Fake Steve Jobs, outed some time ago as Forbes’ Daniel Lyons, is retiring his satirical blog “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs” thus ending one of the more enduring runs as pop Web iCon.

In a post titled “I’m sailing away,” Lyons says he’ll be launching a new site next week, perhaps reincarnating Fake Steve as Fake Somebody Else. His new form will be sitting at a desk at Newsweek.

Lyons doesn’t go into detail about the closure of the site, but if he is reinventing himself at Newsweek, the “A Forbes.com Site” at the top of the blog could be trouble for at least a couple of people.

Decline in traffic has been a problem, too. Surely the mystery of discovering who was playing Apple’s CEO online was part of the Fake Steve experience. Once discovered, it went from funny to just silly, a man, a journalist, playing dress-up. It’s okay. Sometimes alter egos work, sometimes they don’t. Ask Garth Brooks. At the end of the day, we still knew it was him.

Not for nothing, though. Lyons was sure to plug two versions of his new book, a best-of collection of posts from the blog—the second version, unabridged by request, and matching Lyons’ personal copy. In true blogger-form, Lyons created it and is selling it through Webby-award winning online publisher Blurb.

It’s good timing to get out of the Fake Steve Jobs bids. Twitter managed to stay up all day through the incessant “I’m in line for the new iPhone” tweets—some reporting up to six hour waits—which were replaced with “My new iPhone is a brick” ones. Seems AT&T’s servers weren’t exactly prepared for the demand. As iPhone 3G purchasers and iPhone 1.0 upgraders powered iTunes all at once—really? You couldn’t wait until after lunch, until you got home, next week?—the AT&T sky really began to fall.

If I’m ever in line that long, there better be a buffet or a roller coaster at the end—one that lasts the rest of the day.

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Chairman Kevin Martin says that the cable provider has run afoul of regulations that guarantee open access to the Internet, and should be punished.

Martin used a September 2005 policy statement from the Federal Communications Commission as the basis for his position, which was intended to ensure that broadband networks were open and affordable. It did however allow for “reasonable network management.”

The FCC chairman argues that Comcast is blocking traffic arbitrarily, regardless of how much bandwidth is being used, and is failing to inform consumers of its actions. Its move is a result of an earlier complaint that users of BitTorrent were being blocked from using the service.

A proposal to sanction Comcast was put on the table Friday by Martin, with a vote scheduled at an August 1 open meeting.

Interest group FreePress filed that complaint with the regulatory body in November 2007 (PDF available here). While it mentioned other P2P applications, the focus of its argument seemed to center around BitTorrent.

“Amid online rumors and reports, Comcast lied to both the press and the [Electronic Frontier Foundation], claiming it did not interfere with peer-to-peer traffic,” it argued. “Lying to the public about consumer allegations is inherently deceptive.”

Comcast had already appeared in a hearing in February with the FCC, where it denied that it blocked any kind of “Web site, application, or Web protocol.” However, numerous studies have shown otherwise — many of which were cited by Free Press in its complaint.

Of course, the cable company denies any wrongdoing, and argues that it is acting lawfully in managing its bandwidth to ensure that all customers are being served properly. It also claims the 2005 policy statement is not enforceable, adding “reasonable” management has never been defined by the agency.

If the FCC approves the sanctions, it could set a precedent where others accused of throttling could face similar penalties. While it is not yet known exactly what they would entail, it likely would be enough for other ISPs to rethink their practices.

“The FCC order, if passed, is a major victory,” Free Press said on its site. But the organization said it expected the ISPs to fight back “with their money, lawyers and phony grassroots groups to try to take control of the Internet and establish themselves as gatekeepers.”

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The new partnership would allow users of Yahoo’s photo sharing service to make their images available for licensing to clients of Getty’s digital image service.

No timetable for the service’s launch has yet been announced, however the images culled from Flickr would reside in a specially branded collection. Getty will invite select users to participate, and will select imagery based on the needs of its clients.

The details of exactly how Getty would compensate Flickr users have yet to be disclosed. Traditionally, Getty has shared 30-40 percent of the revenues of imagery sold with exclusive rights, and 20 percent of that sold with non-exclusive rights, with its contributors.

Work is underway for Getty to build tools which will allow it to contact Flickr members, and to transfer the photo site’s images from Flickr to Gettyimages.com. Both companies expect to make thousands of photos available for download. Once in the collection, Getty will manage the rights for those photos.

The deal is thought to be the first of its kind to connect a photo enthusiast site with a professional photography service. It also helps Yahoo to further distinguish Flickr from its competitors.

According to Web site analytics firm Compete, Flickr is now the #1 photography site on the Web with 28.5 million unique visitors per month, having passed Photobucket earlier this year, which attracts about 25 million visitors.

Getty sees the deal as helping to strengthen its local imagery repertoire, as well as giving its customers a broader range of photography styles to choose from. Flickr says the deal is a validation of sorts to the site’s strength.

“This partnership is testimony to the Flickr community of photographers who have influenced the aesthetics of photography with authentic, creative and cutting-edge images which will now be available to Getty Images’ customers around the world,” Flickr general manager Kakul Srivastava said in a statement.

UPDATE

A Getty Images representative confirmed with Techachino this afternoon that participants in this program will be asked to sign a Getty Images contributor contract, which was described as “substantially similar to our existing contributor contracts.”Standard royalty rates may apply for the distribution of these shared images, depending on whether royalties also apply to the end user. Under the royalty-free tier, users pay a one-time fee of between $200 and $500, the spokesperson told us, and the photographer may receive a 20% cut. For rights-managed images, the price is approximately $500, and royalties to the photographer range from 30% to 40% depending upon the territory in which the licensed images are to be used.

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The G8 Summit began today in Tokyo, Japan. Among the topics expected to be discussed is the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) treaty proposal drafted in secret primarily by the office of the US Trade Representative and legislators from Californiia. Not surprisingly, the California lawmakers are well known for supporting just about any legislation that increases the term or scope of copyright or strengthens penaitles for infringement.

Despite some attention from websites like Techachino, public interest groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and news publications in Canada we don’t really know anything more now than we did when a draft of the proposal was first published by the watchdog site Wikileaks.

Besides suggesting the controversial move of making law enforcement responsible for investigating and prosecuting intellectual property infringement, the proposal has come under fire for the exclusive group of countries included in the initial discussions. Unlike the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) or World Trade Organization (WTO), every member of the G8 have businesses that derive a significant amount of revenue from intellectual property.

Although representatives of non-G8 countries will be in attendance at the summit, with the secrecy surrounding the entire issue of the ACTA treaty there’s no way to know whether any of them will be consulted or even briefed on any relevant discussions. In fact the description on the event’s official website is merely a mention that “protection of intellectual property rights” will be “discussed.”

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Although Nokia has now made a financial concession to Bochum, Germany worth well over $30 million USD, the city will still be left without its main source of income, after Nokia pulls up stakes and moves its factory to Romania.

Through an initiative announced July 3, Nokia will contribute 20 million euros — the current equivalent of 31.4 million US dollars — to help fund a new program rather ironically entitled “Growth for Bochum.”

Further, while Nokia won’t be fueling any economic growth through continued employment of city residents, the Finnish-based cell phone company has also promised to pitch in to the program with proceeds from the planned sale of its factory and property in the German city.

Also under the settlement unveiled last week, North Rhine-Westphalia Bank (NRW) will contribute another 20 million euros toward Growth for Bochum, a program that will supposedly be run under the “joint responsibility” of Nokia, NRW, and the City of Bochum.

Nokia’s initial announcement in January around closing the plant spawned street riots and calls for boycotts of Nokia consumer products, along with vehement government outcries. Germans were particularly incensed that Nokia announced the demise of the factory just after posting record company profits.

The new Growth for Bochum program is the upshot of a joint task force launched early this year to review Nokia’s decision to move its cell phone plant to the cheaper environs of Romania.

Elements of Growth for Bochum include a “proactive, international campaign” to bring investors to Bochum and the surrounding region; establishment of an “Enterpreneur Center,” also in Bochum; the creation of a chair or some other mechanism at Bochum University for “commercialization of scientific research;” and, last but not least, “finding a suitable buyer [for] the Nokia facilities in Bochum to ensure job creation on the site with financial support.”

Nokia has never officially given in to NRW’s requests for the return of the 41 million Euros in government subsidies the vendor received for opening the German factory in the late 1990s. Yet through the financial package announced last week, Nokia could end up spending much more.

But while it might be better than nothing, the package could come as cold comfort to many local residents. There are no guarantees around either whether other investors will be attracted to the North Rhine-Westphalia region, or when a buyer will be found for Nokia’s now abandoned plant in Bochum.

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Photo sharing site Flickr is one of the leading lights of Yahoo - but cofounders (and husband/wife team) Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield won’t be around to keep driving the product forward. They are both joining the mass exodus of executives from the company.

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The European Commission appears to have thrown its weight behind the principle of net neutrality, after the telecommunications commissioner told a global internet forum that the issue was “a political question to be answered by the people”.

Viviane Reding was speaking to delegates on Tuesday at an Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) ministerial meeting in South Korea, on the subject of the “future of the internet economy”. Because of “explosive developments” such as the dramatic proliferation of online video, she said, “some are starting to question the founding principles of openness and neutrality that have been essential for the development and tremendous innovation power of the internet”.

The net neutrality debate centres on the question of whether internet service providers (ISPs) should be able to charge content providers for traffic. In the UK, this debate has manifested itself recently in the clash between the BBC and certain ISPs, who suggest the broadcaster should help pay for the infrastructure carrying its wildly popular iPlayer online video service.

‘Network neutrality’ refers to the idea that all content should be treated equally by those who run the internet’s infrastructure and access, just as it has been run since its earliest days.

“As the internet is, like the space, the seas, the air, shared by mankind, we have to debate and decide upon such key issues at the global level and in close co-operation with the internet community of users,” Reding said. “The discussion on network neutrality is not a technical question to be answered by regulatory authorities but firstly a political question to be answered by the people: the internet is theirs!”

Reding went on to define the role of policy-makers as being “to prevent powerful interests putting at risk the openness of the internet as a public space and weakening innovation on networks”.

The information society and media commissioner touched on a variety of issues in her speech, such as the need to make a transition to IPv6, reinforce consumer rights and fight online piracy.

She also highlighted the importance of addressing the “security risks and governance concerns” that come along with technologies such as RFID and other sensor technologies, as well as the so-called “internet of things”, in which a multitude of devices are connected to the internet.

“In particular, we must answer citizens’ concerns if we are not to get a rejection of these new technologies,” Reding said. “In order to stimulate the reflection on the various aspects of the [internet of things], the European Commission will launch in mid-September both a recommendation on privacy aspects of [RFID] and a consultation paper on the governance of the internet of things.”

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With giants in the social networking field opening up their APIs to developers, social news sharing site Reddit is going a big step further today, opening its site’s entire source code to the open source community.

Reddit competes with Digg, Newspond, Mixx, and similar news aggregation sites. Its Web site was built using an open source platform and open source tools, but now the site’s source code will be freely available to everyone, downloadable from this address.

“We know Reddit’s success has less to do with our technology than it does with you, our community, and now we want to let our community improve our technology,” reads a post from developers of the Reddit Web site said today. They added only five people work on the Reddit team, though the site has always had a large following of developers within the open source community.Available under the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), the Reddit code may now be freely used by anyone, though any modifications they may make must then be made open to the community, and the use of Reddit code must be publicly acknowledged. Only anti-cheating and spam protection code will not be open-sourced under the CPAL.

The public unveiling of Reddit’s infrastructure code will offer a unique glimpse behind the scenes of the kind of Web site that has traditionally remained behind closed doors. For example, some of the articles that make it to the front page on Digg occasionally baffle users as to how that site’s algorithms work.

The unveiling may also enable the community to make select changes to the site that they feel developers were too sluggish to have implemented themselves.

Even though Reddit is nowhere near the size of Digg, the site is now growing faster than the most popular user-submitted news site. Reddit now has 4.5 million unique visitors per month, and has grown almost 1,000% after its acquisition by Vanity Fair and Wired publisher Conde Nast.

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The sixth annual Canadian Telecom Summit kicked off on Monday with Rogers Communications stressing that the future of the industry would be all about wireless.

“There is no doubt in my mind,” said Nadir Mohamed, president and chief operating officer of Rogers Communications Inc., “that what we’ve seen in the wired internet world, in terms of market share and penetration, will in fact happen in the wireless world.”

Mohamed said the arrival of the iPhone and the growing popularity of Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry, demonstrates that wireless web usage is about to explode.

BlackBerry subscribers make up only five per cent of mobile customers, meaning there is lots of room for the mobile data market to grow, he said.

“There is a tremendous opportunity for greater wireless data penetration,” he told about 500 conference attendees.

While he did not say what the company’s rate plans will be for the iPhone, which it announced last week, Mohamed hinted that data rates will come down when the device launches on July 11 in order to address larger, mainstream market.

“When you look back at pricing … it always evolves to meet and support new applications,” he said. “Web browsing is happening. Our pricing will change to embrace that fact.”

On the wired side, Mohamed said internet access will continue to move toward usage-based billing, where customers are charged for how much they download — much the way the wireless world works.
Rogers needs to monetize

“Usage-based billing is a reality for wired and wireless network,” he said. “The capacity is exploding, and we need to be able to monetize some of that.”

Mohamed also suggested that usage-based billing might be the best way to avoid coming into conflict with so-called “net neutrality” complaints.

Rogers and Bell Canada Inc. are currently at the centre of a heated debate over how much control service providers should have over what customers use the internet for. Both companies are limiting the speeds of peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent, prompting an inquiry from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.

The three-day summit — the Stanley Cup finals of the telecommunications industry — this year comes at an active in Canada. Besides the probe into internet access, which the CRTC is expected to rule on by September, the industry is also in the midst of the government’s wireless spectrum auction, which is expected to result in new cellphone carriers.

CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein is scheduled to deliver a keynote address on Tuesday, while Robert Dépatie, president and chief executive officer of Montreal-based Videotron — a company that is positioned to become one of those new cellphone carriers when the auction concludes - is giving a speech on Wednesday. The auction is slowing down and could possibly end before Dépatie’s speech.
Net neutrality on agenda

Net neutrality will also be at the forefront with a panel discussion on Wednesday. The panel will include Rogers’ chief strategy officer Mike Lee as well as Dave Caputo, CEO of Sandvine, a company that makes network-management technology for internet service providers.

Tuesday will be highlighted by the annual “regulatory blockbuster” session, the only panel this year that will pit representatives of different carriers against each other — a situation that often results in fireworks. During a panel on wireless last year, for example, Quebecor executive vice-president Luc Lavoie took a shot at the quality of Bell Canada’s cellphone service:

“If you were half as good at running a company as you were at lobbying, maybe you’d have a better network,” he said.

This year’s panel will joined by Mirko Bibic, Ken Engelhart, Janet Yale and Chris Peirce, chief regulatory officers for Bell, Rogers, Telus Corp. and MTS Allstream Inc. respectively. Also on the panel will be John Lawford, counsel from the Public Interest Advocacy Council.

Other notable speakers include Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski and Competition Commissioner Sheridan Scott.

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Though not yet officially announced, reports have surfaced that FCC Chairman Martin supports the merger of XM and Sirius satellite radio companies, and will recommend that the Commission vote to push the transaction through.

The willingness of XM and Sirius to comply with demands set forth for their merger appears to be working. FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin said on Sunday that he will support the combination of the two satellite radio providers given their adherence to certain stipulations.

As conditions for the Department of Justice’s approval of the deal last March, the combined satellite radio entity must put a cap on subscription prices for three years, offer a la carte programming (where subscribers select which content they get), provide firmware-upgradeable interoperable receivers, open its standards to third-party device manufacturers, and devote 8% of its spectrum (24 channels) to noncommercial and minority-interest programming. Those conditions are based upon promises that both companies made to legislators and DOJ officials between March 2007 and January 2008.

A merger of the two companies will reverse the FCC’s 1997 licensing agreement which dictated that the two companies never become one. Opposition groups such as the National Association of Broadcasters have been pressuring the FCC to challenge the merger, as it is one of the final regulatory bodies the two companies must face before they can proceed. When the Commission finally votes — which the Washington Post says could take place this week — the merger must be approved by three of five commissioners.

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