Rough Drafts

A flurry of privacy bills are being introduced in Congress … is a blizzard on the way? Government ponders Internet privacy issues

Fast online credit service aims to make it easier to drop large amounts at e-commerce sites: eCredit expedites online financing

Quick! Call the Feds! We need to throw some serious R&D money at this critical problem, before it undermines the economy and the American way of life! Gift, card sites break a few hearts

The Red Herring discovers that, despite the huge amount of venture capital out there, it actually takes a lot of *work* to make a successful startup: Redherring.com – Fish or Cut Bait: How green is the Valley?

Hey, I’ve been quoted in the Wall Street Journal Interactive: Dodge’s E-conomy — WSJ Interactive Edition

Not enough medical advertising dollars to go around all the new health-related sites, according to this MSNBC story: Health sites face ad spending squeeze

Do Web companies have the right to send “bots” out to scan other companies’ online databases? That’s the crux of a debate on Capitol Hill now — and of a fight between eBay and auction-watch site Bidder’s Edge. The outcome of this battle has serious implications for Internet business, since it will a

The largest e-grocer, it turns out, is British supermarket chain Tesco — and they’ve got a decidedly low-tech approach to e-commerce, with little more than Dell servers, BackOffice software, and 7,000 packers who wander down the aisles of your local Tesco store picking up the items to fill your orde

E-business outsourcing, the next generation? Andreessen’s new company, Loudcloud, thinks it can bring dot com startups to market 2.5 times faster: Loudcloud surfaces with e-commerce hosting solution

Disney finds it can’t make a Go of the search engine business — tries for a “leisure site” strategy instead: Disney Plans to Recast Go Portal As Entertainment, Leisure Site

PC Week columnist John Taschek says the AOL – Time Warner merger means the end of the Internet as we know it. He writes: “AOL has the capacity to paralyze this highway system by adding traffic without enhancing the infrastructure necessary to support it.” ZDNet: PC Week: AOL’s buyout of Time Warner

So AOL is buying Time Warner. What’s next? EBay should buy PBS, of course. An Internet Pledge