Highlights

• Net neutrality will take over the Internet this week. We explain.
• Court ruling: Facebook (and others) can track you on other site
• Zillow backs down in test of Consumer Review Fairness Act

We told you in May about the looming Net Neutrality battle. It’s here and kicks into high gear Wednesday when giant Internet companies begin their consumer-focused campaign. 

Companies that sell you Internet service like Verizon, Comcast, and others are required to treat all Internet traffic the same. They can’t favor one company over another or slow down a competitor’s website. That kind of interference was common until an FCC rule prohibited such behavior.

The FCC announced plans to eliminate this provision of the regulation as part of a White House business-friendly platform. Just about everyone using the Internet is affected in some way.

Here is an early look at the Save the Open Internet website that will be heavily promoted all week. You can get a quick overview of the issue and even directly connect to the FCC to leave your comments.

Learn More Fast: Recode is quoting Internet Association direction Michael Beckerman, “The FCC’s looking for comments here. They hear the comments.”‘

The Consumer Fairness Review Act is a relatively new law that makes it illegal for organizations to try to prevent people from posting honest reviews about a product or customer service online. Contract provisions, including terms of service, that allow for a penalty or similar issues are not allowed. 

President Obama signed this bipartisan bill into law in December. We’re telling you about it now because real estate giant Zillow threatened a one person blog that goes by the fun name of McMansion Hell.

Zillow wanted the blogger to stop using images from its site and threatened legal action. The new CFRA legislation and fair use guidelines allowed the Electronic Frontier Foundation to fight back and win one for the much smaller website.

Why you need to know this: The FTC says, “The law protects a broad variety of honest consumer assessments, including online reviews, social media posts, uploaded photos, videos, etc. And it doesn’t just cover product reviews. It also applies to consumer evaluations of a company’s customer service.” Read their guidance for businesses.

A California judge has ruled for the second time in two years that Facebook is not violating consumer privacy by tracking user browsing activity on other websites.

The court found that the plaintiffs had no reasonable expectation of privacy without using tools for that purpose and that they had not suffered financial harm. 

The big deal: No reasonable expectation of privacy is a very big deal. This puts the onus on consumers to protect their privacy by using tools such as virtual private networks (VPNs), incognito mode on browsers, and similar tactics. And then financial harm has to be addressed. We’ve said this many times: you are often the product if you aren’t required to pay for a service online. Let us know if you’re interested in ways to minimize your online presence, but be aware that doing so means that you’ll lose a lot of your favored settings, stored passwords, and other goodies that all require identification to track your ease-of-use.

Headline Scan

• About 2.4 seconds is what some search engineers have found is an optimal website loading time according to Google tests and best practices.
• Google’s mobile index may first roll out to organizations “that are ready”, and it could happen in 2017.
• A new survey of digital marketers found that 65% of organizations pay at least $12,000 per year for search services not counting social media or advertising. 35% pay $30K-$100K per year.
• Amazon Prime–due for its annual sale Wednesday–now has 79 million accounts and is expected to exceed the number of pay TV customers next year. Amazon Prime Video is looking more important.

Highlights

• Google jobs, the search engine version, is real.
• Amazon goes big in clothes. And shoes. Again.
• Google stops scanning Gmail to place ads.

Google will now display job postings, including descriptions, from multiple job sites. The company is working with CareerBuilder, Monster, and LinkedIn, as well as smaller sites. Job seekers still have to apply for a job on those sites.

The job listings function like Google’s movie listings. Google displays the showtimes, directions and other information related to a movie. Clicking a showtime link lets a person choose a movie site from which to buy a ticket.

The big deal: people now only go to movie websites for specialty information because facts are shown directly in Google. That will probably be true for job sites. The future value proposition is likely to be some form of signing up businesses and automating their transactions for Google and Facebook.

Learn more fast: Google announcement, Search Engine Land

told you several weeks ago that Amazon’s clothing initiative could disrupt fashion retail. The details are even more impressive. Prime Wardrobe is a new service that will be free for Amazon Prime members.

Amazon will send shoppers clothes to try on at home with no shipping charges. Shoppers then have seven days to return the items in the free box or pay for them.

Discounts start at 10% if 3 items are bought and reach 20% for 5 items. The program’s test starts soon–perhaps soon enough to make back-to-school shopping easy.

We also told you about Amazon’s market share of online shoe sales. Their share will climb after news broke last week that Nike will work with Amazon to sell shoes online through a special Amazon program. 

The big deal: Grocery stocks are still reeling from Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods. Analysis at Bloomberg and Recode shows that stocks for companies like Foot Locker and Dick’s Sporting Goods were hit especially hard by the Nike news. Cash-rich Internet giants now have enough buying power to disrupt any industry.

Learn more fast: Amazon Wardrobe announcement, Recode, Marketing Land

That’s a picture of Diane Green. Her job is to sell Google services, especially email and its office software suite, to businesses.

Green posted this week that “Gmail and consumer Gmail [would] closely align.” The post was blunt. No Gmail product will scan email looking for keywords on which to base ads. There will still be ads in the free version of Gmail. Those ads will be based on what Google already knows about users. And that’s a lot.

Why change now? The trade press says that Green’s business prospects didn’t get the distinction and thought that Google scanned email in all versions. Now there’s no confusion.

The big deal: Besides Gmail messages not being scanned anymore, Ad Age smartly posits that Green was able to limit Google’s ad business. That move shows the company’s growing interest in enterprise software, That’s more interesting than a keyword in email triggering an ad.

Headline Scan

• TimeWarner makes $100 million content deal with Snapchat.
• Microsoft Bing matches Google and Facebook capabilities to target “in-market buyers” of items like mortgage loans, travel services, and clothing.
• Amazon’s 1 hour PrimeNow service opens in Denver, city #30.
• Expedia closes its acquisition of Silver Rail, buttressing its UK ops.
• Google will now remove links to leaked medical records, making them, financial information, and “revenge porn” the only categories of information that Google will remove in the US when requested.

Highlights

• Walmart answers Amazon’s ecommerce purchases
• Google posting guidance on key mobile, speed issues
• The secret printer code still published on all your documents

You’ve probably read too many articles about Amazon buying Whole Foods by now. It’s a big deal for many reasons. 

But Walmart is continuing to fight back with its own ecommerce purchases as we’ve told you all year. This discounter bought Bonobos for $310 million on Friday, one day after Amazon’s splashy move. Walmart has now made 6 major acquisitions in the last 10 months, including stylish fashion retailer Modcloth and Moosejaw, makers of Patagonia and North Face. 

Walmart will not cede the US ecommerce market to Amazon without a costly fight for both. 

Walmart and the major consumer tech companies are holding on to more than $500 billion in cash. About half of that amount belongs to Apple–a whopping $256 billion. Apple has been linked to every company imaginable from Disney and Netflix to Tesla. But don’t count out the others. Microsoft  has $126 billion in cash, Google has $92 billion, and Walmart still has $85 billion. 

Learn more fast: The Economist on tech cash, NY Times on Walmart strategy

If your organization has a website, you need to pay attention now to how it displays on mobile devices and to the website’s speed.

Google’s switch from a desktop-based index of websites to a mobile-based index is reportedly now delayed until 2018. That means your developers only have to work very hard and fast instead of sleeping at the office. This is important stuff. Get it wrong and your website’s traffic will drop.

Google also announced this week that it will resume letting the search community know when “major” changes are made to its ranking formula. Such changes happened a few times a year a decade ago and are now done multiple times each day. Google didn’t define what creates a major change, but did say that they won’t share details on the 800+ changes it makes.

In a surprising peek behind the curtains, we learned this week that Google will use a website’s speed “as a tiebreaker” when two sites qualify for the same ranking. That news came courtesy of Googler Gary Ilyes speaking at a search conference last week and was reported by Jennifer Slegg of The SEM Post.

Learn more fast: Search Engine Land on mobile, SEM Post on page speed

By time you read this, a new nonprofit template will be available on Facebook. Administrators and moderators have been sent email for the past several weeks about the changes.

Donations and events have a much bigger presence on the template. The key thing to remember is that just as people visit other pages on your website instead of your homepage, they also interact with your content on Facebook without visiting your organization’s page.

Having everything look good and be accurate is important. Creating content that people want to read and share is much more important.

The best thing that we read all week is the BBC’s reminder that virtually all modern printers spray a pattern of dots invisible to humans on printed documents. This program has existed for more than 20 years and gained new attention when federal agents arrested Reality Winner for leaking classified information to The Intercept.

“Why Printers Add Secret Tracking Dots“