Before there was Google, Bing, Facebook or Twitter, there was Yahoo. On Wednesday, Microsoft put to sleep one of the truly great original Internet brands. Yahoo search is no more in 2010. All Yahoo search capabilities will be migrated into Microsoft’s new search engine Bing. The remaining Yahoo brand will function mostly as an AOL style content portal, probably destined for a similar fate.

“A search and advertising deal announced Wednesday means Yahoo’s once-dominant search engine will grind to a halt for 10 years, replaced by Microsoft’s often-revamped and newly branded Bing. Yahoo gets a big slice of text ad revenue, and Microsoft buys itself into a (distant) second place in the search race, still with less than half the searches as Google.” Yahoo Gives Up, Turns Search Over to Bing [Wired].

And now, there are two.

“Forget that Yahoo was one of the first significant internet brands to come out of Silicon Valley. That it has been a leader in cool web technologies, from Hadoop to Flickr to its open search interface and its support for new web standards. That it recognized and bought smart tech companies like Flickr, Zimbra and Delicious.

By letting Microsoft take over its search engine, Yahoo has essentially announced it can’t keep up with Google and Microsoft and instead will focus on amusing users with multimedia deals and Fantasy Football leagues.

Microsoft, for its part, gets a huge bump in traffic to its revamped search engine and online text ad platform. Bing, which currently handles about 8 to 10 percent of U.S. searches, will jump to something in the neighborhood of 30 percent. And by capturing one opposing army, they dramatically simplify the battle lines and create a two-sided conflict.” Yahoo Gives Up, Turns Search Over to Bing [Wired].

It is unfortunate that after decades of success, Microsoft still prefers corporate warfare to innovation. Some things never change.

Goodbye Yahoo, you will be missed. Say hi to Netscape for us.

In a court case involving the establishment of a ruling council and set of stringent copyright rules that included a possible penalty of Internet disconnection, a French court has ruled that Internet access is a ‘Basic Human Right’. This ruling stands as a landmark decision in the support and defense of Net Neutrality.  We congratulate the French for their foresight into the information needs of humanity in the twenty-first century.

“The law was supported by the industry and many artists. They saw it as a model for the USA and Europe in the fight to keep earning a living from their music and film. Net libertarians saw it as the creation of a sinister Big Brother. Many called it technically unworkable. Some artists saw it as hostile to the young consumers who are their main customers.

The Socialist opposition appealed to the council on the grounds that the constitution was breached by the creation of an extra-judicial agency with powers to punish internet offenders.

The council, which includes two former presidents and is usually seen as elderly and out-of-touch, gave the Left more than it was hoping for.

Les sages – the wise men – as the council is known, took the teeth out of the law. They ruled that “free access to public communication services online” is a right laid down in the Declaration of Human Rights, which is in the preamble to the French constitution. It also said the law breached privacy by enabling the HADOPI agency to track people’s internet activity.

It agreed that the law reached the separation of powers because if gave an administrative authority power to impose justice. And to boot, it violated the presumption of innocence because alleged pirates would be cut off without being able to defend themselves, the council said.” Top French court rips heart out of Sarkozy internet law [London Times Online].

[Click to read Top French court rips heart out of Sarkozy internet law at timesonline.co.uk]

Anyone with an email account can attest to getting spam or unwanted email messages but a new report from Symantec illustrates just how bad the problem has become.  90.4 percent (1 in 1.11) of global email is now spam.

“Spammers seem to be working a little bit harder these days, according to Symantec, which reported Tuesday that unsolicited e-mail made up 90.4 percent of messages on corporate networks last month.

That represents a 5.1 percent increase over last month’s numbers, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary. For years, spam has made up somewhere between 80 percent and 95 percent of all e-mail on the Internet.

Symantec reported that nearly 58 percent of spam is now coming from so-called botnets –networks of hacked computers that can be misused by criminals to steal financial information, launch attacks or send spam. The worst of the spamming botnets — called Donbot — generates 18.2 percent of all spam, according to Symantec.” 90 percent of e-mail is spam, Symantec says, May. 26, 2009 computerworld.com

Download the full MessageLabs Intelligence May 2009 report (pdf).