New York Times

At least five times in May, a Pakistani bureaucrat who works from a colonial-era barracks in Karachi, just down the street from the former home of his country’s secularist founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, asked Twitter to shield his compatriots from exposure to accounts, tweets or searches of the social network that he described as “blasphemous” or “unethical.”

All five of those requests were honored by the company, meaning that Twitter users in Pakistan can no longer see the content that so disturbed the bureaucrat, Abdul Batin of the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority: crude drawings of the Prophet Muhammad, photographs of burning Qurans, and messages from a handful of anti-Islam bloggers and an American porn star who now attends Duke University.

The blocking of these tweets in Pakistan -- in line with the country-specific censorship policy Twitter unveiled in 2012 -- is the first time the social network has agreed to withhold content there. A number of the accounts seemed to have been blocked in anticipation of the fourth annual “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” on May 20.

This censorship comes as challenges to Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy law have become increasingly deadly, amid a flurry of arrests, killings and assassination attempts on secularists.

Amazon, under fire in much of the literary community for energetically discouraging customers from buying books from the publisher Hachette, has abruptly escalated the battle.

The retailer began refusing orders for coming Hachette books, including JK Rowling’s new novel. The paperback edition of Brad Stone’s “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” -- a book Amazon disliked so much it denounced it -- is suddenly listed as “unavailable.” In some cases, even the pages promoting the books have disappeared. Anne Rivers Siddons’s new novel, “The Girls of August,” coming in July, no longer has a page for the physical book or even the Kindle edition. Only the audio edition is still being sold (for more than $60).

The confrontation with Hachette has turned into the biggest display of Amazon’s dominance since it briefly stripped another publisher, Macmillan, of its “buy” buttons in 2010. It seems likely to encourage debate about the enormous power the company wields. No company in American history has exerted the control over the American book market -- physical, digital and secondhand -- that Amazon does.

[Commentary] Should a speedy Internet be available to everyone equally or are some users, in Orwell’s terms, “more equal than others”? Should there be “haves” and “have-nots” on the Internet, with the winners being large corporate or commercial users, as opposed to small businesses or regular people?

That’s the essence of the debate behind the high-stakes subject of “net neutrality,” which the Federal Communications Commission voted on recently.

“I’ve long become accustomed to news articles as well as editorials in the Times asserting that black is white or white is black, but for you to insist that the actions of the FCC will protect and enhance Internet neutrality is way over the top,” wrote one reader, William Edwards. And another, Robert Ofsevit, wrote a detailed critique, comparing the headline in The Times, “FCC Vote Paves the Way for New Open Internet Rules” unfavorably with a more direct headline on a Reuters story that ran on Huffington Post: “FCC Votes for Plan to Kill Net Neutrality.”

He wrote: “The writer denigrates and marginalizes ‘some opponents’ of Chairman Wheeler’s plan, and “net neutrality purists” who view the plan as killing net neutrality. In fact, these are not fringe views held only by ‘purists.’” My take: I’m with the critics on this one. While I’m no expert, I don’t think the issues here really are all that muddy. Maybe this makes me a purist, but as I see it, this FCC vote was a clear strike against the commonly understood idea of net neutrality, and The Times should have written and presented it that way.

Joaquín Almunia, the European Union’s antitrust chief, said that he might yet take a tougher stance toward Google in a long-running case that he and the company have been in talks to settle for more than a year.

The announcement is a potential blow for Google, which reached a tentative deal with Almunia in February by agreeing to display rivals’ links more prominently in its search results.

Google has been trying to resolve the three-year case and avoid a potential fine of up to $5 billion. But whether the announcement was an indication of a new hard line by Almunia or a diplomatic nod to the company’s many critics in Europe was not clear. And any action would still be months away.

American officials insist, when speaking off the record, that the United States was never acting on behalf of specific American companies. But the government does not deny it routinely spies to advance American economic advantage, which is part of its broad definition of how it protects American national security. In short, the officials say, while the National Security Agency cannot spy on Airbus and give the results to Boeing, it is free to spy on European or Asian trade negotiators and use the results to help American trade officials -- and, by extension, the American industries and workers they are trying to bolster.

Now, every one of the examples of NSA spying on corporations around the world is becoming Exhibit A in China’s argument that by indicting five members of the People’s Liberation Army, the Obama Administration is giving new meaning to capitalistic hypocrisy.

In the Chinese view, the United States has designed its own system of rules about what constitutes “legal” spying and what is illegal. That definition, the Chinese contend, is intended to benefit an American economy built around the sanctity of intellectual property belonging to private firms. And, in their mind, it is also designed to give the NSA the broadest possible rights to intercept phone calls or email messages of state-owned companies from China to Saudi Arabia, or even private firms that are involved in activities the United States considers vital to its national security, with no regard to local laws. The NSA says it observes American law around the globe, but admits that local laws are no obstacle to its operations.

Every major Internet browser has a feature that lets you tell a website that you don’t want it to collect personal information about you when you visit. And virtually every website ignores those requests. Tracking your online activities -- and using that data to tailor marketing pitches -- is central to how Internet companies make money.

Now California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris, wants every site to tell you -- in clear language -- if and how it is respecting your privacy preferences.

The guidelines, published on Wednesday, are intended to help companies comply with a new state privacy law that went into effect on Jan. 1. That law requires sites to prominently disclose all their privacy practices, including how they respond to “do not track” requests.

[Commentary] Few industries have been as deeply embroiled in merger mania as the telecommunications industry, particularly after AT&T’s $48.5 billion bid for DirecTV. Now, with another mega-deal in the works, how will others respond?

Perhaps with even more consolidation. AT&T‘s acquisition most clearly affects the country’s other major satellite television provider, Dish. Dish Chairman Charles Ergen has made no secret that deals were an important part of his strategy, whether they be a foiled attempt at buying Sprint or a withdrawn bid to acquire the bankrupt broadband wireless provider LightSquared. And in recent months, news reports contended that Ergen was interested in pursuing deals either for T-Mobile USA or DirecTV.

At the same time, analysts had long speculated that Dish might make an attractive acquisition target for AT&T. A bigger and more emboldened AT&T may also have repercussions for Sprint, whose majority owner, the Japanese telecom Softbank, has long coveted a deal with T-Mobile to gain much-needed scale.

Yet a tie-up of the two has already drawn hints of vocal opposition from several officials at the Federal Communications Commission, who have worried that a merger of the two would constitute an unacceptable level of consolidation.

Sprint and SoftBank have argued not so subtly that acquiring T-Mobile would create more competition in the wireless industry, blunting the power of Verizon and AT&T.

[Commentary] Ten years from now, we’ll look back on the moment federal regulators broke the Internet as we know it. Or we will look back on it as just another time they managed to push through a fragile, hodgepodge compromise that kept the Internet just barely functioning fairly, at least until the next telecommunications giant initiates a court case that once again casts the future of the network in doubt.

In other words, whatever happens, it’s hard to see a really great outcome to the proposal on so-called network neutrality rules that the Federal Communications Commission moved to adopt.

The FCC’s actual proposal was quite a bit more legalistically opaque than FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler suggested. Worse than that, it was all over the place. Though it’s cloaked in the language of an “open Internet,” much of the proposal can be read as an effort to let every side think it will get something out of the new rules.

Rather than come anywhere close to preventing anything, the new proposal’s main goal is to ask the public to comment on the right course for regulating Internet openness. Given the considerable technical and legal expertise necessary to even understand this issue, the FCC’s request for public comment on network neutrality seems about as useful as the Interior Department asking for public feedback on the best way to manage the Hoover Dam.

Amazon has been trying to put the screws on Hachette, the smallest of the Big Five publishers, by discouraging people from buying its printed books. Amazon’s goal: force Hachette to give it better terms on e-books.

Two things make Amazon’s confrontational stance toward Hachette unusual. First, there is the overwhelming power Amazon has in the marketplace. Second is Amazon’s multifaceted approach. Most of the time, it has all sorts of ways to encourage you to buy a book: faster shipping, cheaper shipping, a discount, a cheap copy from a third party who was cleaning out his closet.

Now, like a river reversing its flow, it is using all sorts of ways to get people not to buy Hachette titles: more expensive, slower shipping, pitching something else instead. The worry for Hachette is that its authors will rise up in anger at the publisher, forcing it to surrender to Amazon’s terms. The worry for Amazon is that it will be perceived of as a thug.

Google will announce by the end of the month a mechanism for consumers to request that links to information about them be removed from the company’s search engine, a leading European regulator said.

It was one of the first signs that Google was working through how to operate after a court ruling said consumers could make such requests.

Ulrich Kühn, ​head of the technical department at Hamburg’s data protection regulator, one of Germany’s leading data protection agencies, said that the details of the mechanism still had to be finalized. But a basic online tool for people to ask Google to take down potentially harmful links would be in place in about two weeks, he said.

“They are trying to come up with something that users can use to lodge complaints about specific links,” Kühn said. “It will be rolled out across Europe for all citizens.”