market? Try these numbers on for size: from 1997 to 2012, there were 1.038 billion smartphones in use, enough for 1 for for every 6.7 people on the planet. But (and here's the real mind blower), while it took 16 years to get the first billion smartphones online, the next one billion smartphones will be sold in the next two years.

The days of the desktop user as the dominant Internet force are about to end.

sometime in 2013, according to a graph from Morgan Stanley Research embedded in the infographic, the number of mobile Internet users is expected to surpass the number of desktop Internet users.

Over time, we create an Internet that matches our world view through the click signals we send. We aren’t exposed to different points of view, which Pariser says is a threat to everything from creativity to democracy. Adding to the threat is that the filter bubble usually works behind the scenes: In fact, it must go unnoticed to be effective. So while we make the media that ultimately makes us, we don’t notice that we’re being exposed to certain content because we never see the content we’re missing.

Pariser outlines several ways to address the problem, including building serendipity into search engines and helping users find alternative viewpoints, particularly when it comes to news.

“Internet Everywhere means that our old conception of the world separated into an online and an offline space is no longer relevant. Traditional social media required that we live experiences in the offline world, record those experiences, and then post them online to recreate the experience and talk about it,” Spiegel said. But constant connectivity means there’s no longer a disconnect between when media is taken and when it could be shared. Or, as Spiegel said, “We no longer have to capture the ‘real world’ and recreate it online – we simply live and communicate at the same time.”

“The selfie makes sense as the fundamental unit of communication on Snapchat because it marks the transition between digital media as self-expression and digital media as communication,” he said.

When you first load a webpage, the first thing that happens is it generates an impression, which is then forwarded to an ad server. So far, so good, but you might be surprised by how much that ad server knows about you. Using information gathered from Internet cookies, social media, and more, an ad server is capable of generating a unique profile of various metrics, almost like a QR code, that contains everything it knows about you: how old you are, your relationship status, what websites you browse, where you're located, etc. With that code generated, the ad server tries to match it against a pre-sold inventory of ads, almost like a key fitting into a lock. If the key fits, the process ends there, and an ad is returned that advertisers believe jibes with your unique personal profile. But it's what happens if the server doesn't have an ad that matches where things gets interesting.

Without a pre-sold ad to serve you, an ad server forwards your profile to an international ad exchange, where a network of different ad servers examine it and bid on it in real time. In a fraction of a second, a host of third-party servers around the world go into a bidding war for the opportunity to show you an ad, with the highest bidder taking the prize and filling your eyes.

The average top 1,000 web page is 1575 KB.

Page growth is a major reason why we keep finding, quarter after quarter, that pages are getting slower. And faster networks are not a cure-all for the challenges of page bloat.

According to Akamai’s most recent quarterly State of the Internet report, the global average connection speed among the top 50 internet-using countries is 3.3 Mbps — a 5.2% increase over the previous quarter. But when we’re seeing year-over-year page growth ranging from 45-50%, it’s easy to see that the gap is widening.