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Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Microsoft Faces \'Year of Reckoning\' in Mobile Software, IDC Says

In its top 10 predictions for 2013, published on Thursday, the technology research firm IDC declares that next year will be high noon for Microsoft‘s mobile software.

It makes that prediction based on data and a point of view. A crucial constituency, IDC says, is developer support for a company's technology. “Mobile platforms that fail to crack the 50 percent barrier of developers who are ‘very interested' in developing apps for them,” the IDC report states, “will be on a gradual track to demise.” So IDC declares 2013 will be “a year of reckoning in mobile software.”

So what platforms die?

In cooperation with Appcelerator, a maker of programming tools, IDC conducts quarterly surveys of more than 4,800 mobile applications developers. In its most recent survey, 33 percent of developers replied they were “very interested” in writing applications for Windows 8 tablets, and 21 percent for Windows Phone 7 software.

For those wondering about the cliff Research in Motion must climb rather than fall over, just 9 percent of developers in the IDC survey said they were very interested in writing applications for RIM's Blackberry phones, and 8 percent for its PlayBook tablet.

By contrast, 85 percent of the developers were very interested in writing programs for Apple‘s iOS software on the iPhone, and 83 percent for the iPad. Google‘s Android Phone software was next, at 76 percent, and Android tablets at 66 percent. And 66 percent of developers were very interested in writing mobile applications with open-standard Web software, HTML5.

The numbers certainly suggest Microsoft has its work cut out for it. In an interview, Frank Gens, IDC's chief analyst, noted that with Microsoft's new Surface tablet, the company had an impressive piece of hardware to show off its tablet software. And its partnership with Nokia means Microsoft has a committed ally in the smartphone market.

“Now the pieces ar e together,” Mr. Gens said. “But will the developers come?”

Developers, of course, are but one of two engines Microsoft needs to become a challenger in the mobile market. The other is consumers, since developers follow consumers, whose purchasing decisions determine which are the most attractive products, both hardware and software. That is the network-effect flywheel that drives technology markets.

The stakes for Microsoft in the mobile market are underlined elsewhere in the IDC report. IDC predicts, for example, that worldwide spending on information technology will increase 5.7 percent in 2013, to more than $2.1 trillion. The growth rate is off slightly from an estimated 6.2 percent in 2012, mainly because of cooling demand in a few overseas markets, notably China.

But the increase in technology spending, Mr. Gens said, is still about double global economic growth. But take out the boom in smartphones and tablets, and projected technology spending growth would be only 2.9 percent in 2013.

“Without mobile, this starts to look like a pretty mature industry,” Mr. Gens said.



In Midst of Crisis, Egyptians Try to Untangle President\'s \'Planet of the Apes\' Metaphor

As my colleague David Kirkpatrick reports, Egypt's new president, Mohamed Morsi, is engaged in a two-front battle of wills with the country's courts on one side and a galvanized opposition in the streets on the other. In the midst of this showdown, just days after he helped to negotiate an end to the fighting in Gaza, Mr. Morsi sat down for an interview with Time magazine.

Speaking mainly in English, a language he has a fluent if idiosyncratic grasp of, the president attempted to explain himself in terms Americans might understand - making reference in one answer to “Good Morning America,” Barbara Walters, the Iran hostage crisis, the Charles Bronson war movie “When Hell Broke Loose,” and “Planet of the Apes.” He observed, near the start of the discussion with the American journalists, “The world is now much more difficult than it was during your revolution. It's even more difficult. The world. More complicated, complex, difficult. It's a spaghetti-li ke structure. It's mixed up.”

While the reference to the world's “spaghetti-like structure” attracted some attention from readers in Cairo, more puzzling still was the question of what, exactly, Mr. Morsi intended to say about his role in international diplomacy with his long aside about the 1960s science-fiction fantasy in which apes evolved from man.

The trailer for “The Planet of the Apes,” a 1968 science-fiction film with less than obvious lessons for modern day Egypt..

According to the interview transcript, the president brought up “Planet of the Apes” after mentioning that his experience of living for some time in Los Angeles - where he earned a Ph.D in engineering from the University of Southern California in 198 2 - had made him aware of the difficulty of multicultural cooperation, both inside and between countries. “Conflict does not lead to stability in the world. Cooperation, how can we do that? It's a struggle. It's a very, very difficult struggle,” Mr. Morsi said. “To have a new culture, international culture, respecting individual countries and people's cultures, their local ones, but can we have an international culture? Can we do that?”

A short time later, he added:

We can cooperate, we can integrate. As much as we can. How can we do that? I think leaders in the world have a great responsibility in this. Human beings can live together.

I remember a movie. Which one? Planet of the Apes. The old version, not the new one. There is new one. Which is different. Not so good. It's not expressing the reality as it was the first one. But at the end, I still remember, this is the conclusion: When the big monkey, he was head of the supreme court I think - in the movie! - and there was a big scientist working for him, cleaning things, has been chained there. And it was the planet of the apes after the destructive act of a big war, and atomic bombs and whatever in the movie. And the scientists was asking him to do something, this was 30 years ago: “Don't forget you are a monkey.” He tells him, “don't ask me about this dirty work,.” What did the big ape, the monkey say? He said, “you're human, you did it [to] yourself. “That's the conclusion. Can we do something better for ourselves?

A quick look at the script for the film - the original version, not to the remake, as Mr. Morsi specified - made it difficult to say which scene, in particular, the president was misremembering.

While convoluted, the simplest reading of the president's musings is that they had something to do with the moral of the film's end, in which the orangutan known as Dr. Zaius, who held the high office of Chie f Defender of the Faith, explained to the human astronaut, Taylor, that mankind had proven unfit to rule the earth and destroyed itself through nuclear warfare. Political analysts in Cairo, however, were more struck by the fact that Mr. Morsi, who recently asserted that his decrees cannot be overturned by the Egyptian supreme court, mistakenly recalled that the villainous ape leader was “head of the supreme court.”



British Man Could Avoid Extradition to U.S. in Piracy Case

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

For Children, a Lie on Facebook Has Consequences, Study Finds

A federal law designed to protect children's privacy may unwittingly lead them to reveal too much on Facebook, a provocative new academic study shows, in the latest example of how difficult it is to regulate the digital lives of minors.

Facebook prohibits children under 13 from signing up for a Facebook account, because of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, which requires Web companies to obtain parental consent before collecting personal data on children under 13. To get around the ban, children often lie about their age. Parents sometimes help them lie - and in order to keep an eye on what they post, become their Facebook friends. Consumer Reports earlier this year estimated that Facebook has more than 5 million children under age 13.

That relatively innocuous family secret that allows a preteen to get on Facebook can have potentially serious consequences, including for their peers who do not lie. The study, conducted by computer scienti sts at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, finds that in a given high school, a small share of students who lie about their age in order to get a Facebook account can help a complete stranger collect sensitive information about a majority of their fellow students.

In other words, children who deceive can endanger the privacy of those who don't.

The latest research is part of a growing body of work that highlights the paradox of enforcing children's privacy by law. For instance, a study jointly authored by academics at three separate universities and Microsoft Research earlier this year found that even though parents were concerned about their children's digital footprints, they had helped them circumvent Facebook's terms of service by entering a false date of birth. Many parents seemed to be unaware of Facebook's minimum age requirement; they thought it was a recommendation, akin to a PG-13 movie rating.

“Our findings show that parents are i ndeed concerned about privacy and online safety issues, but they also show that they may not understand the risks that children face or how their data are used,” that paper concluded.

Facebook, for its part, has long said that it is difficult to ferret out every deceptive teenager and pointed to its extra precautions for minors. For children between ages 13 and 18, only their Facebook friends can see their posts, including photos.

That system, though, is compromised if a child lies about her age when she signs up for Facebook â€" and thus becomes an adult much sooner on the social network than in real life, according to the experiment by N.Y.U. researchers.

The key to the experiment, explained Keith W. Ross, a computer science professor at N.Y.U. and one of the co-authors of the study, was to first find known current students at a particular high school. A child could be found, for instance, if she was 10 years old and said she was 13 in order to sign up for Facebook. Five years later, that same child would show up as 18 years old â€" an adult, in the eyes of Facebook - when in fact she was only 15. At that point, a stranger could also see a list of her friends.

The researchers conducted their experiment at three separate high schools. They were able to construct the Facebook identities of most of the schools' current students, including their names, gender, profile pictures and other data.

The researchers identified neither the schools nor any of the students. Their paper is awaiting publication.

Using a publicly available database of registered voters, someone could also match the children's last names with their parents' - and potentially, their home addresses, Prof. Ross pointed out.

The COPPA law, he argued, seemed to serve as an incentive for children to lie, but made it no less difficult to verify their real age.

“In a COPPA-less world, most kids would be honest about their age when cr eating accounts. They would then be treated as minors until they're actually 18,” he said. “We show that in a COPPA-less world, the attacker finds far fewer students, and for the students he finds, the profiles have very little information.”

How children behave online is one of the most vexing issues for parents, to say nothing of regulators and lawmakers who say they wish to protect children from the data they scatter online.

Independent surveys suggest that parents are worried about how their children's social network posts can harm them in the future. A Pew Internet Center study earlier this month showed that most parents are not just concerned, but many are actively trying to help their kids manage the privacy of their digital data; over half of all parents said they talked to their children about something they posted.

Teenagers seem to be vigilant, in their own way, about controlling who sees what on the Facebook pages.

A separate study b y the Family Online Safety Institute and released in November found that four out of five teenagers have adjusted privacy settings on their social networking accounts, including Facebook, while two-thirds place restrictions on who can see which of their posts.



Nokia\'s New Lumia: In High Demand, or Just Short on Supply?

Nokia's new Lumia smartphone is about as difficult to buy in the United States as Apple's iPhone 5. In many online and brick-and-mortar stores, the Lumia 920 is sold out. But does that mean it's popular?

On Amazon.com, the Lumia 920 is labeled “backordered” with a shipping time of one to two weeks. In Manhattan, the phone is not available for an in-store pickup at any Best Buy location. This month, Nokia representatives even said the company was struggling to get the phones out to technology journalists who were interested in reviewing the device because there weren't enough to go around.

Nokia's last flagship phone, the Lumia 900, didn't sell very well here. Zacks Equity Research says the sold-out Lumia 920 is an early sign that Nokia has a “fighting chance” against Apple and the army of Android phones on the market.

But it's difficult to believe that the Lumia 920, an exclusive to AT&T in the United States, is drawing such a crowd. Tero Kuitti nen, an independent mobile analyst, says he thinks Nokia limited the supply of the Lumia here because it was aiming its first wave at Europe, where its smartphones have sold better in the past.

He noted that on Amazon, for instance, the Lumia 920 sold out just three days after it went on sale on Nov. 7, and the “backordered” status has stuck ever since - a sign that Nokia may simply be lowballing supply because it doesn't expect to sell many phones here.

Doug Dawson, a Nokia spokesman, declined to comment on whether the difficulty of buying the phone was related to unusually low supply. He said Nokia didn't have numbers to share about early sales.

“You can be very sure that we are working hard to meet the demand,” Mr. Dawson said.



How Much Facebook Might Make Through Gifts

Facebook's Gifts product can be lucrative for the data it can offer to Facebook. But whether it can be a moneymaker for the company remains a mystery.

Facebook has not offered any estimates of revenue through Gifts. But a thought experiment, with a back of the envelope calculation, yields some rough answers.

The company says it has 186 million users in the United States and Canada. About 168 million of them are in the United States, according to Socialbakers,  a Czech analytics company. Right now, Gifts is available only to users in this country.

Let's say 5 percent of them buy a gift on Facebook this year for one of their Facebook friends. That's almost 8.5 million people. If Facebook is correct in saying they spend an average of $25, that's a bit more than $200 million.

Facebook gets a cut of that. Let's take the high end of industry standard commission: 15 percent. That would generate about $30 million in revenue for Facebook, a fraction of th e $5 billion in revenue that the company is projected to generate this year.

Brian Blau, an analyst for Gartner, said: “Given the program only started recently, and it's only available to a limited number of Facebook users, it's difficult to say exactly how users are reacting.”

Could it expand worldwide and make more money? Possibly. To date, most of its revenue comes from advertising in North America, even though the vast majority of its users are abroad. The problem is, some of its largest and fastest-growing markets are countries like Brazil and India, emerging economies where the average user is less likely to spend $25 on a gift.

Gift giving has not been an easy market to crack for any of the Web giants. Amazon certainly has a rich history of purchases for its customers, but it doesn't offer an easy way to figure out what to buy for whom. Apple's iTunes allows customers to buy gifts for friends. But as I found out last weekend, Apple bizarrely limi ts people to giving within the same country. (So much for globalization.)

Facebook has a rich record of its users' friends all over the world and knows important gift-giving occasions â€" birthdays, graduations and the like. But it doesn't quite know â€" not yet, anyway â€" what to buy for whom. As it compiles more of its users' likes and wants, it is likely to get better at recommending the right gifts for the right people.

It could, of course, hasten that process by buying Pinterest. Now that would tell the clueless husband instantly what his wife really wants.



RIM\'s Market Share Slips Some More

Shortly after some stock analysts raised their ratings for Research in Motion, a new market share report showing that the company's once iconic BlackBerry brand now holds just 1.6 percent of the American smartphone market sank expectations for the company.

A year ago during the same quarter leading up to the end of October, the Kantar Worldpanel ComTech report estimated BlackBerry's share at 8.5 percent.

Just as surprising as the extent of RIM's collapse in the United States was the report's finding that BlackBerry was rapidly retreating in European countries where buyers previously had remained loyal to the brand.

In Britain, once RIM's largest market outside North America, BlackBerry's market share plummeted to 7.9 percent from 19 percent. In economically troubled Spain, BlackBerry went to just 3.4 percent of the market from 23.7 percent.

RIM's shares closed at $10.72 on Nasdaq on Tuesday, down $1.26 or 10.5 percent. Late on Wednesday afternoon, they were trading at $11.07, up 35 cents or 3.3 percent.

“We understand the competitive nature of the global smartphone market and the need for innovation,” Amy McDowell, a spokeswoman for RIM, said in an e-mail. “We are confident that BlackBerry 10 will provide our customers with an exciting alternative to our competitors, and we are committed to regaining market share.”

While RIM has been boasting about BlackBerry's success in Latin America, the report shows that the thrill is gone in Brazil. It estimates BlackBerry's market share there at 2.7 percent, down from 8.7 percent.

The only good news from the report by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, which is owned by WPP, the advertising, public relations and market research company, came from Germany. That, coincidentally, is the birthplace of Thorsten Heins, RIM's president and chief executive. There BlackBerry accounted for 2.5 percent, up from 1.6 percent.

Germany was also an exception in that it was the only market covered by the report where Apple's share declined despite the release of the iPhone 5. It fell to 17 percent from 22.1 percent.

By contrast, in the United States, all iPhone models accounted for 48.1 percent of the market, more than doubling last year's 22.4 percent share. Some of Apple's gain there came at RIM's expense. The report found that 6 percent of  those who bought an iPhone 5 during the period were BlackBerry owners.

Overall, however, phones based on Google's Android operating system proved to be the most popular alternative for disgruntled BlackBerry owners. Of those who switched phone brands in the United States in the last six months, Kantar Worldpanel ComTech found that 63.4 percent went with an Android handset.

The study's researchers found that many buyers were attracted by the new iPhone's larger screen, as well as its ability to use faster wireless networks known as 4G or LTE.

Mr. Heins has acknowledged that RIM would produce “challenging” numbers until it begins selling its new BlackBerry 10 phones and operating system next year. It features a screen similar in size to that of the iPhone 5, and it will be compatible with high-speed wireless networks.

Expectations that RIM will meet its planned release date of Jan. 30, as well as positive comments from wireless carriers now testing the BlackBerry 10, led to the analysts' upgrades of their share target prices.



Jeff Hawkins Develops a Brainy Big Data Company

Jeff Hawkins has been a pioneer of mobile devices, a distinguished lecturer in neuroscience, and a published author of a revolutionary theory of how the brain works. If he's right about Big Data, a lot of people are going to wish he'd never gone into that field.

Mr. Hawkins, who helped develop the technology in Palm, an early and successful mobile device, is a co-founder of Numenta, a predictive software company. Numenta's technology is based on Mr. Hawkins's theories of how the brain works, a subject he has studied and published on intensively. Perhaps most important for the technology industry, the product works off streams of real-time information from sensors, not the trillions of bytes of data that companies are amassing.

“It only makes sense to look at old data if you think the world doesn't change,” said Mr. Hawkins. “You don't remember the specific muscles you just used to pick up a coffee cup, or all the words you heard this morning; you might re member some of the ideas.”

If no data needs to be saved over a long term and real-time data can stream in all the information that is needed, a big part of the tech industry has a problem. Data storage companies like EMC and Hewlett-Packard thrive on storing massive amounts of data cheaply. Data analysis companies including Microsoft, I.B.M., and SAS fetch that data and crunch the history to find patterns. They and others rely on both the traditional relational databases from Oracle, and newer “unstructured” databases like Hadoop.

Much of this will be a relic within a few years, according to Mr. Hawkins. “Hadoop won't go away, but it will manage a lot less stuff,” he said in an interview at Numenta's headquarters in Redwood City, Calif. “Querying databases won't matter as much, as people worry instead about millions of streams of real-time data.” In a sensor-rich world of data feeds, he is saying, we will model ourselves more closely on the constant change that is the real world.

Mr. Hawkins thinks that the human neocortex, that part of the brain that includes the perception and reasoning functions, itself works as a kind of pattern-seeking and predictive system. Brain cells, starting at some of their most elemental components, work together to build expectations, initially about things like light and dark, or near and far, that they gather from sensory organs.

Patterns of one or the other are reinforced over time. As new data streams in, the brain figures out if it is capturing more complexity, which requires either modifying the understanding of the original pattern or splitting it into two patterns, making for new knowledge. Sometimes, particularly if it not repeated, the data is discarded as irrelevant information. Thus, over time, sounds become words, words occupy a grammatical structure, and ideas are conveyed.

“The key to artificial intelligence has always been the representation,” he says. “You and I are streaming data engines.”

It is a model of consciousness that Mr. Hawkins has promoted not just in the tech world, but to neuroscientists. While some have questioned the idea, he published a popular book on the rudiments of the subject, “On Intelligence.” Last spring he was invited to present the work at the Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock Lectures, at the University of California, Berkeley. Previous lecturers include Martin Rees, who Britain's Astronomer Royal, and Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize winner and Energy Department secretary.

Numenta's product, called Grok, is a cloud-based service that works much the same way. Grok takes steady feeds of data from things like thermostats, Web clicks, or machinery. From initially observing the data flow, it begins making guesses about what will happen next. The more data, the more accurate the predictions become.

It has been much more difficult to engineer than that sounds. Modeling itself on 40 sensory receptors feeding over 128 information-seeing dendrites on each cell of the brain, Mr. Hawkins put into Grok a mathematical algorithm that he says approximates the way brain cells work together, even sometimes canceling out each other's signals to refine a sense of what's going on.

“There are the equivalent of 60,000 neurons, each one fairly sophisticated, in each Grok,” he said. That model of 300 million connections, he notes, is about one millionth the actual capability of the neocortex

Grok is still in limited release, with just a few customers in the fields of energy, media, and video processing. So far, the company claims, Grok has delivered results that are 10 percent to 20 percent better than various benchmarks, like revenue, optimal purchasing mixes, and machine servicing. The company expects to start selling Grok more broadly in the first half of 2013.

As more companies use the product, and Grok feeds on more streams of data, the world will be in a better position to judge whether Mr. Hawkins is correct. He evinces few doubts, however.

“This is the future of machine intelligence,” he said. “Twenty years from now the computer industry will be driven by this, I'm certain of it.”



What Readers Think of Facebook\'s Gifts

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Daily Report: Facebook Seeks Your Credit Card Number

Facebook is already privy to its users' e-mail addresses, wedding pictures and political beliefs. Now, as Somini Sengupta reports in Wednesday's New York Times, the company is nudging them to share a bit more: credit card numbers and offline addresses.

The nudge comes from a new Facebook service called Gifts. It allows Facebook users - only in the United States for now - to buy presents for their friends on the social network. On offer are items as varied as spices from Dean & DeLuca, pajamas from BabyGap and subscriptions to Hulu Plus, the video service. This week Facebook added iTunes gift cards.

The gift service is part of an aggressive moneymaking push aimed at pleasing Facebook's investors after the company's dismal stock market debut. Facebook has stepped up mobile advertising and is starting to customize the marketing messages it shows to users based on their Web browsing outside Facebook.

Those efforts seem to have brought some relief to Wall Str eet. Analysts issued more bullish projections for the company in recent days, and the stock is up 49 percent from its lowest point, closing Tuesday at $26.15, although that is still well below the initial offering price of $38.

To power the Gifts service, Facebook rented a warehouse in South Dakota and created its own software to track inventory and shipping. It will not say how much it earns from each purchase made through Gifts, though merchants that have a similar arrangement with Amazon.com give it a roughly 15 percent cut of sales.

If it catches on, the service would give Facebook a toehold in the more than $200 billion e-commerce market. Much more important, it would let the company accumulate a new stream of valuable personal data and use it to refine targeted advertisements, its bread and butter.

“The hard part for Facebook was aggregating a billion users. Now it's more about how to monetize those users without scaring them away,” said Colin Seb astian, an analyst with Robert W. Baird.



Integrity of Internet Is Crux of Global Conference

Integrity of Internet Is Crux of Global Conference

PARIS - A commercial and ideological clash is set for next week, when representatives of more than 190 governments, along with telecommunications companies and Internet groups, gather in Dubai for a once-in-a-generation meeting.

The “Take Action” Web site of Google calls on visitors to sign a petition for a “free and open Internet,” and ban censorship.

Hamadoun Touré has said the I.T.U. has no desire to stifle the Internet's growth.

Terry Kramer, U.S. ambassador to the meeting, vowed to veto any change in how the Internet is run.

The subject: Control of the Internet, politically and commercially.

The stated purpose of the World Conference on International Telecommunications is to update a global treaty on technical standards needed to, say, connect a telephone call from Tokyo to Timbuktu. The previous conference took place in 1988, when the Internet was in its infancy and telecommunications remained a highly regulated, mostly analog-technology business.

Now the Internet is the backbone for worldwide communications and commerce. Critics of the International Telecommunication Union, the agency of the United Nations that is organizing the meeting, see a dark agenda in the meeting. The blogosphere has been raging over supposed plans led by Russia to snatch control of the Internet and hand it to the U.N. agency.

That seems unlikely. Any such move would require an international consensus, and opposition is widespread.

Terry D. Kramer, the former Vodafone executive who is the United States ambassador to the conference, has vowed to veto any change in how the Internet is overseen.

Analysts say the real business of the conference is business. “The far bigger issue - largely obscured by this discussion - are proposals that are more likely to succeed that envision changing the way we pay for Internet services,” Michael Geist, an Internet law professor at the University of Ottawa, said by e-mail.

Hamadoun Touré, secretary general of the I.T.U., has repeatedly said that the U.N. group has no desire to take over the Internet or to stifle its growth. On the contrary, he says, one of the main objectives of the conference is to spread Internet access to more of the four and a half billion people around the world who still do not use it.

And yet, groups as diverse as Google, the Internet Society, the International Trade Union Confederation and Greenpeace warn that the discussions could set a bad precedent, encouraging governments to step up censorship or take other actions that would threaten the integrity of the Internet.

“This is a very important moment in the history of the Internet, because this conference may introduce practices that are inimical to its continued growth and openness,” Vinton G. Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, said in a conference call.

Google set up a Web site last week, “Take Action,” encouraging visitors to sign a petition for a “free and open Internet.” The campaign is modeled on the successful drive last winter to defeat legislative proposals to crack down on Internet piracy in the United States.

More energy is expected to be spent on how companies make money off the Internet. In one submission to the conference, the European Telecommunications Network Operators' Association, a lobbying group based in Brussels that represents companies like France Télécom, Deutsche Telekom and Telecom Italia, proposed that network operators be permitted to assess charges for content providers like Internet video companies that use a lot of bandwidth.

Analysts say the proposal is an acknowledgment by European telecommunications companies that they cannot hope to provide digital content. “The telecoms realize that they have lost the battle,” said Paul Budde, an independent telecommunications analyst in Australia. “They are saying, ‘We can't beat the Googles and the Facebooks, so let's try to charge them.' ”

The European lobbying group says that without the new fees, there will be no money to invest in network upgrades needed to deal with a surge in traffic. Regulators have required European telecommunications operators to open their networks to rivals, and the market for broadband is fiercely competitive, with rock-bottom prices.

In the United States, by contrast, most telecommunications companies have been permitted to maintain local monopolies - or duopolies, with cable companies - in broadband, keeping prices higher. And American regulators have ordered broadband providers to give equal priority to all Internet traffic. Such “network neutrality” is incompatible with charging content providers for moving their bits of data.

Analysts say this may explain why American telecommunications companies have not joined the European call for a new business model. “Models that try to force payment terms between nations and telecom operators run a huge risk of cutting off traffic,” Mr. Kramer said in an interview. “Liberalized markets are the only way to expand the success of the Internet.”

People who have been briefed on the conference submissions say that not a single European government delegation has endorsed the telecommunications operators' proposal, and the European Parliament has passed a resolution denouncing it. Only governments, not private groups or companies, can put items on the meeting agenda.

While many documents prepared for the conference remain secret, several people who have seen submissions say there is broad support for Internet connection fees in French-speaking Africa and among Arab nations - countries in which many telecommunications companies are still owned or heavily regulated by governments.

Much of the attention before the 12-day conference has focused on a proposal from Russia that would effectively remove control of the Internet's infrastructure from a collection of decentralized and apolitical organizations, mostly based in the United States. “Member states,” Russia proposed, “shall have equal rights to manage the Internet, including in regard to the allotment, assignment and reclamation of Internet numbering, naming, addressing and identification resources.”

Those functions are performed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a private organization with an international board that operates under contract with the United States government.

The Russian proposal was widely interpreted as a call to legitimize domestic censorship of the Internet. Yet analysts note that governments inclined to filter the Web, like China and Iran, have not waited for consensus in an international meeting to do so.

A version of this article appeared in print on November 28, 2012, on page B2 of the New York edition with the headline: Integrity of Internet Is Crux of Global Conference.

Something Missing in Chinese Newspaper\'s Entirely Accurate Summary of Onion Report

A state-run newspaper in China reported, accurately, that The Onion has named North Korea's leader its Sexiest Man Alive for 2012. Left unsaid in the report, which was featured on the English-language home page of People's Daily Online on Tuesday, is whether the editors of the Chinese Communist Party's newspaper are in on the joke that the American publication is, well, kidding.

A screenshot from People's Daily Online on Tuesday. A screenshot from People's Daily Online on Tuesday.

Although the People's Daily report, accompanied by a 55-photograph slide show, clearly cited The Onion, there was no reference in either English or Chinese to the fact that the original item was satirical.

The Chines e newspaper's three-paragraph report read:

An entirely accurate summary of a report from The Onion by the Chinese Communist Party's newspaper. An entirely accurate summary of a report from The Onion by the Chinese Communist Party's newspaper.

… The Onion has named North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un as the “Sexiest Man Alive for the year 2012.”

“With his devastatingly handsome, round face, his boyish charm, and his strong, sturdy frame, this Pyongyang-bred heartthrob is every woman's dream come true. Blessed with an air of power that masks an unmistakable cute, cuddly side, Kim made this newspaper's editorial board swoon with his impeccable fashion sense, chic short hairstyle, and, of course, that famous smile,” it said.

“He has that rare ability to somehow be completely adorable and completely macho at the same time,” said Marissa Blake-Zweiber, editor of The Onion Style and Entertainment.

For some reason, the editors in Beijing chose to omit the section of the Onion report which listed “prior ‘Sexiest Man Alive' winners,” including:

- 2011: Bashar al-Assad

- 2010: Bernie Madoff

- 2009: Charles and David Koch (co-winners)

- 2008: Ted Kaczynski

The Associated Press tried and failed to reach the editors of People's Daily for comment late on Tuesday in Beijing.

The editors of The Onion, for their part, added an update to their report on Tuesday, reading: “For more coverage on The Onion's Sexiest Man Alive 2012, Kim Jong-Un, please visit our friends at the People's Daily in China, a proud Communist subsidiary of The Onion Inc. Exemplary reportage, comrades.†

Regular readers of The Lede will be aware that this is not the first time The Onion has been apparently mistaken for a news organization by journalists. In September, Iran's Fars News Agency plagiarized The Onion, running an edited version of a satirical report as if it were real, and then defended itself by claiming that the fake news item had uncovered a deeper truth.

Fars also pointed at the time to the ever-expanding list of news organizations that have been mistaken The Onion for a news source. Among them, as The A.P. explained, is another Chinese paper, the Beijing Evening News, which picked up a story from The Onion in 2002 “that claimed members of Congress were threatening to leave Washington unless the building underwent a makeover that included more bathrooms and a retractable dome.”

A screenshot of the People's Daily home page on Tuesday. A screenshot of the People's Daily home page on Tuesday.

As The Lede suggested in September, the increasingly lighthearted tone in the reports of many serious news organizations, as they compete for attention on social networks in the Internet era, could be making such mistakes more common.

The image of North Korea's leader featured on the People's Daily home page on Tuesday, for instance, was taken from a recent Time magazine cover that referred to him as “Lil' Kim,” playing on a joke frequently made by bloggers who use the name of a female rapper to refer to the young leader.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.



Something Missing in Chinese Newspaper\'s Entirely Accurate Summary of Onion Report

A state-run newspaper in China reported, accurately, that The Onion has named North Korea's leader its Sexiest Man Alive for 2012. Left unsaid in the report, which was featured on the English-language home page of People's Daily Online on Tuesday, is whether the editors of the Chinese Communist Party's newspaper are in on the joke that the American publication is, well, kidding.

A screenshot from People's Daily Online on Tuesday. A screenshot from People's Daily Online on Tuesday.

Although the People's Daily report, accompanied by a 55-photograph slide show, clearly cited The Onion, there was no reference in either English or Chinese to the fact that the original item was satirical.

The Chines e newspaper's three-paragraph report read:

An entirely accurate summary of a report from The Onion by the Chinese Communist Party's newspaper. An entirely accurate summary of a report from The Onion by the Chinese Communist Party's newspaper.

… The Onion has named North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un as the “Sexiest Man Alive for the year 2012.”

“With his devastatingly handsome, round face, his boyish charm, and his strong, sturdy frame, this Pyongyang-bred heartthrob is every woman's dream come true. Blessed with an air of power that masks an unmistakable cute, cuddly side, Kim made this newspaper's editorial board swoon with his impeccable fashion sense, chic short hairstyle, and, of course, that famous smile,” it said.

“He has that rare ability to somehow be completely adorable and completely macho at the same time,” said Marissa Blake-Zweiber, editor of The Onion Style and Entertainment.

For some reason, the editors in Beijing chose to omit the section of the Onion report which listed “prior ‘Sexiest Man Alive' winners,” including:

- 2011: Bashar al-Assad

- 2010: Bernie Madoff

- 2009: Charles and David Koch (co-winners)

- 2008: Ted Kaczynski

The Associated Press tried and failed to reach the editors of People's Daily for comment late on Tuesday in Beijing.

The editors of The Onion, for their part, added an update to their report on Tuesday, reading: “For more coverage on The Onion's Sexiest Man Alive 2012, Kim Jong-Un, please visit our friends at the People's Daily in China, a proud Communist subsidiary of The Onion Inc. Exemplary reportage, comrades.†

Regular readers of The Lede will be aware that this is not the first time The Onion has been apparently mistaken for a news organization by journalists. In September, Iran's Fars News Agency plagiarized The Onion, running an edited version of a satirical report as if it were real, and then defended itself by claiming that the fake news item had uncovered a deeper truth.

Fars also pointed at the time to the ever-expanding list of news organizations that have been mistaken The Onion for a news source. Among them, as The A.P. explained, is another Chinese paper, the Beijing Evening News, which picked up a story from The Onion in 2002 “that claimed members of Congress were threatening to leave Washington unless the building underwent a makeover that included more bathrooms and a retractable dome.”

A screenshot of the People's Daily home page on Tuesday. A screenshot of the People's Daily home page on Tuesday.

As The Lede suggested in September, the increasingly lighthearted tone in the reports of many serious news organizations, as they compete for attention on social networks in the Internet era, could be making such mistakes more common.

The image of North Korea's leader featured on the People's Daily home page on Tuesday, for instance, was taken from a recent Time magazine cover that referred to him as “Lil' Kim,” playing on a joke frequently made by bloggers who use the name of a female rapper to refer to the young leader.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.



Egyptians Explain Their Return to the Streets

With tens of thousands of protesters again filling Cairo's Tahrir Square and the streets of other Egyptians cities on Tuesday, chanting for the country's president to “Leave!” just five months after he was elected, the mood in the square reminded many of the 18 days of protest that toppled Hosni Mubarak last year.

While the atmospherics are similar, though, the political dynamics are d ifferent, and a group of Egyptian filmmakers is making an effort to explain the roots of the current crisis by posting a series of interviews with demonstrators on YouTube.

The group, known as Mosireen, is a collective effort of activists and citizen journalists who set out to document the 2011 revolution by gathering video clips shot by protesters. About a year ago, after deadly attacks on protesters during the period of military rule, the collective began producing its own reports, hoping to give observers following events in Egypt through the Internet a deeper understanding than can be gleaned from raw footage of protests and clashes.

On the eve of Tuesday's demonstration, one Egyptian protester, Ahmed Hassan, explained the new protests to the Cairo film collective Mosireen.

As my colleague David Kirkpatrick reports, tens of thousands marched to Tahrir on Tuesday to denounce President Mohamed Morsi's recent constitutional decree, in which he granted himself broad new powers. But as an activist and blogger named Mona Seif told Mosireen on the eve of the protest, many Egyptians remain angry that the new government has failed to address the central grievance of the 2011 revolution, the impunity enjoyed by the country's police officers.

An interview with Mona Seif, an Egyptian rights activi st, on Monday.

Just blocks from Tuesday's main demonstration, on a street near the Interior Ministry headquarters in Cairo, groups of young men have been engaged in a running street battle with riot police officers for nine days. Another Mosireen video report, produced last week by by Bassem Zakaria Al-Samragy, explains that those clashes grew out of anger at the lack of prosecutions for officers who killed dozens of protesters in the same area exactly one year ago.

“Why Are They Taking to the Street?” a video report by Bassem Zakaria Al-Samragy for Mosireen.

Among the demonstrators who spoke to Mosireen was the father of Jika Gaber, a 16-year-old protester killed last week, who described his son as “the first martyr of Morsi's government.”

An interview with the father of Jika Gaber, a protester killed in last week's clashes.

Video of Tuesday's demonstration in Cairo posted online by a rights activist named Amani Massoud showed protesters chanting, “Jika Jika, you hero, your blood frees the nation.”

Liam Stack contributed reporting.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.



Egyptians Explain Their Return to the Streets

With tens of thousands of protesters again filling Cairo's Tahrir Square and the streets of other Egyptians cities on Tuesday, chanting for the country's president to “Leave!” just five months after he was elected, the mood in the square reminded many of the 18 days of protest that toppled Hosni Mubarak last year.

While the atmospherics are similar, though, the political dynamics are d ifferent, and a group of Egyptian filmmakers is making an effort to explain the roots of the current crisis by posting a series of interviews with demonstrators on YouTube.

The group, known as Mosireen, is a collective effort of activists and citizen journalists who set out to document the 2011 revolution by gathering video clips shot by protesters. About a year ago, after deadly attacks on protesters during the period of military rule, the collective began producing its own reports, hoping to give observers following events in Egypt through the Internet a deeper understanding than can be gleaned from raw footage of protests and clashes.

On the eve of Tuesday's demonstration, one Egyptian protester, Ahmed Hassan, explained the new protests to the Cairo film collective Mosireen.

As my colleague David Kirkpatrick reports, tens of thousands marched to Tahrir on Tuesday to denounce President Mohamed Morsi's recent constitutional decree, in which he granted himself broad new powers. But as an activist and blogger named Mona Seif told Mosireen on the eve of the protest, many Egyptians remain angry that the new government has failed to address the central grievance of the 2011 revolution, the impunity enjoyed by the country's police officers.

An interview with Mona Seif, an Egyptian rights activi st, on Monday.

Just blocks from Tuesday's main demonstration, on a street near the Interior Ministry headquarters in Cairo, groups of young men have been engaged in a running street battle with riot police officers for nine days. Another Mosireen video report, produced last week by by Bassem Zakaria Al-Samragy, explains that those clashes grew out of anger at the lack of prosecutions for officers who killed dozens of protesters in the same area exactly one year ago.

“Why Are They Taking to the Street?” a video report by Bassem Zakaria Al-Samragy for Mosireen.

Among the demonstrators who spoke to Mosireen was the father of Jika Gaber, a 16-year-old protester killed last week, who described his son as “the first martyr of Morsi's government.”

An interview with the father of Jika Gaber, a protester killed in last week's clashes.

Video of Tuesday's demonstration in Cairo posted online by a rights activist named Amani Massoud showed protesters chanting, “Jika Jika, you hero, your blood frees the nation.”

Liam Stack contributed reporting.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.