Rod Rosenstein, the U.S attorney in Baltimore, filed a six page indictment, alleging that Ayre, along with three other Canadians, James Philip, David Ferguson and Derrick Maloney ran an illegal gambling business from 2005 to 2012, which was in violation of Maryland law. Money was also allegedly laundered in Switzerland, England, Malta and Canada. In a statement, Rosenstein said “sports betting is illegal in Maryland, and federal law prohibits bookmakers from flouting that law simply because they are located outside the country,” adding that “gambling prohibitions are exacerbated when the enterprises operate over the Internet without regulation.” Prosecutors also allege that Ayre moved $100 million in gambling winnings to gamblers, using payment processors like JBL Services and ZipPayments.

Ayre claims to be retired, and that his Bodog brand has been transferred to the Morris Mohawk Gaming Group, located in the Kahnawake territory near Montreal. Ayre’s website describes him as being an “industry pioneer, megalomaniac, and adrenaline junkie.” Adding that, “in 1994 Calvin Ayre sold everything he owned and launched Bodog.com. During an unprecedented run of marketing/PR stunts, Calvin Ayre had the opportunity to be around more D-list celebrities than Dr. Drew – not to mention stuffing more 3rd world mouths than Live Aid.” Dang. Presently, the domestic version of the Ayre’s Bodog site is down, due to a seizure of its domain name by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Bodog’s other site, bodog.eu, is also blocked from North American access, prompting users to visit bovada.lv, which allows access.

Ayre’s comment on the matter he’d posted to his website:

These documents were filed with Forbes magazine before they were filed anywhere else and were drafted with the consumption of the media as a primary objective. We will all look at this and discuss the future with our advisors, but it will not stop my many business interests globally that are unrelated to anything in the U.S. and it will not stop my many charity projects through my foundation.

Yahoo Tech reports on the efforts of a group of advertising associations that have come together to build a set of rules and regulations that the industry can use to give the consumer the privacy they expect and let marketers keep the freedoms that government intervention would likely hinder.

The centerpiece of these guidelines are the provision of transparency in tracking practices and easier opt-out for consumers. While it is certainly a big question as to how well these guidelines will actually work the hope is that the industry will be less of a focus of the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) and Congress.

These guidelines are coming from trade associations that represent 5,000 companies. The consortium comprises the American Association of Advertising Agencies, Association of National Advertisers, Direct Marketing Association, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Better Business Bureau. Their members are some of the nation’s largest companies, including Google Inc., General Electric Co., Microsoft Corp., Coca-Cola Co. and Procter & Gamble Co.

These guidelines include recommendations that companies

1. Tell consumers more clearly when they’re being tracked
2. Educate consumers on how Web tracking works
3. Give consumers an easy way to opt out of being followed
4. Provide “reasonable” security for the data they collect
5. Limit how much data they retain
6. Get consumer approval before making material changes that would erode privacy protections with specific areas such as children’s personal information, financial data and medical records getting more protection.

Anyone caught by this new group will be reported to the federal government. This plan should go into effect in 2010. Sounds reasonable enough but of course there are those who feel that this will not be enough.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said the online ad industry’s promise to regulate itself through the new guidelines is designed to undercut the federal government’s increased interest in overseeing online behavioral advertising.

He fears that the guidelines don’t go far enough and that there needs to be fair rules passed by Congress that ‘online marketing can thrive but consumers have greater control on how the information collected is being used.’

I am sure that the views of Pilgrim readers regarding government intervention in business are all over the map so we’ll ask you the question: Should the industry police itself or should the federal government be involved? What are the pros and cons of both options? Here’s your chance to form your own policy for people to see and show off your position on government’s role in business. Sounds like a fun and light topic to consider while enjoying the holiday weekend, right?

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Google’s 2007 Australian Federal Election site is still up; there’s no telling how long it’ll remain that way, so look now if you’re at all interested.  Among many other endeavors (“videos, gadgets, and more”) there’s a nice map showing color-coded election results.

Of course, that’s the sort of thing that regular news agencies have been creating for some time now, yet it was interesting to see Google get involved.  It was also interesting to see how the search giant was greeted; as noted by Frank Taylor, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation created its own graphics using Google Earth and Google Maps.

Want more “interesting” stuff?  The Australian elections coincided with the appointment of Karim Temsamani as General Manager for Google Australia and New Zealand.  (Actually, the General Manager announcement came about ten days earlier – however warmly we would greet Temsamani, Paul Rudd’s win is probably a little more important.)

We’ll now just wait and see what Google has in store for the upcoming U.S. elections.

Royal Pingdom posted the top seven problems webmasters and site visitors alike may have encountered. Pingdom’s data comes from their monitoring of thousands of websites; this particular sample comes from 160 million test results over a 30-day period leading up to October 19.

‘Unable to connect to server’ occurred 62.4 percent of the time, where visitors simply could not reach the online resource. That was the most common problem, which Pingdom noted could happen due to network outages, server downtime, or possibly firewall issues.

‘DNS lookup problems’ only popped up about 9.71 percent of the time. Problematic DNS configuration usually causes this error, but in the case of the CA.gov domain, Federal domain admins at GSA in Washington inflicted the DNS problems for that domain.

Following these two top errors were ‘connection refused by server’, ‘timeout while trying to load the web page’, ’503 Service unavailable’, ’500 Internal server error’, and ’502 Bad gateway’. As Pingdom noted, some 80 percent of webserver problems were unreachable servers, DNS errors, and server load conditions.

Patent Suit Hits Google, AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo

The patent in question, 6,978,253 (253 for short), covers, "A method of doing business over a global communications network." Performance Pricing filed its patent application in June 1999, and was rewarded with the patent in June 2005.

Fast forward two years later, and InformationWeek has reported the filing of a lawsuit in federal court for the Eastern District of Texas. The district has been the site of numerous patent infringement filings, due to a perception that the court favors the claimants in these suits.

Here’s what the 253 patent abstract says about what the patent governs:

A business model/process is described for conducting business transactions over the Internet, allowing buyers to reduce the price of the selected product/service based on the buyer's performance during a collateral activity.

Sellers offer the product/service within a specified price range, and buyers accept the offer, in exchange for the opportunity to close the transaction at the lowest price offered by achieving a high score during the collateral activity.

The ultimate price is within the agreed upon range, but is determined based upon the buyer's performance during the collateral activity.

The abstract talks about the activity as gaming, but also broadly lists "any other activity" too. Performance Pricing claims it has suffered damage from the use of its patent in Google AdWords, AOL Search Marketplace, Microsoft adCenter, and Yahoo Search Marketing. They want the usual damages and injunctions against use of the patent, as similar past claims against Google and others have demanded.

If the companies named as defendants have any concern, they aren’t showing it publicly. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told a European audience he expected advertising will become a quarter of Microsoft’s business in a few years, according to the New York Times.

The site’s called 2007 Australian Federal Election, and Google appears to have thrown just about everything it’s got at the creation.  “Follow Australian politics with our map, videos, gadgets & more,” invites one heading.

That about sums it up, really – Google intends to provide a wide-ranging and in-depth resource to all Australian voters.  On the Official Google Blog, Julian Sonego and Rob Shilkin wrote “[h]ere’s hoping Australians will find them useful and even fun” in reference to the new site’s tools.

“It’s our view that democracy on the web works – and the web can work for democracy,” they continued.

That’s fine, except that it sounds a little far-reaching.  Which is fine, too, of course, but announcements related to the Australia-centric site have stressed that it is the first of its kind to be made by Google.  The implicit hint, now, is that others might follow.

So we may be able to focus on American politics, after all.  Oh joy.

Observations like that usually fizzle away – at least Jason Kilar, Hulu CEO, wishes it would. Yesterday, Lulu Enterprises confirmed that they have filed a law suit against N-F Newsite LLC (the operating company) for “trademark infringement, unfair and deceptive trade practices and for federal cyberpiracy” in a US District Court on August 22.

Lulu alleges that Hulu, as a result of their recent name and Internet domain announcements, have intentionally attempted to create confusion in the marketplace.
Hulu, in name, as a mark and in their business as a digital content distribution platform, represents a definitive encroachment.

Lulu.com opened it’s doors to the creative community in 2002 and claim 1.2 million registered users – publishing, buying and selling digital content across 700 interest groups. CEO Bob Young (previous co-founder of Red Hat) was force-full in his press release statement:

We have more than five years and tens of millions of dollars in investment successfully building the Lulu brand… It is clear we are required to move quickly to protect our intellectual property and defend ourselves

A comment from Soso Sazesh over at Techomical widened my smile even further:

Aren’t online video sites supposed to wait to be involved in litigation until they are up and running and have infringing content on their site?

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Oh, if only Marketing Pilgrim had a category called, “Duh.” Do these decisions change anything? As I see it, all they is codify the status of blogs as “media.” Or should I say, the status of a blog as a medium. A blog has always been a medium—a way that political candidates and interested parties can communicate with the public at large.

Realistically speaking, the Federal Electoral Commission’s decisions really only affect (1) bloggers who offer free advertising to candidates and (2) people blogging about campaigns (including blogs devoted to deposing incumbents). And if you fall into one of those limited groups, you’ll be happy to note that you’re now part of the media in the eyes of the FEC. And what does that mean? It means you don’t have to register as a “political committee” for doing the aforementioned.

On the other hand, it’s also a good sign that people so glaringly out of touch with modern culture to think that these rulings are necessary decided in favor of including blogs in the category. After all, they didn’t officially consider the Internet a medium until March 2006.

In the United States, the Federal Election Commission is a regulatory agency in charge of monitoring electoral practices, campaign finance and media activity. While these specific rulings do hold the force of law, it’s unlikely that all blogs will be considered “media” quite yet.

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It’s unlikely that anyone will want to acquire the company until it’s had the chance to respond to a Federal Trade Commission investigation.

According to ClickZ, ValueClick filed a Form 8-K (which is basically SEC talk for “we have something material to tell the world”) revealing the FTC is investigating the company for possible violations of the CAN-SPAM act.

“We continue to believe that we are compliant with all current state and federal regulations pertaining to our lead generation activities, and we intend to fully cooperate with the FTC in connection with their inquiry,” John Ardis, vice president, corporate strategy for ValueClick, told ClickZ in an e-mail.

While experts believe ValueClick is in fact following the CAN-SPAM law, until the investigation is complete, I doubt any suitor would want to take their hand in marriage.

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On the surface, Online Consumer Protection Act sounds noble enough – it would require online pharmacies to publicly comply with state and federal licensing requirements and fill only those medications prescribed by doctors who have personally examined the patient.

Certainly, prescriptions meds are far too easy to get online. People have been hurt and killed by bad drugs and there has been pressure put on directories and search engines to tighten their requirements for pharmaceutical ads. Something needs to tighten somewhere.

But where this bill oversteps the balance is that it institutes another level of government control over ISPs by requiring they block sites they suspect of advertising or selling illegal pharmaceuticals.

While regulation is often necessary, this nipping at the heels of the DoJ’s Big Brother behavior and Congress’ general lack of common sense when it comes to the Web (Internet gambling and the series of tubes, anyone?), the extent to which the government seeks control is, at least a little, alarming.

CNet’s Anne Broache notes that the bill’s main critics come from, quite surprisingly, the Drug Enforcement Administration (interesting they have time to protest given how busy they are winning the War on Drugs). The DEA says policing pharmaceuticals on the Web is their job, given to them via the Controlled Substances Act.

That the hand of noble causes often devolves into an unnecessary iron fist is beside the point. Ratcheting up control at every opportunity is a scary thought – it’s the type of thing that makes online poker illegal but horse race gambling and lotteries not.

If we are to regulate the Internet (and to be clear, some regulation is necessary), let’s use regulation sparingly.