The case centered on the FCC’s 2008 decision to ban Comcast from throttling file-sharing services for video and TV shows, Reuters and the Associated Press report.

Before the court decision, Amit Schejter, professor of telecommunications policy at Penn State, told Reuters that the FCC will have three options if the court rules against the agency.

First, the FCC can appeal the case to the Supreme Court. Second, Congress could rewrite laws to line out the FCC’s authority over the Internet. Both of those options could take years.

The third option would be to classify broadband services under the existing rules that govern telephone services. That decision, which is within the FCC’s power, would likely cause problems too:

A court loss followed by FCC actions to implement broadband policies would inevitably invite challenges by companies willing to unleash their legal budgets to take the FCC to court while the agency pushes its broadband plan and an open Internet agenda.

Tom Tauke, Verizon executive vice president for public affairs told Reuters that no matter what happens, the role of government in regulating the Internet will need to be hashed out.

“It is clear to me that we need a fresh look at what the role of government should be in the Internet ecosystem, and specifically at the statute governing the communications industry,” Tauke said.

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The Internet abhors a funnel: “This might be one of those fundamental Internet laws, or it may just turn out to be a way to express another one.

The Internet is a bunch of pipes and tunnels with processors located at the junctions and at the ends of the pipes. Some of the processors are little, things like iPhones, routers, blogs or webcams and some are huge like Google’s cloud”

(Via Dave Winer: Scripting News.)

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On his blog, Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur, responds to claims that expanding broadband is comparable to the building of railroads in the 1800s. Keen, who is often critical of the Web, writes:

[B]roadband provides a very different kind of transportation — one that allows individuals to escape their physical communities, to create virtual loyalties, to lose their identities in the narcissistic chaos of cyberspace.

I can’t agree wholly with Keen. Surely more broadband access in rural areas will not kill everything local. People will not revert to keyboard-potatoes, wasting away in front of their computer screens without ever visiting their local stores or picking up the local paper. Besides, the benefits of greater connectivity in currently unconnected areas — provided people aren’t just using the Internet for Ebay and celebrity news — will be too great to ignore.

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Under the ad partnership, Yahoo would show the valuable Google ads along with its own ads. The prices will be set by auction and the companies would share the profits, Bloomberg reports.

It is uncertain whether any antitrust suit would address any of Google’s other advertising business.

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In a written statement, Yahoo said that Microsoft “is not interested in pursuing an acquisition of all of Yahoo! at this time.” At the same time, Yahoo is still open to “any transaction which is in the best interest of our stockholders.”

Microsoft confirmed this in its own statement saying, “Microsoft is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo! at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo! or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo! or Microsoft or with other third parties.”

The software giant initially offered Yahoo $31 per share in late January, a little more than 150 percent what the Yahoo stock was worth at the time. Microsoft withdrew its initial bid to buy Yahoo on May 3 after negotiations between the two companies stalled.

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Wikileaks allows its users to anonymously post government and corporate documents to the pubic. The Swiss banking group Julius Baer said several hundred of its documents were posted to the site.

A judge ordered the domain registrar that controls Wikileaks to remove all traces of the site from its servers and turn over Wikileaks’ account information.

Wikileaks was founded in 2006 and claims to have published more than a million documents. Versions of the site hosted in Belgium and India can still be accessed online, the BBC said.

The site’s administrators said the court order was “unconstitutional” and that the site had been “forcibly censored,” the BBC reported.

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Again, the role of liberator is being played by advertising revenue. The WSJ, purchased recently by Rupert Murdoch, a closely monitored development that had many journalists worried that the end of the world had arrived, hopes that revenue from advertisers will cover the loss of about $30 million a year in subscription fees.

Why keep a newspaper’s Web site behind a pay wall? To make money, of course, but that only works if readers continue to use the paid Web sites. If users can get equally well-written news cheaper (read: “free”) elsewhere, they will.

“But what about quality and brand loyalty?” you might ask. “What about paying the salaries of all those highly skilled reporters?” (And no, I’m not mocking them. I’m a reporter myself.)

That’s the real issue behind the “paid versus free” issue. Can readers get equally well written and researched news from elsewhere, news that has a hope of competing with the quality journalism put out by papers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal? Of course they can, depending on how you define “well written and researched.”

Look at CNN.com for an example of why people don’t care about how well-written news articles are. At the top of each of their online posts, they have a section labeled “Story Highlights.” These highlights comprise a list of sentence length key points about the story. Readers don’t even have to scroll down the page to read the article; they can read the highlights and get the gist. More commonly, the gist is all people think they need.

But CNN has never exactly been known as a world leader in “deep” journalism, has it? The network is known for getting the news quickest. Let the New York Times’ writers analyze it to death. CNN will keep to its sound bites and overblown celebrity coverage.

I’m not bitter, I swear.

This shows that there should be a place for the deep analysis and quality reporting that big papers can provide. So why open their archives to the public? Couldn’t they continue to make a mint off the people who a) have the money to pay the subscription and b) really want to read quality journalism?

I know, I know. The answer is as simple as the classic movie imperative “Follow the money!” The Times and WSJ hope to make more from ads than from subscriptions. Newspapering is a business and we must never forget that, blah, blah, blah.

I would also like to think there’s something else behind, an altruistic goal put forward by a group of journalists who are quietly looking out for us all from the shadows. “Let them in,” these journalists say. “The basis of a strong and healthy democracy is a free and independent press, so let them in! Give them what they really need to be effective citizens and voters, not just what they need to be obedient consumers. Let them in!”

But, I’m a realist, not an idealist, and though my brush may get dipped in the inkwell of idealism from time to time, painting purple, I really don’t believe that there was much of that kind of thinking behind opening up the good newspapers to the public. Still, that doesn’t stop me from enjoying the fruit of their business decisions.

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The service will shut down on Wednesday after two years of service. Times Select had about 227,000 paid subscribers, who will receive pro-rated refunds when the service shuts down.

I’m really, really happy about this, considering that most of the articles that made me say, “Ooh, cool!” had that annoying little orange T next to them. It’s also a sign of the times that the Web site of record sees the value of making their content freely accessible.

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