Few things in technology have been as transformative as the Internet. It has reshaped business and in some cases, made industries redundant. Don’t believe it? Think about what’s happened to neighborhood video rental stores now that we have Netflix and Amazon.

These Internet-based companies deliver streaming content immediately to devices or send DVDs by mail for purchase or rental, to be returned at the viewer’s leisure. The immediacy that these services provide has successfully made the idea of getting into a car and driving to a brick and mortar store to pick up a piece of plastic that you then have to drive back to at a later date to return your rented items seem…well, kind of inconvenient.

Streaming video aside, the Internet has grown massive in the past two decades, now boasting about 2 billion users according to recent estimates. But to get a better understanding of just how big the Internet has become, Intel put together an infographic detailing the amount of data transferred in a minute on the web.

Here are a few highlights from the infographic. In one minute on the Internet:

• 639,800 gigabytes of global IP data is transferred
• 135 botnet infections take hold
• 1,300 new mobile users are added
• 204 million e-mails are sent
• 2-plus million searches on Google are conducted
• 30 hours of video are uploaded on YouTube
• 227,000 users log in to Facebook

Although no concrete data is given to how many users post to and access newsgroups, numbers are thought to also be in the millions.

There was a battle taking place in the city of Tyler, Texas that had Yahoo, Amazon, Google, YouTube and even the internet’s father himself, Tim Berners-Lee, involved in a legal dispute over the future of the World Wide Web.

According to reports on USENET newsgroups, Chicago biologist and plaintiff Michael Doyle claimed that during their employment by the University of California in 1993, he and two co-inventors — now called Eolas Technologies — created and patented the “interactive web” before anyone else. He referred to a program he created at the San Francisco campus which allowed doctors to view embryos over the Internet. He claims that this was the first program that allowed users to interact with images within a browser window.

In a US federal court ruling in Texas an eight-man jury rejected Eolas’ claimed ownership of the technology ruling that the company’s patents were invalid, according to USENET reports. Eolas’ opponents had claimed the company’s patents were falsely based on existing inventions”.

Many of the companies Eolas had sued had settled the dispute out of court, including Apple and eBay, whilst the technology firm had previously won $565 million in settling a patent dispute with Microsoft.

After the settlement, the W3C contacted the patent office directly with a letter signed by Berners-Lee, stating that unless the disputed patent was invalidated, it would cause the “disruption of global web standards” and cause “substantial economic and technical damage to the operation of the World Wide Web.”

The defence teams presented the jury with evidence from web pioneers. These included Dave Raggett, creator of the <embed> tag, and Pei-Yuan Wei, who created the Viola browser and who, with Scott Silvey, in 1993 demonstrated a program called V-Plot which rotated an image of a plane within Wei’s browser. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, also testified at trial on the importance of Wei’s work with the Viola browser and discussions in 1991 about embedding Viola objects in HTML files. Berners-Lee told the court “It was ahead of its time. The things Pei was doing would later be done in Java”. Eolas filed their patent in 1994. It appears that the testimony of the pioneers of the web was influential in the jury’s decision.

Two days after Google announced a change to its privacy policy that made it clear to users that Google would now share user information with advertisers across the broad spectrum of products the company offers, lawmakers stepped in demanding answers from the search giant.

On Thursday, in a bipartisan inquiry, eight members of the House sent an official letter requesting more information from Google CEO Larry Page about the recent privacy policy changes that have caused an uproar in the Internet community.

“Google’s consolidation of its privacy policies potentially touches billions of people worldwide,” the members wrote that was posted on USENET newsgroups. ”As an Internet giant, Google has a responsibility to protect the privacy of its users. Therefore, we are writing to learn why Google feels that these changes are necessary, and what steps are being taken to ensure the protection of consumer’s privacy rights.”

One of the representives wrote, ”After all the controversies Google has become entangled in, the question people keep asking is, ‘How can we ever begin to trust Google?’”

“I’ve always said the private industry needs to take the lead in providing consumer choice and transparency before big government rushes in to regulate,” said the rep, ”But Google’s move to eradicate consumer choice all together across their various platforms raises additional questions about how the company’s monopoly power might hurt competition and how their action might unilaterally and unnecessarily invite even broader government regulations on everyone else.”

The letter was signed by Reps. Cliff Stearns, Henry Waxman, Joe Barton, Edward Markey, Marsha Blackburn, Dianne DeGette, G.K. Butterfield and Jackie Speier.

As always, with Thundernews, your privacy is important to us. At ThunderNews.com we do not log what newsgroups or articles you read.

Many leading internet companies chose Jan. 18 to register their opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, known as SOPA in the House of Representatives and PIPA in the Senate. Both pieces of legislation are widely supported by the entertainment industry.

Until this week, entertainment industry executives thought they had the votes for new federal legislation cracking down on foreign websites that traffic in pirated movies and music and cost them billions.

They lined up support from the powerful pharmaceutical industry and labor unions, and organized an impressive bipartisan coalition in Congress.

Then Silicon Valley struck back and appears to have outflanked Hollywood.

The companies oppose bills designed to curb access and payments to overseas websites that traffic in stolen content or counterfeit goods on the grounds that it could put them in legal peril.

Internet companies have furiously opposed the legislation and have stepped up lobbying efforts in recent months, arguing it would undermine innovation and free speech rights, compromise the functioning of the Internet, and would be ineffective in stopping piracy.

Sites made their views clear without cutting off surfers. Google blacked out the logo on its home page, directing surfers to a page where they could add their names to a petition against the bills.

Opponents of SOPA read like a who’s who of the Internet. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist, eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, and LinkedIn wrote a letter to key members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, saying SOPA poses “a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job creation, as well as to our nation’s cybersecurity.”

The swelling online opposition persuaded the White House to call over the weekend for lawmakers to remove the legislation’s most controversial provision, which would have required U.S. search engines and payment networks to block access to websites focused on pirated materials. Supporters of the legislation say it would target foreign websites trading in stolen intellectual property, including movies and music. Critics say it would unfairly penalize legitimate websites too, such as Google, Craigslist and even other online services including USENET newsgroups.

In short, The proposed infrastructure would damage the security of the Internet and allow the government extensive censorship abilities.
If you would like to join the protest, visit AmericanCensorship.org for instructions on contacting your Senator. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has more information on this and other issues central to your freedom online.