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A report, commissioned by the government, suggests firms such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook should pay a new tax on their online ad revenues.

The money could be used to fund legal alternatives for buying books, films and music on the internet.

But critics say the tax would be difficult to implement and Google says it could slow down innovation.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has taken a tough line on the increasing dominance of digital content.

France has just introduced tough new legislation aimed at removing those who persistently download illegal content from the net.

It has also gone head-to-head with Google over its plans to digitise the world’s books, with a project to set up its own digital library financed by the government to the tune of £700m.

And it is considering a law which would give net users the option to have old data about themselves deleted.

The proposals for a tax on content is still very much in the early stages and there are few details of how it would exactly work.

Patrick Zelnik, who contributed to the report and is also the founder of the French president’s wife’s record label, hopes the idea will be taken on board across the EU.

But Google is among those to have voiced opposition to the plan.

“We don’t think introducing an additional tax on internet advertising is the right way forward as it could slow down innovation,” said Olivier Esper, senior policy manager for Google France.

The better way to support content creation is to find new business models that help consumers find great content and rewards artists and publishers for their work.”

BBC

Consumers who do not want to wait for an official UK launch of Google’s new iPhone rival the Nexus One can order it, unlocked and sim-free online via google.com/phone, and pay $519 (£324) plus $29.65 (£18). Import taxes would come to approximately £60, too, so the total cost would be around £400, subject to fluctuations in the US to UK exchange rate.

Complications arise, however, should users wish to subscribe to a network, too. Vodafone is the first European carrier to be announced, but the company has confirmed that it has no exclusive deal with Google. That means that while Vodafone will be first to subsidise UK purchases, there is no guarantee that other operators may not start to do the same thing in the near future.

Google is known to have spoken to several major networks already, although no deals are said to be imminent. Vodafone hopes to start offering Nexus One contracts within weeks, and prices will be inline with those for the iPhone. Sers should expect monthly tariffs to start at around £30, and the phone will cost less than £200 on an 18-mmonth deal.

Additionally, because all phones sold will be unlocked, some customers could find it cheaper to sign up with a contract, and then buy themselves out of the deal. Again, Google says it will try to make sure that any obvious outright purchases are treated as such, but the situation could prove difficult to police. All phone are purchased from Google, but contracts will be with individual networks.

This Tuesday, Panasonic and LG have made a deal with Skype to use its software in the latest lines of TVs coming from the aforementioned companies. Furthermore, Skype announced support for 720p video calls, something that will surely be a hit with many.

So, Panasonic’s VIERA CAST-enabled HDTV’s and LG’s total of 26 new LCD and Plasma HDTVs with NetCast Entertainment Access will be capable of “Skyping”. These products should be available sometime in the middle of 2010.

Of course, opportunities such as this one open the doors for many software and peripheral manufacturers, and some already jumped on that wagon. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that the webcams perform encoding independently from the TV.

As for the actual webcams, faceVision has developed a HD encoding webcam optimized for Skype and it should ship in February 2010 with the pricing at $99 (with microphone) and $69 (without the mic). They’re not alone though, as In Store Solutions also announced two HD encoding webcams – Freetalk HD Pro and Freetalk HD Pro Plus priced at $120 and $140 respectively. They should hit the market sometime in March 2010.

Google has called on the web community to help it transform Google Earth in to an accurate, three-dimensional representation of major towns and cities.

The search giant has released Building Maker, a tool which allows people to quickly and easily change a flat image into a 3D structure by aligning a series of squares and rectangles on an existing photo of the building using Google’s SketchUp modelling software.

In a blog post on the Google site, Mark Limber, a product manager for the company, and Matt Simpson, a user experience designer, conceded that crowdsourcing was one of the most effective ways of augmenting and improving Google Earth’s existing layout: “Some of us here at Google spend almost all of our time thinking about one thing: How do we create a three-dimensional model of every built structure on Earth? How do we make sure it’s accurate, that it stays current and that it’s useful to everyone who might want to use it?

“One of the best ways to get a big project done — and done well — is to open it up to the world.”

Google said the new tool was fun and addictive, and could produce accurate renderings of buildings in minutes.

“We like to think of Building Maker as a cross between Google Maps and a gigantic bin of building blocks. Basically, you pick a building and construct a model of it using aerial photos and simple 3D shapes – both of which we provide.

“When you’re done, we take a look at your model. If it looks right, and if a better model doesn’t already exist, we add it to the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth. You can make a whole building in a few minutes.”

Beta testers who have been trying out the new software said it was more like a game than a tool, while Google said it hoped the tool, and the improved version of Google Earth, would prove educational.

“Teachers might find that Building Maker is a great way to get students interested in geography,” wrote the company on its blog. “Armchair tourists can not only visit an unfamiliar city; they can engage with it. It’s amazing what you learn when you look at something really closely.”

Building Maker is compatible with most web browsers, although web users hoping to build their own 3D renderings will need a Google Earth account, a free copy of Google’s SketchUp modelling software and a copy of Google Earth installed on their computer.

To mark the milestone, there is a celebratory logo on the YouTube website today. Chad Hurley, YouTube’s chief executive and co-founder wrote on the video sharing site’s blog: “Three years ago today… we’d just made headlines by joining with Google in our shared goal of organising the world’s information (in our case video) and making it easily and quickly accessible to anyone, anywhere.

“Today, I’m proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube. This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you.”

He went onto to detail how aspects of the site have had to move with the times: “As bandwidth has increased, so has our video quality. As we’ve started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we’ve brought more shows and movies to the site. There are now more ways than ever to make and consume content, and more of you are looking to turn your hobby into a real business.”

Over the past few months, devs over at Mozilla Corp have been making an aggressive push to forward the development of Firefox 3.5. Along the way, there have been some critical problems to say the least, particularly with the last two beta releases, but Mozilla is now on track to deliver the first release candidate of this new development milestone early next month.

Mike Beltzner, the director of Firefox, sent out an email last Thursday in which he stated that the team will be “setting an aggressive code freeze target of next Wednesday, May 20 for Firefox 3.5 RC.” In other words, this “code freeze” means that Mozilla will be halting progress in development in order to get a working RC build out to testers, similarly to what Microsoft has done with Windows 7 RC build 7100.

Assuming Firefox 3.5 RC’s code is “frozen” on Wednesday, Beltzner said that the preview would ship as early as the first week of June. According to Mozilla release notes dated May 5th, we can also expect to see Firefox 3.0.11 released on June 2nd or 3rd.

On another note, over 650,000 users are currently testing Firefox 3.5 beta 4, with all versions of Firefox owning 22.5 percent of the total web browser market as of the beginning of the month.

Social networking site Facebook has raised more than $150 million to stop its employees cleaning up if the site starts making a lot of dosh.

Hundreds of the Palo Alto, Calif.’s employees have now worked at the outfit for more than two years but are unable to cash in the shares. While selling them back to Facebook will net them a nice windfall it also prevents them from seriously cleaning up if the site does a Google.

At the moment they will be allowed to flog 20 per cent of their shares back to Facebook for about $10 a go. Facebook is not going to become a public company until the economy spruces up a bit.

When it does, those shares that are still in employee hands will cost a bomb. So it makes sense that Facebook can buy them now for $10 and clean up in a couple of years time when the outfit goes public.

The World Wide Wibble is now made up of 486 billion gigabytes worth of data, according to bean counters IDC.

According to the Guardian newspaper if that data were bound into books it would create a stack that would stretch from the Earth to Pluto ten times. The stack of books is apparently growing faster than Nasa’s fastest space rocket. Part of the reason is that large files from digital cameras and the world’s army of surveillance cameras are sucking up bandwidth. Another reason is the increase in machine to machine communications in Internet transactions.

IDC thinks that the digital universe is expected to double in size over the next 18 months thanks to a  rise in the number of mobile phones. Last year the world’s total digital content was 161bn gigabytes. Despite the business use of the world wide wibble, more than 70 per cent of the information in the digital universe is created by individuals and includes phone calls, emails, photos, online banking transactions or postings on social networking sites, including Twitter.

The job of protecting the vast majority of this content lies with corporations and organisations with more than 30 per cent of data requiring heavy security. IDC/EMC estimate that the cost of the computers, networks and storage facilities that drive the digital universe is about $6 Trillion.