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Last week, I posted about how Google lost search market share, but overall US searches increased by 5%.

Now I have some more interesting news to report about those same statistics. When I first looked at the data, one of the figures struck me as a bit odd when I first saw it, but I didn’t post about it …until now.

The search engine with the largest growth in US search market share last month was Comcast. Say what?

Yup, you read that correctly. In fact, Comcast’s month-over-month search market share increased by 41%. Granted, they never had much of the search market to begin with, but still — 41% seemed like way too much for Comcast to ethically gain in a single month.

After some investigation, I discovered that Comcast has been up to something fishy.

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Threats to Free Speech on the Net: Censorship and Copyright Law

Despite the universally recognized benefits of the Internet revolution by academics and millions of Internet users everywhere, some special interests seek to undermine the core feature that has made the Internet so successful: its freedom.

There are two main threats to freedom of speech on the Internet today.

The first threat to free speech on the Internet is website filtering and censorship by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Many Americans are unaware that Internet censorship is currently practiced in the United States. It’s true: the Associated Press recently caught Comcast secretly using Web filtering technologies similar to those used in China to censor the Internet.

The Creative Commons Logo. Awesome!

The second threat to free speech on the Internet is oppressive copyright law enforcement by media conglomerates like Viacom and Warner Brothers. The old-fashioned, literal interpretation of copyright law in a digital age is threatening to stifle the creativity of our generation by criminalizing our creative social behavior. Some awesome Stanford University professors have played a crucial role in the fight to defend free speech on the Internet. Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society has led the fight to preserve freedom on the Internet. Professor Lessig’s work to establish Creative Commons, a groundbreaking non-profit organization “devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally” has been one of his greatest successes.

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