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You may have never heard of Brandon Campeaux, but more than 265,000 folks have "circled" the photographer on Google+. As of this morning, Campeaux packed his virtual bags and left Google+ claiming that the company has done nothing about death threats leveled against him on Google+.

According to Campeaux's last post, "I received 4 separate death threats through Google+. That brings the total for the month of December way over 10. I've reported each account & flagged the individual death threats. Google responded by doing nothing. Not one account suspension."

"The communications public policy effort that may affect all of us the most in 2012... will take place far from our shores," stated U.S. Federal Communications Commissioner Robert McDowell, in a speech in Washington before a bar association two weeks ago. "As we sit here today, scores of countries, including China, Russia and India, are pushing hard for international regulation of Internet governance."

We talk a lot, almost ad nauseum, about the "free and open Internet." What we sometimes fail to take into account is that freedom has many... shall we say, facets, which cast different shades of light at different angles. From one angle, the story looks like this: The free Internet is threatened by the incursion of governments that would seek to suppress individual freedoms through the systematic restructuring of Web services, with the burden being placed on service providers to comply. But that's not coming from Comm. McDowell, or from the opponents of SOPA legislation. It's the new populist battle cry of Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister seeking once again to become President.

Following February's slew of complaints regarding Facebook's Terms of Use amendment, founder Mark Zuckerberg launched an "Open Governance" model and wrote, "If [Facebook] were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world. Our terms aren't just a document that protect our rights; it's the governing document for how the service is used by everyone across the world." Today Facebook redrafted its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and while users / citizens have until August 18th to comment, we can't help thinking the system is a bogus democracy.

In a new report issued on the first of the month, Forrester Research has asserted the importance of enterprise platforms for governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC). Pointing to big name corporate failures in the last decade, they argue that the value proposition for GRC software is clear, and they identified leaders in this growing market.

The open question from the research is whether enterprises will really see the need as being so desperate. Fear may be a great motivator, but GRC platforms have yet to prove that they're a piece of IT that businesses require to succeed.

Public data from the government - is it an opportunity for innovation and essential accountability or a snoozer that no one really cares about? Government transparency advocacy group The Sunlight Foundation offers one example today of something that can be done with government data that is clearly worth doing - but the data they used hasn't been made available on the Obama administration's anemic new data repository Data.gov.

Enterprises are hamstrung by regulations and governance policies. It's just a fact of life. As enterprises struggle with the need to remain compliant, the exploding popularity of web 2.0 tools and social applications are forcing conversations about trying to strike a happy compromise. Although the notion of "command and control" is unpopular within the 2.0 community, in the Enterprise it's the law. Strict rules govern who has access to what data and which communications must be monitored and archived (in some cases for years). Complicating matters further, compliance regulations vary from country to country.