Gasta Tech News: French to create new tax for web

Google and other net firms could be taxed under plans being considered by the French government.

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."

Gasta Tech News: Twitter serious about search strength

Gasta.com set to benefit with its new search and share applications. Gasta has so far only rolled out the demo of its new mysearchmachine.com white label solution that enables search users to share search results directly to Twitter and Facebook (As well as a number of other social networking and social marketing sites.)The mysearchmachine.com demo has earned lavish praise from Twitter users and Beta testers alike. Gasta has been working closely with Twitter apps for the last few months and if the following article by Dan Leahul of revolutionmagazine.com is anything to go by Gasta has once again struck the right cord with search users.

Twitter serious about search strength



LONDON - Twitter is tweaking its search function and will soon start indexing the links included in tweets, creating a real-time mini Google.

Twitter's vice president of operations Santosh Jayram revealed yesterday that Twitter is planning on expanding its search function, no longer will it be a stream of text-based tweets, but will include links to millions of web pages as well.


Although Twitter will not be able to compete with Google in terms of pure numbers, it will have a leg-up in speed and relevancy, creating a real-time search engine.

Jayram, who previously worked at Google, said Twitter's recent emphasis on its search prowess will also include a reputation ranking system, meaning that all tweets will not be equal.

However, minute details on just how Twitter ranks its users has yet to be hammered out, but it is assumed that number of followers and retweets will factor into the equation.

Other bugs need to be worked out before a full launch, such as how to differentiate between retweets, or redundant search results, but analysts see the service as a way for Twitter to finally monetise the website, by placing ads next to its indexed results.

Twitter article by Dan Leahul, revolutionmagazine.com