Hilary Clinton made a speech yesterday calling on Beijing to investigate Google’s claim’s of Chinese cyber-hacking, and also announcing that tackling internet censorship will be a new priority for US foreign policy. More in the Independent HERE; Times HERE and Telegraph HERE. China responded today warning the US against interference and denouncing Clinton’s criticisms as “information imperialism”.. A foreign ministry spokesman said:
‘The US has criticised China’s policies to administer the internet and insinuated that China restricts internet freedom… This runs contrary to the facts and is harmful to China-US relations… We urge the United States to respect the facts and cease using so-called internet freedom to make groundless accusations against China.’ More in the Guardian HERE and Times HERE.
The Court of Appeal has upheld a judgment from the Competition Appeal Tribunal in 2008, which insisted that BSkyB cut its stake in ITV from 17.9 per cent to less than 7.5 per cent on competition grounds. Sky has 28 days to lodge an appeal with the Supreme Court, its final available legal recourse, and has said it will ‘review the judgment and order carefully and consider next steps in due course’. More in the Independent HERE; Times HERE; and Telegraph HERE and HERE.
BT is launching its next-generation super-fast broadband service next week, and kick-starting a price-war; already claiming to have undercut Virgin Media’s prices. BT is spending £1.5bn putting a new fibre network within the reach of 10m homes by the time of the Olympics in 2012. It will have 500,000 homes connected by the end of next month and 4m by the end of this year. Virgin Media, meanwhile, has already upgraded its existing cable network, which passes 12.5m addresses, and launched its own ultra-high speed offering.
Virgin have hit back at BT’s pricing, accusing the company of misleading consumers because Virgin Media’s service is actually faster. BT’s service runs at 40Mb per second while Virgin Media’s is 50Mb per second. This said, BT’s service does offer upload speeds of 10Mb a second – meaning customers will be able to send large files to other people quickly. In stark contrast, Virgin Media’s upload speed – even on its 50Mb service – is only 1.5Mb. More in the Guardian HERE and Telegraph HERE.
