A growing but controversial trend on the Internet is receiving a great deal of scrutiny from the government. The trend involves paid or sponsored endorsements, testimonials, and more on blogs and various social media sites. The Federal Trade Commission began investigating these practices earlier this year and announced it would release new rules and guidelines to update the current legislation.

As a result, marketers, advertisers, and bloggers alike are all raising concern. Is it necessary for the government to intervene? A problem does exist since consumers are directly affected by paid and sponsored posts, but is government regulation the answer?

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The three major search engines seem to have a large cloud of antitrust concerns hanging over them right now. Microsoft has had a long battle of antitrust issues with the European Union and others. Google however, the search engine that everyone loves and that people can never find a fault about, seems to be drawing a lot of attention of late regarding antitrust matters.

First it was the Yahoo-Google advertising deal that was canceled last year as a result of antitrust issues. More recently, Google has been brought into the limelight in reference to its settlement with authors and publishers on electronic rights to out-of-print books.

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Google agreed to a $125 million settlement with publishers groups over copyright issues. The advertising giant agreed to settle the three-year-old class action lawsuit over book scanning but still maintained that its efforts were comparable to the invention of printing.

McGraw-Hill, Pearson, John Wiley & Sons Inc., and Simon & Schuster, owned by CBS Corp, all filed suits against Google. The suits were filed after Google began its project that allowed users to search the content of thousands of books in 2004. Google worked with organizations such as the universities of California, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Stanford University.

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A federal judge ruled that video-sharing site YouTube, which is owned by Google, has to give Viacom all its user data. Last year, Viacom sued Google claiming that YouTube infringed upon its copyrights by allowing users to post clips from "South Park" and "The Daily Show."

YouTube countered the argument by saying that according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA), it doesn't have to take down its clips until Viacom files a complaint about each one.

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Popularity: 12% [?]