My publisher has such a site and sells DAISY, ePub, Mobi and PDF directly. They cannot sell them via Amazon, however. The Amazon site sells only a kindle-specific variant.

The fact that someone as major as O'Reilly has to deal with Amazon, at a price disadvantage and with significant limitations on what they're allowed to sell is typical of a monopoly, or an oligopoly with one leading member and the others doing price- and policy-following.

Monopolies are barely legal in Canada (where I am), but oligopolies and price-following are winked at. Very occasionally the government or courts will whack a leading oligopolist, but only if they are enraging the whole cell-phone-using population. Arguably they're a criminal conspiracy in restraint of trade, but as they only communicate their evil plans with each via press releases, the "secret" part of conspiracy is technically absent (;-))

In the Excited States, they have to have something like 83% of the market

The US used to have such laws, having suffered from significant monopoly problems in the past. It may be illegal in Canada, but it's arguably illegal everywhere else. If you sell houses in Chatham, you can't refuse to sell a house built by Bill Green, nor refuse to sell a house to Chan Hin Poon, even if you think Bill is an idiot and you hate anyone Chinese (;-))

Nor can you ask Bill for a kickback.

The approvals are for "add a new wire to all the poles in East Bumsquat county, with component sizes the same or smaller that standard F", rather than approval for houses. They're issued to companies who pull and maintain the wires and pay fees according to another preapproved schedule for large areas, typically a county or a region like "the south shore of Nova Scotia". If you want to pay a different fee, that takes a meeting. And, as I said, the original approvals took months of boring meetings, there and in Ontario.

Provinces vary: the first permission to hang cable TV on Ontario Hydro poles took months and months, but subsequent ones got rubber-stamped at subsequent monthly meetings. Nova Scotia, on the other hand, reputedly turns them around in a few days, unless you ask for something that requires a meeting.

Someone had to bootstrap it, and Google stepped up, for their own normal benefit. In other locations, and after some years in the current ones, Google can offer to hand the physical fibre and the things it hooks to, to the local utility company. That moves the fibre itself into a being a common carrier, and probably a regulated monopoly if the local laws require.

Waterloo and Ottawa have more computer scientists. but Tranna has the manufacturing infrastructure, so Cisco's announced that they're moving significant parts of the company there. The first phase is $100 million, out of a $4-billion investment in Ontario. and roughly 1,700 jobs. See http://www.theglobeandmail.com...

Besides, many people fear CSE less than they do the NSA. After all, Canada's only been caught spying on Brazil, while the US was found spying on everyone on the planet (;-))

Let the default download of a new firefox randonly select either with- or without-DRM. Cound the number of times the same user goes back and selects a non-default browser from a list that explicitly says whether they have DRM or not.

Done well, no-one will even notice.

In this experiment, I expect the null hypothesis will be "no-one cares", and will win (:-))

For one, legal publishers.

Lexis Nexis and Westlaw are massive special-purpose search engines dealing in exactly this kind of data: court reports. Lexis Nexis is also well-known as a newspaper/magazine search engine.

Imagine a lawyer in the UK trying to refer to a classic interpretation and discovering the case was no longer reported, as from the point of view of one of the participants, it was "no longer relevant".

In non-EU countries, it if was a case about a minor, the page would have the names removed. Similarly, if a participant had received a pardon, they could apply to the court to remove their name from the published report. The original report would be available, of course, to lawyers willing to agree to confidentiality controls.

It's already having an effect: in the UK their privacy commission just got credit reporting company misbehavior dumped back on their plate: turns out they're the legal equivalent of search engines. Now add any other "information intermediary" like Lexis Nexis, which publishes law reports...

It's cheap in the short run, especially if you can't afford the hardware. That's why people used to lease time on IBM mainframes in computer centres. Now people lease time on x86s in computer centres, not realizing that buying enough for your base load is affordable, as well as cheaper in the long run.

The leasing (cloud) people just love people who don't know about costs.

I did a table-based setup for an electoral candidate, and could up- and down-load subsets to spreadsheets for major changes or offline work and it has a simple form for single-line changes. Much processing consisted of select, export, format and print, as many volunteers understood paper and pen (;-))

Regrettable... I had taken the " Google failed to argue that such a decision would be unfair because the information was already legally in the public domain." as an indication that they had not been heard, rather than that they had not made the point. Thanks for the pointer!

[81] However, inasmuch as the removal of links from the list of results could, depending on the information at issue, have effects upon the legitimate interest of internet users potentially interested in having access to that information, in situations such as that at issue in the main proceedings a fair balance should be sought in particular between that interest and the data subject’s fundamental rights under Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter. Whilst it is true that the data subject’s rights protected by those articles also override, as a general rule, that interest of internet users, that balance may however depend, in specific cases, on the nature of the information in question and its sensitivity for the data subject’s private life and on the interest of the public in having that information, an interest which may vary, in particular, according to the role played by the data subject in public life.

... suggests that they might make a "correct results" argument, to further narrow the case and exclude companies "scrubbing" their reputations via takedown orders.

Followup: looking at the ruling, there's a contradiction between "processing" and "search", where Google has failed to argue that their result ranking is either fair or dictated by necessary. This may take an additional case, to distinguish when one can legitimately ask to be removed and when one can't. I'm guessing Google will argue that they would have had to to engage in at least malfeasance to qualify for removal of results (;-))