< Start Quote > The suit was filed last week with the Federal District Court in Los Angeles, and alleges that MySpace has broken antitrust laws by censoring competitor services. Greenspan's new company, LiveUniverse, owns a number of internet properties, including social networking site Stickam.com and YouTube competitor Vidilife.com. He alleges that MySpace blocks users from even mentioning Stickam.com and Vidilife.com in their profiles.
He says that "any attempts by users to type the url of sites like 'stickam.com' or 'vidilife.com' into a [MySpace] blog or profile [are replaced] with '......' ". < End Quote>
The truth of the matter is that Myspace had terms of use, that are supposed to be read before setting up an account. Not that anybody ever really sits down and reads all of that mumbojumbo (at least, not the average person).
BUT!
The bottom line on that is that anything where you can set up an account: Yahoo, Google, Myspace, Youtube - all of them have terms of use. This allows them to do pretty much anything that they want, since the users of the service already, supposedly, know the stipulations like not linking to competitors.
If somebody wants to read the terms of use (I didn't, but I assume) and point out that it's nowhere in there, then I would definitly say the Myspace overstepped some bounds.