With unlimited storage, Go Daddy Unlimited Email allows users to store “photos, documents and important files” without worrying about running out of storage space. The solution also allows users to create a “customized address”, avoiding the generic addresses available through free email services. Users can also utilize an Online File Folder and Calendar.

The email solution also offers robust virus and spam protection, phishing fraud protection and 256-bit encryption, all free of charge.

“It was an easy decision for us to offer unlimited email storage,” explained Bob Parsons, CEO and Founder of Go Daddy. “It gives our customers the peace of mind they will always have space for incoming emails. This is about giving our customers what they want and that’s what Go Daddy is all about!”

Go Daddy bills itself as “the world’s largest domain name registrar”. The company recently made the Inc. 5000 List of fastest-growing companies for the fifth consecutive year.

In a nutshell, some Internet stocks are better than others. You know that, of course, but I’m going to get into the Olympian swing by singling out the three Internet stocks that I feel are worthy of wearing medals around their necks.

You may agree. You may disagree. We’ll get into that later, but for now I hear the “do no evil” anthem starting, so let’s turn our attention to the podium where the awards are being handed out.

Gold: Google
Good luck awarding the top prize in this event to anyone other than Google (Nasdaq: GOOG). Big G earned it, as the world’s leading search engine and the runaway champ in online advertising.

One crown goes with other, naturally. Responding to search queries provides the juiciest opportunity to deliver credible leads to high-paying sponsors. A smaller player like Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) may pride itself on serving up a ton of page views through sticky applications like email or photo-sharing site Flickr, but Google knows that the key to monetizing the Web isn’t about keeping people around as much as sending them away to advertisers.

Google’s latest quarter shows that the company’s model is still rocking. Revenue for the period soared 39% to $5.37 billion, with earnings increasing 34% to $1.25 billion, or $3.92 a share. Google isn’t perfect. It is, at its very heart, a media advertising company, and that isn’t a very attractive sector in this stingy economy. Google has missed Wall Street’s profit targets in three of the past five quarters, including last month’s second-quarter report.

However, until proven otherwise, it’s hard to give the gold to any other company. Between its market-dominant position in search and its cloud-computing initiatives, Google will continue to be a juggernaut in the industry and a thorn in the sides of its rivals.

Silver: Baidu.com
One of the few places on the planet where Google isn’t a market leader just happens to be the world’s most populous nation. China’s version of Google is Baidu.com (Nasdaq: BIDU), the spunky local favorite that has managed to keep Google down as it commands roughly two-thirds of the country’s search market.

Baidu is making the most of China’s booming economy. Revenue doubled in its latest quarter. Earnings rose by 87%, and would have doubled if not for the company’s capital investments in Japan as it tries to grow its search-engine reach beyond China.

Baidu may not seem cheap, at 43 times next year’s earnings, but go back a paragraph and reread the part about the company’s heady growth rates. China lapped the United States this summer in terms of the number of Internet users, and it’s just getting warmed up. Just a fifth of the country is online at the moment. You have to like the Chinese search engines — like Baidu, Google, and Sohu.com’s (Nasdaq: SOHU) Sogou — at this moment. China’s stock market may be out of favor, but the fundamentals of its search-engine rock stars continue to improve. Take the silver, Baidu, and get back to me in a few years about trading that up for a gold.

Bronze: eBay
My third medalist may not be a popular choice. I can’t seem to mention the company’s name without my email filling up with angry power sellers who have bolted from the namesake site. The company also overpaid for Web chat leader Skype. Sure, but what has eBay done for you lately?

The company’s most recent quarter was sound. Revenue and net income grew by roughly 20%. Even if listings have slowed at eBay.com, the company still has the financial-transactions market leader in PayPal. It also has a very robust global portfolio of online classifieds websites, attracting 74 million monthly unique visitors who go through nearly 3 billion pages a month.

If you want to go region-specific, you will find faster-growing marketplaces like Gmarket (Nasdaq: GMKT) in South Korea, and MercadoLibre (Nasdaq: MELI) in Brazil and Argentina. However, eBay is the global giant (and also happens to own a chunk of MercadoLibre).

So stand tall and proud on that podium, medal recipients. Your hard work has paid off

The company reported revenues of $5.37 billion for the quarter ended June 30, an increase of 39 percent compared to the second quarter of 2007 and an increase of 3 percent compared to Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) first quarter of 2008.

Google posted earnings of $1.58 billion, or $3.92 per share, compared to $1.55 billion (or $4.12 per share) for the first quarter.

However, Wall Street analysts had the company pegged for earnings of $4.72 per share, according to Thomson Reuters estimates. The miss from the Internet search leader sent shares plummeting during after-hours trading, down 8 percent at press time.
Despite the punishment from the Street, Google executives remained optimistic.

“As we continue to focus on innovating in our core business of search, ads and apps, we also look forward to enhancing the experience of our users and expanding the reach of our advertisers and partners with new technologies and formats,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a statement.

He pointed especially to the company’s integration of DoubleClick, which he said is gaining momentum and creating “new opportunities in display advertising and elsewhere.”

Schmidt remained bullish during a conference call with analysts. “We continue to believe we’re well-positioned in an economic slowdown because of a flight to quality,” he said.

Some analysts and other observers have questioned whether Google will ever see significant profit from YouTube, but Schmidt dismissed such concerns, saying the company was “enormously happy” with the video sharing site as a cultural success.

While Google has experimented with a number of different ad formats to monetize the video-sharing site, Schmidt conceded he didn’t believe “the perfect ad product” has been produced yet. However, he did note that in-video advertising — ads appearing at the bottom of video clips — shows promise.

Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder and president of technology, said mobile search advertising likewise shows great promise, particularly in countries like Japan where mobile devices tend to be more of a primary computing device.

Speaking during the earnings call, he also said Google allows advertisers to specify a mobile-only campaign, versus ads that go to the broader Web for desktop access as well — a separation that may become less important down the road.

“I see them converge more in the future, because once you have fully capable browsers on mobile devices, there’s not much difference,” he said, pointing to the Apple iPhone as the first in a series of such devices.

He predicted advertisers would have “a more fluid experience” choosing where ads should run, pointing out the potential of location-based advertising best suited to mobile devices.

Brin also said Google’s universal search — incorporating elements like videos, pictures and books — is seeing a rapid increase in popularity. In this most recent quarter, he said almost a third of all search queries had a universal search element, up from the preceding quarter, when the universal element comprised closer to only a tenth of all queries.

“Video alone is ten percent of [today's] queries,” Brin said. “People have videos for things you wouldn’t expect.”

As an example, Brin said he recently wanted to buy a high-capacity RAID (define) drive for personal use. After doing some research using Google, he ended up buying from a company that had a detailed video showing the system’s features and how to install it.

Core strength

The executives’ discussion of future areas of growth seek to build on several key areas where Google continued to show strength during second quarter.

Google-owned sites generated revenues of $3.53 billion, or 66 percent of total revenues, in the second quarter. This represents a 42 percent increase over second quarter 2007 revenues of $2.49 billion and a 4 percent increase over first quarter 2008 revenues of $3.40 billion.

The next big source of revenues comes from the company’s partner sites which generated revenues through AdSense programs of $1.66 billion, or 31 percent of total revenues, in the second quarter. This represents a 22 percent increase over network revenues of $1.35 billion generated in the second quarter of 2007 and a 2 percent decrease over first quarter 2008 revenues of $1.69 billion.

International revenues did indeed help Google’s bottom line. Revenues from outside of the United States totaled $2.80 billion, representing a 52 percent of total revenues in the second quarter of 2008, compared to 48 percent in the second quarter of 2007 and 51 percent in the first quarter of 2008.

Google said if foreign exchange rates remained constant from the first quarter of 2008 through the second quarter of 2008, its revenues in the second quarter of 2008 would have been $88 million lower. Additionally, had rates remained constant from the second quarter of 2007 through the second quarter of 2008, its revenues in the second quarter of 2008 would have been $249 million lower.

Total paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of its AdSense partners, increased approximately 19 percent over the second quarter of 2007 and decreased approximately 1 percent over the first quarter of 2008.

Google’s reported earnings don’t take into account what the search leader terms traffic acquisition costs, or TAC — the sums associated with reimbursing partners like Web site publishers that host its ads. TAC totaled $1.47 billion, or 28 percent of advertising revenues, just shy of last quarter’s expenditure.

Updated to include executives’ comments from today’s earnings call.

The mass access to the Internet, which helped ex-CEO Lee Myung-bak to his resounding presidential election victory, went on to become the instrument helping shatter that popularity in just five months in office.

Now the government is working on new rules to rein in the excesses of its netizens and bring some control to the information — and disinformation — that bombards the nation’s computer screens.

“We have to guard against ‘infodemics,’ in which inaccurate, false information is disseminated, prompting social unrest that spreads like an epidemic,” Lee told parliament early in July.

Lee has every reason to take it personally.

Barely had he taken office in February than he was accused of putting the nation’s health at risk by agreeing to import U.S. beef, long banned because of concerns over mad cow disease.

Much of the fear, at times hysteria, was fanned by blogs and discussion boards that crammed into South Korea’s Internet space. It helped trigger mass protests that daily clogged central Seoul in late spring and early summer as tens of thousands took to the streets to demand U.S. beef be kept from South Korean tables.

An early hot topic was a scientific study, heavily distorted in the retelling but widely believed judging by Internet postings, that Koreans had a genetic predisposition to catching the disease.

Another was that a beef by-product used in the manufacture of diapers put the nation’s babies at risk of succumbing to bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

But the government argues its concern goes beyond attacks on its policies, and rules are needed to bring a largely uncontrolled media into line with its traditional counterpart.

Stories abound of people being cruelly and very publicly hounded on the Internet, sometimes to the point of suicide.

Personal information too has become increasingly vulnerable. Earlier this year, the country’s biggest online market place was hacked and enough information to identify some 13 million people released to anyone with an Internet connection — which includes most of South Korea’s population.

The Justice Ministry is working on what it calls a Cyber Defamation Law.

“The reality is that we lack the means to effectively deal with harmful Internet messages,” a ministry official said.

The Korean Communications Commission, which regulates the industry, has come up with its own rules to oblige portals to suspend sites stepping outside the limits and force Websites to use real names of anyone posting comments.

The commission says the measures are designed to improve security and reduce the spread of false information.

FREEDOM

Predictably, voices are rising that the government moves are attempts to erode freedom in a country that has had only two decades of democratic elections.

“The regulations violate the autonomy of the Internet and are an effective tool for tighter media control by the government,” said Lee Han-ki, senior editor at the popular citizen news Website OhMyNews.

“The regulations would bring about a reverse in the advancement of the Internet media as a whole.”

But an official with one major local portal, who asked not to be identified, said he thought the commission was right to get tough.

It was also backed by some academics, including Kweon Sang-hee, a journalism and mass communications professor at Sungkyunkwan University.

“South Korea is a leading testbed for the IT industry and the Internet media here certainly has a frontier-like aspect in leading experimental democracy.

“But the Internet media should also serve public good, and compared with other countries, South Korea has lacked the institutional control over the media, in which people tend to expand and reproduce unverified, one-sided information.”

South Korea’s netizens remain unconvinced.

“If you want to sue me with the Cyber Defamation Law, go ahead. History will charge you with insulting South Koreans,” read one posting.

(Editing by Jonathan Thatcher and Jerry Norton)