The Register reports that “

[t]he chair of the Antitrust Subcommittee in the Senate Judiciary Committee has written to the four largest US network operators demanding they explain why the cost of texting has doubled since 2005.  Text messages have been a nice little earner for European operators since cross-network connectivity became available, but txt is still a growing market in the US, and one on which American operators have been slow to capitalise – though the fact that texting rates have doubled from 10 cents to 20 cents since 2005 shows they’re catching up fast.  The concern of Senator Herb Kohl is that all four networks seem to have increased their prices at roughly the same rate, and as the industry has seen consolidation reduces competition.”

The Guardian writes that “[t]he chief executive of the Walt Disney Company has called on internet service providers to ban people who illegally download content.  Bob Iger, speaking at a media briefing in London today, today added his voice to calls for people who illegally download content to be punished.  Disney owns US network ABC and produces hit international TV shows including Desperate Housewives and Lost.”

The Seattle Times reveals that “Amazon.com has found a way to capitalize on one of the most interesting presidential elections in U.S. history.  On Tuesday, the Seattle-based retailer introduced an interactive map of the U.S. showing which states are ‘red’ or ‘blue’ based on their online book purchases.  Although it’s not meant to predict the next president, it suggests that the Right’s slant on the Obama-McCain matchup is more widely read than the Left’s.  For now, 36 states are pink or red. Six are blue. And eight, including Washington and Oregon, are purple, meaning residents are virtually split in their political book purchases between Republican and Democratic viewpoints.”

Slashdot has an interesting post on the “Fedora-Red Hat crisis,” writing that “[w]hen Linux journalist Bruce Byfield tried to dig for details about the security breach in Fedora’s servers, a Red Hat publicist told him the official statement — written in non-informative corporate-speak — was all he would get. In the wake of Red Hat’s tight-lipped handling of the breach, even Fedora’s board was unhappy, as Byfield details. He concludes: ‘If Red Hat, one of the epitomes of a successful FOSS-based business, can ignore FOSS when to do so is corporately convenient, then what chance do we have that other companies — especially publicly-traded ones — will act any better?’”

According to the Wall Street Journal, “[w]hen AOL in 2006 ditched its subscription service in favor of an advertising-based model, millions of subscribers deserted the site. Now, AOL is making its biggest push yet to win them back.  In a bid to remain relevant, AOL on Wednesday is unveiling a new home page as well as a slew of Web sites aimed at women, pop-culture addicts and parents of gamers. The revamped AOL.com will for the first time let visitors access email accounts from outside providers like Google and Yahoo and will include updates from major social-networking sites and automatically personalize content for users.  The changes are an effort to recalibrate AOL’s portal model with the way people use the Internet these days.”