Internetnews.com reports that “

[t]he House Committee on Small Business took a look at the issue [of Internet taxation] today, hearing testimony from online mom-and-pop shops who are urging Congress to enact a permanent ban on discriminatory and access taxes. Affordable Internet access — free of the kind of taxes that inundate a typical phone bill — is important to many segments of the economy. But for small businesses, it could be a matter of survival, Brett Dewey, CEO of Los Angeles-based e-tailer WickedCoolStuff.com, told the committee during today’s hearing. ‘Right now, like many small online retailers, we’re down,’ Dewey said in his testimony. ‘We are taking steps to improve sales and I’m optimistic that we’re headed for another ‘up,’ but a new tax right now would be devastating.’”

Inc.com writes that “[t]he U.S. Chamber of Commerce this week launched its Global Intellectual Property Center, which will focus on raising awareness among consumers and policymakers about the economic impact of counterfeiting and piracy in the international market.”

According to the Register, a German privacy watchdog has warned that “[t]he proposed $3.1bn merger of search giant Google and online advertising company DoubleClick would lead to ‘a massive violation of data privacy rights.’ The Data Protection Commissioner of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein Thilo Weichert has written to Europe’s Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes expressing his view that the merger would allow the combined company unprecedented access to personal data about users. […] Wiechert said access to the combined database would give the company access to highly detailed personal information. ‘Such an approach contradicts fundamental data privacy principles of the European Union: limited specific use, transparency, the right to object, the protection of sensitive data and the right to having data deleted,’ he wrote.”

CNetNews.com has an interesting story today about the huge amounts of venture capital being invested in virtual world companies.

Yahoo!News reports that, according to eBay’s security chief David Cullinane, “[w]hen it comes to launching online attacks, criminals are getting more organized and branching out from the Windows operating system. […] Cullinane’s experience with phishing goes back to his previous employer, Washington Mutual, which has been one of the top phishing targets in the U.S. While there, he noticed an unusual trend when taking down phishing sites. ‘The vast majority of the threats we saw were rootkitted Linux boxes, which was rather startling. We expected Microsoft boxes,’ he said. Rootkit software covers the tracks of the attackers and can be extremely difficult to detect. According to Cullinane, none of the Linux operators whose machines had been compromised were even aware they’d been infected.”