It's been a huge week in the mobile space, with AT&T announcing Android-based smart phones, Google launching its own Nexus One smart phone, and Apple acquiring mobile ad company Quattro Wireless.

The last move is particularly interesting; the roughly $300 million deal marks Apple's first foray into advertising, placing it directly in competition with former (rumored) partner Google in the mobile ad market. In November, Google agreed to purchase AdMob, another mobile advertising network, for $750 million. That deal has raised eyebrows in some circles, since Google already dominates Web advertising. Indeed, watchdog groups have already sparked an intensive review of the deal by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

Google is quickly developing into an actual Internet hegemony; remember, we're only four years from the predicted Google World Domination. This video was largely viewed as a joke when it was released in 2004, but it's fascinating to look back and see how eerily prescient some of it seems--and how much of it is being actively argued about now, especially the future of journalism.

The Take Back Your Privacy site offers simple ways to file complaints.

Don't like what a website has done with your personal information? Don't understand its privacy policies? A new privacy complaint site is now open for business--created by an Internet freedom and privacy advocacy group in Washington, D.C. called the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT).

Complaints can be shared with your social network via sites like Twitter and Facebook, and also forwarded to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). If enough complaints surface, it's possible that the FTC will launch an investigation into whether a website is violate existing laws.

The larger point is to create a cudgel to get Congress interested in enacting comprehensive Internet privacy legislation. CDT has already put out a pretty good guide to online privacy problems, explaining existing and often narrowly-written patchwork of court rulings and laws, most of them falling hopelessly behind rapid technological advances.

"In the past ten years, the ability of Internet companies to collect and aggregate information has increased dramatically," says Leslie Harris, the group's president. But while some states have taken action, Congress has not. "We see next year as the first time in a decade that we will have serious debate in Congress on whether we will have comprehensive privacy laws."

Among other things, says Harris, "we ought to have a tool that takes you out of online tracking; with one click, you delete all tracking devices that have been put on your computer." Users should also have the power to force Internet companies to delete personal data, such as search requests, after the passage of a reasonable period of time, she adds.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is finalizing plans to introduce domain names that use non-Roman (or Latin) characters--that is, Internet users in countries such as China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia will soon be able to enter Web addresses in Asian, Cyrillic, Arabic, or other scripts. According to a BBC story:

"Of the 1.6 billion internet users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based," said Rod Beckstrom at the opening of Icann's conference in Seoul, South Korea.

"So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world's internet users today but more than half, probably, of the future users as the internet continues to spread."

The news comes after years of controversy about the Internet's de facto requirement of basic literacy in English, which advocates have argued severely limits its utility for the millions of people barely literate in local dialects in countries such as India.

ICANN initially approved plans for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) in June 2008, but working out the technology behind it has proved extremely difficult. In effect, Internet engineers had to create an entirely new "translation system" for the Domain Name System, which transforms domain names such as "technologyreview.com" into numerical IP addresses. Enabling the system to recognize and translate an array of non-Latin characters into IP addresses as well was a challenge. Though workarounds have existed in some Asian countries, they were not internationally approved and didn't necessarily work on all computers or in all Web browsers.

ICANN representatives say that the new system, which currently supports 16 different non-Roman scripts, has been thoroughly tested and is ready to go. If the ICANN board gives final approval next week, the agency could begin accepting applications for internationalized domain names as early as November 16, and the first websites using them could be up by the middle of next year.

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