Electronic Commerce

The Bush administration is moving in its last weeks to adopt final regulations to enforce a controversial law that seeks to block Internet gambling. The move is drawing hot protests from Democratic lawmakers and supporters of online betting. "This midnight rule-making will tie the hands of the new administration, burden the financial services industry at a time of economic crisis and contradict the stated intent of the Financial Services Committee," the House panel's chairman, Rep.

Online spending for October grew at the slowest pace since at least 2001, an Internet research company said -- the latest evidence that Web shopping is being dragged down by the deteriorating economy. According to the ComScore Inc. report, online spending increased a meager 1% last month from the year-earlier period, marking the slowest sales pace for any month since the company began tracking the data seven years ago. The results exclude business from auctions, autos and travel.

Wooed by heavy discounts from online retailers, consumers who had been exercising restraint during this holiday shopping season finally let themselves go on Cyber Monday. E-commerce spending on the first workday after the long Thanksgiving weekend jumped 15%, to $846 million from $733 million a year earlier, according to a ComScore report released Wednesday. Web shoppers started buying more on Thanksgiving and kept going through the weekend, the research firm said.

Online spending at U.S. retailers has fallen less than 1% in the holiday season so far, research firm ComScore Inc. said Sunday. Consumers spent $24 billion over the Internet from Nov. 1 to Friday, compared with $24.2 billion in the same period a year earlier, the Reston, Va., research firm said. Consumers have tightened their holiday-spending budgets because of rising unemployment and declining home values.

The removal of Warner Music Group's videos from YouTube over the weekend highlights the growing tension between music labels and websites over what is becoming an important source of revenue for the beleaguered recorded-music industry: advertising and licensing fees from music videos, the foundation that built MTV but which has now largely migrated to the Internet.

A country that shunned Christmas for decades is now looking to cash in on the holiday season, promoting an online shopping site designed to let Cubans overseas buy products, including flowers and flat-screen TVs, for delivery to relatives in the island nation. Grupo Excelencias, based in Spain, teamed with Cuba's communist government to create MallHabana.com, which offers prices in U.S.

Wish you could get your special guy that yummy black wool coat worn by Dr. Burke on the Nov. 23 episode of "Grey's Anatomy"? You can. It's manufactured by Calvin Klein, and it's available for $239.99 in sizes S, M, L and XL. How about those snazzy Diane von Furstenberg slacks that made Delinda Deline look so good during the Nov. 24 installment of "Las Vegas"? They're black wool gabardine, available in sizes 2, 4, 6 and 10 for $159.

Digital downloads helped the struggling music industry end 2006 on a positive note, but their once-sizzling beat is starting to slow. A Nielsen SoundScan report released Thursday showed music purchases in the U.S. exceeding 1 billion units for the second straight year as downloads continued to compensate for declining CD sales. But analysts remained skeptical that the industry was in a full turnaround, saying that the torrid growth in digital music sales was slowing.

The U.S. Justice Department has demanded information from some of the world's biggest investment banks as part of a probe into online gambling in the United States, banking sources said Sunday. Internet gaming was effectively banned last year after President Bush signed legislation outlawing gaming-related financial transactions at the end of September.

A world without digital handcuffs on downloaded music sounds pretty good to Eston Bond, a 21-year old senior at the University of Michigan. Bond, a self-proclaimed music lover, is sick of the anti-piracy software that limits how he can listen to music downloaded from Apple Inc.'s iTunes and other online stores. If it weren't for those restrictions, he said, he'd buy a lot more music -- and listen to it in more ways.