The modified Android software will be installed on commercially available handsets and can be used to support top-secret dispatches; something that the government doesn’t yet allow for. In the future, soldiers could use the handsets to locate other troops or quickly communicate orders to a group securely.

Ironically, the government group formed to manage the Android software project has already made a bold claim that makes the carriers look silly from where I stand.

Information-security director at George Mason University, Angelos Stavrou, is a contractor on the project and said when Google updates its Android software, an update to the secure Android phones can be ready within two weeks. Given that carriers can take 6 months or more to provide Android updates on some handsets, one of them should hire Stavrou away from this project!

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France Telecom is partnering with Thales SA, a maker of aerospace systems and industrial electronics, to build a homegrown cloud to offer built-in-France software, according to a Bloomberg news report.

And the verbiage is getting heated.

“It’s the beginning of a fight between two giants,” Jean-Francois Audenard, the cloud security advisor to France Telecom, told Bloomberg.  Audenard added:

It’s extremely important to have the governments of Europe take care of this issue because if all the data of enterprises were going to be under the control of the U.S., it’s not really good for the future of the European people.

The impetus or justification comes from the U.S. Patriot Act, which allows U.S. law enforcement to force disclosure of cloud-based data if they perceive a security threat. Last spring Microsoft said that it would have to hand cloud data over to U.S. authorities if asked, even if it resides in the company’s European data centers.

Such statements obviously caused consternation in the European Union, especially in Germany, which has much tighter data privacy laws than most countries.

In September, Reinhard Clemens, the CEO of Deutsche Telekom’s T-systems group, said local regulators should enable super secure clouds to be built in Germany or elsewhere in Europe. He cited pent-up demand among customers who do not want their information accessible to the U.S. government.

Some in the U.S. will cry protectionism as American companies ranging from Google to Microsoft to Facebook now lead the universe in creating very efficient data centers to run their massive cloud operations. If EU countries all proceed along this path, there could be severe repercussions not only for these companies but also for the value of cloud computing.

And this Europe-first policy, if it takes hold, is risky for the Europeans as well. According to a new report from Informa, the European telecom operators that are pushing this strategy “risk being sidelined in the global cloud computing market as aggressive North American and Asian operators spend billions to build international presence.”

The Informa Telecom Cloud Monitor shows that these European operators make up just 7 percent of the world’s overall cloud assets as of 2011, while their North American and Asian counterparts account for 90 percent.

As GigaOM reported last month, U.S. tech giants aren’t taking this threat lying down. Google, IBM, Citi and several other large U.S. tech and banking companies are lobbying the U.S. government to push global treaties to assure the free flow of information across international borders. But the Patriot Act could hobble their efforts.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user dandeluca

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Have you ever gone to a website with a .jobs address, or a .mobi URL, or one that ends in .biz or .info? If you have, then you’ve visited one of the newer additions to the internet’s central directory system, so-called “top level domains” that were created by the entity that runs the system, which is known as ICANN. On Thursday, the agency launched a new program to add even more domain names to the system, despite the fact that some believe there is no need for them. According to these critics — a group that includes the Federal Trade Commission — the move will unnecessarily complicate the internet’s structure, and the only ones who will benefit are domain-name registrars, many of whom sit on the ICANN board.

Under the program, anyone can apply to operate their own top-level domain, and there are very few restrictions on what the domain can include (although most observers believe the agency will likely draw the line at offensive words). The program could lead to hundreds of new domains that involve specific products or topics, such as .music or .sports, and a number of cities including Berlin, Paris and New York have said they plan to apply to create a domain with their names as well. Companies have also said they are considering launching their own domain names, such as .canon or .motorola.

This might sound like a great idea if you happen to be a domain-name registrar, who charges users annual fees to provide them with a domain name for their website or service, but to many it sounds like a recipe for chaos — and for lawsuits. The Association of National Advertisers says it is worried that this domain-name land rush will result in fraudsters snapping up brand-name domains by the bucketload, leaving corporations who own those brands to go after them all one by one. The federal Commerce Department has raised a red flag on that issue as well, saying it will create unnecessary headaches.

Agency says the move will promote competition

ICANN, meanwhile, says the addition of new domains is part of its mandate, which is to “promote competition in the domain name market while ensuring Internet security and stability.” The chief executive officer of the agency says that far from causing chaos, the new system could actually add more clarity, since users might be able to remember a company’s address if it is based on a domain that includes the company name. The Federal Trade Commission disagrees, however. Chairman Jon Leibowitz has said:

My sense is that a lot of this demand is just absolutely artificial and largely imagined by the ICANN board. We’re an agency that’s required to protect consumers, and from our perspective, this is a potential disaster.

To make matters worse, critics say that ICANN won’t be notifying companies if someone tries to set up a domain name that looks like a trademark infringement (although the agency said it will be posting the applications publicly so people can track that for themselves), nor has it agreed to block certain domains from being created by adding them to a blacklist. Opponents of an application will have 60 days to file a response, and ICANN says it will be doing a “full background review” to ensure that those registering new top-level domains don’t have a record of fraudulent or anti-competitive activity.

So why would ICANN be interested in launching potentially hundreds or even thousands of new domains if we don’t actually need them? The agency says in a FAQ that it is not interested in the money that will be generated from the program — although each individual top-level domain application will cost $185,000 — because it is a non-profit entity. But a number of observers, including Wired magazine editor David Rowan, have noted that the ICANN board happens to include a number of people who either operate or are associated with domain-name registry companies in various countries.

Will it promote competition, or chaos and lawsuits?

If all this seems a little haphazard for a core function of the global internet, that’s probably because ICANN itself is to some extent a holdover from an earlier time. Its full name is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and it is a non-profit entity based in California that manages the domain-name system through a number of related entities, including the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. Before ICANN was set up in the late 1990s, the U.S. government effectively controlled the domain-name system, although for many years it was run by a single man, Jon Postel.

In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, ICANN insists that the rollout of the new domain-name program will be uneventful, and says it has learned from two previous expansions (PDF link): one in 2000 that added domains like .info and .biz, and another in 2009 that added domains that include non-Western characters. It also says managing hundreds of domains isn’t an issue, since there are already more than 200 “country code” domains — including some popular ones such as .tv (the code for the island nation of Tuvalu) and .me (the code for Montenegro).

Not everyone is convinced things will be so easy, however. Domain industry blogger Andrew Allemann, for example, says he is worried about a number of potential problems, including a raft of registrations by domain-name hijackers and cybersquatters, but also controversy over potential top-level applications — such as .gay or .sex, or racially sensitive terms (Note: Allemann is married to GigaOM writer Stacey Higginbotham). In any case, the land-rush has officially begun.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Dunechaser and Quaziefoto

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Google spent a whopping $2.06 million on lobbying efforts in the second quarter of 2011, according to documents filed this week per the US Senate’s Lobbying Disclosure Act. The search engine giant spent $1.48 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2011. The company seems on track to clearly outspend its 2010 lobbying budget: Google spent a total of $5.2 million on lobbying efforts last year.

According to the documents, Google’s Q2 2011 lobbying funds were focused on such issues as international tax reform, international freedom of expression and censorship, renewable energy policies, and an H.R. 399 bill titled “Stopping Trained in America Ph.D.s From Leaving the Economy Act of 2011,” to name just a few.

This most recent quarter represents the first time Google has outspent Microsoft in formal lobbying. Microsoft spent $1.85 million on lobbying efforts in Q2 2011, up from the $1.72 million it spent during the first quarter of 2011.

Google’s increasing influence in Washington is setting off alarm bells for some policy watchers. California-based public interest group Consumer Watchdog is calling for Google chairman Eric Schmidt to register formally as a lobbyist, since he personally is spending increasing amounts of time working in government relations.

“Schmidt could well have reached the threshold requiring registration as a lobbyist; he is clearly trying to influence policy,” said Consumer Watchdog director John Simpson in a press release issued Thursday. “It certainly should be checked out.”

The scrutiny is not stopping relative newcomers to the tech industry’s big leagues from trying to have their own say in Washington. Facebook spent $320,000 during Q2, according to regulatory documents filed this week, nearly the same amount that it spent over the entire course of 2010. Facebook has spent $550,000 on lobbying so far this year on such issues as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, the Location Privacy Protection Act of 2011, and an initiative billed as “discussing House, Senate, and Government rules to allow more Government and Congressional offices to access social media and to use social media to engage with citizens.”

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ICE seized the domains in late January as part of its operation “In Our Sites,” which has targeted dozens of sites selling counterfeit products as well as a torrent search engine and a number of sites specializing in video streams.

Puerto80 has successfully defended its site in Spanish courts in the past, and is now arguing that its offering is legal. “United States courts would likely reach the same conclusion if and when the government ever decided to bring a cause of action against Puerto 80 alleging copyright infringement,” the company’s petition (PDF), filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, states.

The legality of a site like Rojadirecta in the U.S. is certainly debatable. Foreign courts have in the past ruled torrent sites and P2P services to be legal, while similar offerings haven’t had much luck in U.S. courts. However, the real issue here seems to be that domain seizures completely sidestep the legal process of determining these legal issues.

That’s why Puerto80’s lawsuit is already getting a thumbs-up from the EFF: “We’re very glad that Rojadirecta is fighting back so that this and other domain name seizures can receive more careful judicial consideration,” the organization writes on its blog, adding that it is prepared to get involved as well: “We’ll be following the case closely and expect to weigh in as amicus as well.”

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