As concern over Internet advertising and data collection grows, privacy advocates and the Internet advertising industry have been sharpening their legal knives for more than a year.

FORBES

Indeed, the battle over what companies will survive in the Internet search and advertising industry is just getting started.

NPR: Yahoo Refusal May Bring Higher Offer from Microsoft

Having do not track as the default, a default that we all know most people will stick with, thus means that all of the complicated work that the advertising industry has done to increase the performance of internet advertising becomes, for those users at least, near irrelevant.

FORBES: Microsoft Sticks With Do Not Track Default: And Boy Are The Advertisers Angry

But Microsoft is facing major opposition to its plan to make privacy the default setting for Internet Explorers, and that opposition from the advertising industry might mean that the setting winds up being completely useless.

FORBES: Microsoft Is Losing In A Bitter Battle To Protect Internet Users' Privacy

At the moment, he says, the industry is focusing heavily on Internet search advertising offered at major sites such as Google and Yahoo!

FORBES: Slouching Toward Online Advertising

In a stump speech for all things digital, Gates told an audience of hundreds of BlackBerry-fiddling advertising industry types Tuesday that within just five years, Internet-based television will do to broadcast what the Internet has already done to print media.

FORBES: Microsoft Versus Your TV

"The small screen will disrupt but not kill the advertising industry, " Jeff Pulver, a serial American internet entrepreneur and a regular Stream attendee, explained to me.

CNN: Will mobile kill digital advertising?

And as Amy Gershkoff, the Global Director of Analytics at the PR agency Burston-Marsteller, told me, mobile will only successfully monetized when the advertising industry understand that mobile isn't just a smaller screen version of traditional Internet media.

CNN: Will mobile kill digital advertising?