Google Inc. accused Vietnam on Wednesday of stifling political dissent with cyberattacks, the latest complaint by the Internet giant against a communist regime following a public dispute with China over online censorship.

Like China, Vietnam tightly controls the flow of information and has said it reserves the right to take “appropriate action” against Web sites it deems harmful to national security.

Microcontroller company Microchip Technology Inc. (Chandler, Ariz.) has announced the result of a partnership with software giant Google Inc. to produce a reference implementation of the Google PowerMeter application programming interface.

PowerMeter is free software that displays details of home energy consumption received from either a smartmeter or another electricity monitoring device. Microchip has produced the first reference implementation of the Google PowerMeter API, which is key to producing compatible electricity-monitor circuits for inclusion in energy-consuming devices.

Two U.S. companies that sell Internet addresses to Web sites said Wednesday they had stopped registering new domain names in China because the Chinese government has begun demanding pictures and other identification documents from their customers.

One of the domain name companies, Go Daddy Inc., announced its change in policy at a congressional hearing that was largely devoted to Google Inc.’s announcement Monday that it will no longer censor Internet search results in China.

Google Inc shut its mainland Chinese-language portal and began rerouting searches to an uncensored Hong Kong-based site, unleashing a blast of ire from Beijing and prompting concerns over its future business in China.

China lost little time in warning Google that its rejection of self-censorship angers the one-party government, which is wary of ceding control over domestic use of the Internet with 384 million users in China.

Google Inc (GOOG.O) could win a widely expected victory next week in Europe’s top court and still face many more battles over keyword advertising, the backbone of its Internet business model.

The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg will rule on Tuesday whether or not Google infringes the trademark rights of such companies as Louis Vuitton through its Adwords service, in which advertisers pay to use keywords that are the companies’ proprietary brand names.

China’s state media on Sunday accused Google Inc of pushing a political agenda by “groundlessly accusing the Chinese government” of supporting hacker attacks and by trying to export its own culture, values and ideas.

In a commentary signed by three Xinhua writers, the state news agency also sought to defend the government’s Internet censorship, which Google has cited as one reason the world’s largest search engine may quit China.

SAN FRANCISCO — Viacom Inc. and Google Inc.’s YouTube site began airing each other’s dirty laundry Thursday, providing a tantalizing peek at the wheeling and dealing that triggered a bitter battle over the copyright laws governing the Internet.

The previously confidential information came out as part of the evidence in a copyright lawsuit that Viacom filed against YouTube in 2007 for alleged copyright infringement of “The Colbert Report,” “The Daily Show” and other shows.

The sensitive documents were unsealed because Viacom and YouTube are both trying to persuade U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton to decide the case without a trial.

Both YouTube and Viacom are getting muddied in the process.

Internal YouTube e-mails depict at least one of the company’s founders as a video pirate and suggest the Web site’s employees were more interested in getting rich quick than adhering to copyright laws.

Other records show Viacom wanted to buy YouTube at least seven months before it filed its lawsuit and often used the Web site to promote the shows on its cable TV programming.

Google bought YouTube for $1.76 billion in November 2006, but not before Viacom made a last-ditch effort to persuade Google to team up in a joint bid for the Web’s leading video site, according to the court documents. A few months later, Google offered to pay Viacom $590 million for licensing rights to video, according to the records.

Google Inc may make an announcement next Monday about whether it will pull out from China, the China Business News reported on Friday, quoting an unnamed Google employee.

The report also said a local authorized agent had received unconfirmed information that Google would leave China on April 10.

Google Inc stepped up its assault on Microsoft Corp’s productivity software business with the acquisition of a small start-up company that allows Microsoft users to edit and share their documents on the Web.

Google said on its company blog on Friday that it has acquired San Francisco-based DocVerse. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Four in five adults believe access to the Internet is a fundamental right — with those feelings particularly strong in South Korea and China — and half believe it should never be regulated, according to a global survey.
A poll of 27,000 adults in 26 countries for the BBC World Service showed 78 percent of Internet users believed the Web gave them greater freedom, while nine in 10 said it was a good place to learn.