ReadWriteWeb

A sizable chunk of Internet traffic went dark yesterday. No, I'm not talking about a SOPA protest. The #91 Web site on the entire Internet, Megaupload, was taken down after U.S. authorities executed a warrant to seize its Virginia-based servers and arrest four of its proprietors in New Zealand. To give you some perspective: On Google AdPlanner's scale, Walmart.com is #97. Social document sharing service Scribd.com is #90. Huffington Post is #86.

To pretend it's a revelation that Megaupload trafficked in illicit material is like Claude Rains being "shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" That said, its "front parlor," if you will, had many legitimate customers who had posted non-infringing files. So the big question that Colombia's NTN24 news anchor Mónica Fonseca* asked me was essentially, "What has happened to everyone's files?"

As we mentioned in our article earlier this summer, the lines are blurring between file sending and sync services and cloud drives. The latest entrant into this field is ZipSend, from the folks that make the popular WinZip file compression utility. It is somewhat disappointing on several reasons, but gives us an excuse to recap the major players in the marketplace.

"We want to give users the native experience, as they migrate from their Macs to their PCs to their iPhones and iPads and Android devices. Our application within those devices should behave as they would expect an app to behave for those devices." This from Karen White, the CEO of Syncplicity, which for the past three years has delivered an innovative file synchronization service for individuals and businesses.

White's explanation comes in response to a question from RWW about how best to approach the cross-platform question, especially as Syncplicity adds support for more platforms that aren't really devices. Case in point: Salesforce.com, which was added last week to the list of platforms that Syncplicity supports. White and her business partner, co-founder Leonard Chung, tells RWW their development philosophy for now is to create separate versions of their applications, each of which is tailored to the expectations of its platforms' users.

The lines among file sending, collaboration and cloud drive services is blurring with announcements in the past month from two providers, YouSendIt and ShareFile. While it is nice to have choices, it is getting harder to figure out when to use one kind of service or another for your storage and transportation needs.

Here is the scenario: you and your partner are located across the country and working to produce a series of videos for your company. You both need access to the assets involved, and grow tired of using Dropbox or Google Apps to act as an intermediary to store your files, which are too big to attach to your emails practically.

The House of Commons passed a controversial piece of legislation called the "Digital Economy Bill." The loudly-criticized law nontheless passed 187-47, according to the Guardian newspaper.

The bill purports to provide comprehensive regulation of digital services, in order to clear the way to promoting Britian as a digital econmic power. Criticism focused first on a clause that would have given broad government discretion to the closing of sites. That clause was removed, but the amendment to another was still significantly worrying to some.

In November, we told you about a move in the UK to monitor P2P sharing and permanently ban users who infringed on copyright from using the Internet.

In our reporting on P2P issues, it's rare these days to get wind of some good news; today, we've learned that this plan to ban would not, in fact, apply to most file-sharing fiends. After one ISP stood up to the government's proposals by circulating a petition, the government responded favorably, saying, "We are not requiring ISPs to monitor for unlawful file-sharing. Nor are we proposing that ISPs look at what users download in order to combat piracy... We will not terminate the accounts of infringers."

French president Nicolas Sarkozy recently announced the so-called Google tax, which would tax online advertising revenues and then use the money to help "legal music platforms." The tax was, among a few other ideas, suggested by a committee lead by Patrick Zelnik. (Funny enough, Zelnik is also the producer of France's First Lady and pop singer, Carla Bruni Sarkozy.) That committee's mission is to suggest ideas to boost digital music sales in France when at the same time, the controversial HADOPI law, which targets illegal file sharers, is about to take effect.

Last week, we told you about peer-to-peer and torrent file-sharing sites were being systematically shut down all over China. Not too long before that, we let you know about file-sharing being monitored by a major ISP in the UK.

Now, Israeli ISPs are throttling P2P network access, too, as confirmed in a report just released by an Israeli cyberlaw attorney and a partner news site. Whether you consider file-sharing an affront to content creators and copyright-holders everywhere or whether you see P2P networks as a permissible and valid way for users to exchange data, this trend is gaining considerable momentum around the world. Where will P2P restrictions pop up next?

Cloud storage and collaboration company Box.net has opened up its platform to iPhone apps today through a new mobile API. The API lets independent iPhone developers join its OpenBox program, and several apps have already added Box.net support in advance. The new service will let Box.net users access their files on the go, avoid storage limits, and share their content with anyone. The API currently is only available for the iPhone, but support for Palm webOS, Android and BlackBerry is in the works.