Inc.com reports that, according to the Commerce Department, “

[o]nline retail sales grew by 3.6 percent to $34.7 billion over the third quarter, more than double the quarter-to-quarter growth of brick-and-mortar sales.  In the past year, e-commerce sales have increased by 19.3 percent, compared to just 3.8 for total retail sales, the [Commerce Department’s] report said.”

The Mercury News writes that “Google’s proposed $3.1 billion takeover of DoubleClick deserves close scrutiny by U.S. regulators to ensure it won’t strangle competition and hurt consumers’ online privacy, two key U.S. senators said.  The acquisition by Google of DoubleClick’s online advertising software ‘raises very important competition issues in a vital sector of the economy,’ Wisconsin Democrat Herb Kohl, chairman of the Senate antitrust subcommittee, and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the panel’s top Republican, said in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission.”

According to Yahoo!News, “European trade chief Peter Mandelson said the United States should let foreign companies into its multibillion-dollar online gaming market instead of trying to compensate European firms for shutting them out.  ‘The U.S. has so far opted for compensation to make right what is wrong. I don’t think compensation does that job,’ he told members of the European Parliament on Tuesday.”

BBC News warns that if a new study by US analyst firm Nemertes Research is to be believed, “[c]onsumer demand for bandwidth could see the internet running out of capacity as early as 2010.  […]  Such gridlock would drastically affect how people use the web and could mean the next Google or YouTube simply doesn’t get off the ground, [the Nemertes study] said.”

The International Herald Tribune reports that “[t]he European Union will name 23 ‘malfunctioning’ economic sectors Tuesday, from transportation to telecommunications, as it moves to revive the single regional market and project its regulatory framework internationally.  The review will highlight areas where productivity in the EU lags behind that of the United States and will call for measures to inject more competition into important sectors.”