In a potentially huge victory for Comcast, the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC threw out a rule limiting cable companies to under 30 percent of the market. The courts claimed that the FCC failed to take into account competition from satellite and fiber-optic providers when considering competition.
Comcast currently controls about 25 percent of the cable market, with about 23.7 million customers. With the law now vacated, the company will have an easier time looking for potential acquisitions to expand its reach.
The rule has an interesting history: it was first implemented in 1992 as part of an effort to control monopolization of the cable industry. The court declared the law unconstitutional in 2001, and had it set aside. That didn’t stop the FCC: in 2007, on a 3-2 vote it re-instituted the policy.
Analysts say that its unlikely that Comcast will acquire large cable operators, as there is not a significant enough benefit to doing so. However, with no roadblocks, the nation’s largest cable operator is pretty much free to get as big as it wants.
Google’s UK headquarters in London were evacuated Thursday afternoon local time after a barbecue on the bulding’s roof caught fire and burned out of control. No injuries have been reported, and damage seems to be contained to the portion of the roof where the barbecue was located. In total, four fire engines and 20 firefighters responded to fight the blaze.
The Swedes are doing all they can to shut down The Pirate Bay, but it just won’t die. A Swedish court ordered the popular file sharing site’s bandwidth provider to cut it’s Internet access or face fines, which was enough to pressure Black Internet into action.
Verizon was the first major carrier to do it 
With the mass migration from MySpace to Facebook by a good portion of the social mediarati, the ways we are using the service is certainly changing. Before, the two sites had rather distinct user types. This lead to the sites being used in different ways.
Select Motorola phones will gain the ability to stream “thousands” of movies to their devices from Blockbuster’s 
There are new allegations in the continuing court battle between Mac clone maker Psystar and Apple: the Cupertino company is now accusing its rival of destruction of evidence: I’m still in shock that the battle has gone this long, but I do digress.
[UPDATE: Yup, Apple is holding an event on September 9th. 
You might have noticed that Microsoft’s ads for its Bing search engine have become much more frequent on our pages as of late. I’ve noticed elsewhere a marked increase in advertisements for the service, which seems to imply that Microsoft may be staging another offensive in the war over search.