Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt was to meet French President Francois Hollande on Monday amid a revenue row with French, German and Italian media firms who want the Internet giant to pay for content.

Google, which receives four billion hits worldwide every month, has warned it will exclude French media sites from its search results if France adopts a bill that forces search engines to pay for linking to its news sites.

It's a wildly popular website laden with unlicensed songs and Hollywood movies, a prime exhibit of the digital piracy that is strangling the music industry in Asia and eroding legitimate online sales around the world.

But a few clicks inside the free-to-download bonanza that has pushed Vietnam's Zing.vn into the globe's top 550 websites reveals a surprising presence: the American government, which maintains a bustling social media account on the site.

Microsoft bills Windows 8 as a "re-imagining" of the personal computer market's dominant operating system, but the company still has a lot of work to do before the makeover captures the imagination of most consumers, based on the results of a recent poll by The Associated Press and GfK.

The phone survey of nearly 1,200 adults in the U.S. found 52 percent hadn't even heard of Windows 8 leading up to Friday's release of the redesigned software.

Complaints about mobile phones to Australia's telecoms watchdog jumped nine percent in a year, accounting for two-thirds of all gripes received due to growing smartphone use, a study said Monday.

Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman Simon Cohen said there were 122,834 mobile phone complaints in the year to June 30 -- an increase of nine percent on the previous year -- despite overall grievances dropping two percent.

It is expected to be the mother of all cyber diplomatic battles.

When delegates gather in Dubai in December for an obscure U.N. agency meeting, fighting is expected to be intense over proposals to rewrite global telecom rules to effectively give the United Nations control over the Internet.

A New York man with a shady past was arrested on Friday for using a forged contract with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg to lay claim to half of the world's leading online social network.

Paul Ceglia, 39, faces a pair of fraud charges that each carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, according to federal prosecutors.

U.S. voters can slide their political orientation and news to the left, right or center with an elections website launched Friday by Microsoft search engine Bing.

The Bing Elections 2012 site was launched "to bring together comprehensive election news, up-to-the-minute election results, and social media insights -- all in one place," Bing marketing chief Mike Nichols said in a blog post.

It used to be that Microsoft was the evil empire, and Apple the scrappy underdog.

Now the roles are reversed, and Microsoft is challenging a dominant Apple, which has staked its claim as the leader of the sizzling mobile sector for tablets and smartphones, as well as the biggest seller of digital music.

Canada and the United States announced Friday they were launching a joint cyber-security plan to protect their digital infrastructure from online threats.

The action plan, under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Public Safety Canada, aims to better protect critical digital infrastructure and improve the response to cyber incidents.

German media giant Axel Springer said on Friday it had agreed to sell its online gaming unit Gamigo in a move to focus on core digital activities.

"Axel Springer is continuing to focus on core competences in its digital business -- content portals, marketing and classifieds portals. In this context, Axel Springer is selling Gamigo AG to Samarion, a strategic investor in online gaming," the group said in a statement.