Internet access in Egypt remained a top concern in the business technology online conversation this week, as did American companies' contributions to the situation. Also, a high-profile bickering match broke out between two long-time rivals and the industry began preparing for the internet to run out of space. All in a week's work in the business tech sector.
After five days in the dark, Egyptians regained access to the internet around midday on Wednesday. James Cowie, founder and CTO of internet monitoring firm Renesys, once again broke the news with a company blog post. Cowie was the first to report the internet outage last week.
Surprisingly, internet access has returned to its normal capacity in Egypt, with Facebook and Twitter both available again. Initially, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak banned access to these social networking sites before shutting down overall internet access in an effort to cut off communication between protesters. The return of the nation's internet access was well received and celebrated across the globe, with online conversation about “Egypt's internet” remaining busy two days after its return.
Last weekend, while Egypt was still disconnected, Google engineers put in some overtime hours with others from Twitter and Google's recently acquired SayNow on “some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard.” The result was a speak-to-tweet service directed at Egyptians, providing them with international phone numbers they can call and leave a desired tweet in a voicemail. The service then immediately tweeted these voicemails, thus providing Egyptians access to reach out to the global community without internet access.
While Google spent its weekend working to resolve one conflict, it sparked its own once the workweek resumed. On Tuesday, Google fellow Amit Singhal, speaking in an interview with SearchEngineLand.com, made bold claims that Microsoft had stolen its search engine results and inserted them into Bing. Later that day, Singhal made it official with his own post on the Google Blog, citing his interview with SearchEngineLand.com and flatly claiming in his headline that “Microsoft's Bing uses Google search results – and denies it.”
Executives from Google and Bing also went head-to-head on this matter at this week's Future of Search event. As Brafton reported, Bing claims it is not copying Google; it says it is learning “from our collective customers.”
After Microsoft's verbose initial response to the allegations set off further speculation, CNET's Mary Jo Foley investigated and generated a flat statement from a Microsoft spokesperson, who declared “we do not copy Google's results.” Despite such a convincing argument, speculation remains, with a significant amount of online conversation pertaining to the search term “Bing steals search results.”
Meanwhile, the rest of the business tech industry is worried about finding space to operate on the internet. With IP addresses running out in the outdated Internet Protocol version 4, industry experts and analysts have long called for the switch to Internet Protocol version 6. IPv6 has been operable since 1998, but has struggled to persuade many to deal with the headache of switching without much, if any, financial incentive.
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority stepped in this week, allocating blocks of IP addresses based on IPv4, which will help those who really need the addresses – internet service providers, for example – remain on IPv4 for a longer time before making the switch. IPv4, which initially offered 4.3 billion addresses, ran out of space far sooner than most suspected, with the sudden emergence of mobile web devices quickly consuming IP addresses.
Diminshing resources for IP addresses remains a popular topic in the online conversation, with Google Realtime results for both “IPv4” and “IPv6” showing frequent updates.
Each of these issues will continue to impact future developments in business tech. Keep listening, as the online conversation gets louder.
