Let’s be clear. If the Obama administration fails to block this deal, it will be setting the lowest possible bar in approving mergers and buyouts. This buyout could not be more obviously bad for competition -- and therefore bad for customers -- and antitrust enforcement is designed precisely for protecting competition.

When I said there would be two major winners in this deal, I was referring to Verizon, the largest mobile carrier in the nation, as the other one. AT&T is currently second largest, with Sprint and T-Mobile trailing. A combined AT&T and T-Mobile would be a bit larger than Verizon, with Sprint in a very distant third place.

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As you may know, the program featured a long interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.  My initial reaction was incredulity, at what seemed like an amateurish if not downright embarrassing performance by the interviewer. In particular, I was astonished at the tone and substance of some of the questions, which seemed at times to come out of the "old media sucking up to power" school of which CBS often seems to be a proud member. Here's one of the exchanges:

Kroft: There's a special set of rules in the United States for disclosing classified information. There is long-standing ...

Assange: There's a special set of rules for soldiers. For members of the State Department, who are disclosing classified information. There’s not a special set of rules for publishers to disclose classified information. There is the First Amendment. It covers the case. And there’s been no precedent that I’m aware of in the past 50 years of prosecuting a publisher for espionage. It is just not done. Those are the rules. You do not do it.

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The Egyptian government's move to shut down Internet access, among other communications, amid the escalating protests is nearly unprecedented—and it foretells a future, unless we work hard to prevent it, of centralized information control. And before we Americans get smug about our freedoms in the information sphere, we should recognize that what Egypt is doing is exactly what authoritarians in our own government want the ability to do here.

This isn't the first time government has shut down access to the Internet during a national crisis, or ordered mobile phone companies to stop letting customers make calls and send text messages. Burma largely succeeded in closing off its media borders several years ago, and regimes around the planet have created harsh censorship systems that prevent the majority of their people from seeing information deemed unacceptable by the people in charge.

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Page is in the driver's seat. Brin is in the back seat.  Schmidt is outside the car, a specially modified Toyota Prius that drives itself.

The photo is part of a blog post announcing a move that took everyone outside the company by surprise; Schmidt is kicking himself (or was kicked) upstairs into the role of executive chairman, and is being replaced as chief executive by Page. Brin's new role will be simply co-founder.

This is a big deal. Changes in Google leadership -- the Schmidt-Page-Brin troika has been intact for the past decade -- are exceedingly rare. What this one means for the long run is unclear, obviously, though that isn't stopping a torrent of speculation and instant analysis.

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In the latest case, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains, Sony has sued computer security researchers:

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On a trip to Washington last week, I had a mishap that resulted, among other things, in a broken arm. This is a pain both literally (physically) and figuratively (various hassles to deal with). But as I keep reminding myself, but it could've been much worse, and lots of other people have many more difficult situations than mine.

The software is called Dragon Dictate, and it works with my Mac computer. It's hardly perfect, but the more I use it the more I realize that it will be a great help in restoring at least part of my ability to do my work.

I've only scratched the surface of what the program can do, and have decided not to even try to plumb its depths. In fact I'm going to break the cardinal rule the program sets out: don't mix speech with the mouse and keyboard. What seems to work fastest for me is to dictate what amounts to a first draft and then turn off the software while I edit, one-handed, what I dictated. If both of my arms were out of commission, of course, I'd make a different decision.

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Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe it's possible to have a news organization that combines 21st-century tools and tactics with the timeless principles of excellence and honor. We are nearly free from the printing presses, the expensive broadcasting gear and especially the top-down approach of the past. Tomorrow's great journalism practitioners and organizations will believe in -- and work in -- a culture that embraces the possibilities of our emergent conversational and collaborative space.

Although what follows are editorial suggestions, not business ones -- I recognize that none of these ideas matters if the business fails -- they are essential to my ideal journalistic enterprise. Besides, most of these could be implemented with little or no additional cost, and I'm absolutely convinced that they'd help create news product that's worthy of audience support. A business that doesn't respect and value its customers has no future.

So, here are some of the things I'd insist on if I ran a news organization.

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"What I like about April Fool's Day: One day a year we're asking whether news stories are true. It should be all 365."

The above quote is a Twitter tweet by Prentiss Riddle (@pzriddle) of Austin, Texas, posted on April 1, 2008. It's a line we should all live by.

Why don't we ask ourselves, every day, whether the news reports we're reading, listening to and watching are trustworthy? The fact that most of us don't is a vestige of the bygone era when we used to watch the late "Uncle" Walter Cronkite -- called the most trusted person in America before he retired as "CBS Evening News" anchor in 1981 -- deliver the headlines. It's a vestige of a time when we simply sat back and consumed our media.

At the risk of repeating this too often, let me say again: We can no longer afford to be passive consumers. In this chapter, we'll look at the core principles for turning mere consumption into active learning.

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The e-mail arrived in early January 2010 via a colleague, who got it from his father, who got it from a mail list. It began, "Do you remember 1987 ..."

The formatting and style were amateurish, and the tone just-folks. It went, in part:

Thought you might be interested in this forgotten bit of information………

It was 1987! At a lecture the other day they were playing an old news video of Lt. Col. Oliver North testifying at the Iran-Contra hearings during the Reagan Administration. There was Ollie in front of God and country getting the third degree, but what he said was stunning!

He was being drilled by a senator, ‘Did you not recently spend close to $60,000 for a home security system?’

Ollie replied, ‘Yes, I did, Sir.’

The senator continued, trying to get a laugh out of the audience, ‘Isn’t that just a little excessive?’

‘No, sir,’ continued Ollie.

‘No? And why not?’ the senator asked.

‘Because the lives of my family and I were threatened, sir.’

‘Threatened? By whom?’ the senator questioned.

‘By a terrorist, sir’ Ollie answered.

‘Terrorist? What terrorist could possibly scare you that much?’

‘His name is Osama bin Laden, sir,’ Ollie replied.

At this point the senator tried to repeat the name, but couldn’t pronounce it, which most people back then probably couldn’t. A couple of people laughed at the attempt. Then the senator continued.

Why are you so afraid of this man?’ the senator asked.

‘Because, sir, he is the most evil person alive that I know of,’ Ollie answered.

‘And what do you recommend we do about him?’ asked the senator.

‘Well, sir, if it was up to me, I would recommend that an assassin team be formed to eliminate him and his men from the face of the earth.’

The senator disagreed with this approach, and that was all that was shown of the clip.

By the way, that senator was Al Gore!

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(This is an updated excerpt from my new book, Mediactive. Material from this post originally appeared in my Mediactive blog in November, 2009).

Like so many other people today, I've been following the news about horrific events in Tucson, Ariz., where Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat, is one of a number of shooting victims. As I write this, it's not known how many have died. And as I write this, news reports say that Giffords is in surgery, in critical condition.

The reports from traditional news organizations, amplified by Twitter, blogs and other Internet media, have been a parade of unclear information -- just what we've come to expect in such situations. CNN's headline now reads "Congresswoman Giffords shot" -- with a sub-headline saying, "There are conflicting reports on whether she has died." No kidding: One of those conflicting reports was CNN's own report, citing an unnamed sources, that Giffords had died. (UPDATE: See Regret the Error's Craig Silverman's exhaustive compilation of Big Media misstatements, from which I grabbed the above screenshot of NPR's mis-reporting of Giffords' condition.)

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At last year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, 3-D got its first big push into the home entertainment market, but it looked more like a gimmick than anything most people would care about in the near term. This year, the push is on with renewed strength, with a dizzying variety of new hardware and content ideas. The industry has more than a few hurdles ahead. The highest hurdle will be rational customer resistance to the you-must-upgrade mantra. But there's no question in my own mind that 3-D is going to have a central role in our homes within a few years.

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Their hearts are in the right place. Parts of the Internet are cesspools of slimy speech, where anonymous cowards hide behind virtual bushes and say outrageous, untrue things about others. I've been attacked in this way, and I don't like it.

So of course anyone with a conscience wants to encourage accountability and responsibility in speech. But the key word there is "encourage," not "force." It's essential to preserve anonymity, and to appreciate why it’s vital. Anonymity protects whistle-blowers and others for whom speech can be unfairly dangerous.

If Fish's description of the book is accurate, the authors are offering a cure that is much more dangerous than the disease: They would require Internet sites to take legal responsibility for what other people post on their sites.

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Comdex faded away after the turn of the century, for many reasons including the bursting of the technology bubble. But another mega-event has taken its place in recent years: the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). And even more than Comdex in its heyday, CES has become the must-attend event for people who want to experience the zeitgeist of where personal technology is heading. The crowds and annoyances haven't gone away, but here we are.

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Meanwhile, Facebook gets the capital to keep buying talent and startups, and to fuel its expansion in all kinds of other ways -- and it gets to sell stock in what amounts to a shadow stock market that's growing faster than regulators seem willing or able to understand, much less deal with.

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In the last quarter of 2010, a contender emerged in the form of the Samsung Galaxy Tab, powered by Google's Android operating system. A few others of this genre have hit the market in recent weeks as well.

But the floodgates are opening, and it's safe to say that 2011 will see a huge number of tablets hitting the market, and not just Android and iPad models. Gadget lovers will see a cornucopia of choice. Many others may see an uncontrolled flood of devices. Either way, this is going to get interesting in a big way.

The Android market is going to be particularly noisy, especially when Google releases version 3.0 of the operating system, which the company says will be the first version that's tablet-ready in a serious way. That hasn't stopped hardware companies from selling tablets based on current versions -- I own one, and I review it in an accompanying piece -- but Google's caution is at least worth noting.

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And, yet ... While I can recommend it in many ways, I have some lingering reservations.

First, let's look at the Tab's positive features. At the top of that list, from my perspective, is its size: almost three inches smaller (in diagonal screen measurement) than the iPad. It weighs half a pound less than the iPad, and is easy to hold for long periods with one hand. (It fits nicely into a jacket pocket, but with the padded case even that becomes a bit of a stretch, figuratively and literally.) In area, the Tab is roughly half the size of the iPad. But it has a 1024-by-600 screen resolution compared with the iPad's 1024-by-768, which means that it's displaying about 615,000 pixels compared with about 785,000 on the iPad -- still less to see but not nearly as much as the difference in screen sizes suggests.

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Tuesday's FCC vote on rules purportedly designed to ensure open and free networks was a 3-2 partisan charade, with Genachowski and the other two Democratic commissioners in favor and the two Republicans against. It did nothing of the sort. The short-term result will be confusion and jockeying for position. Genachowski's claim that the rules bring "a level of certainty" to the landscape was laughable unless he was talking about lobbyists and lawyers; their futures are certainly looking prosperous. The longer-range result will be to solidify the power of the incumbent powerhouses -- especially telecommunications providers and the entertainment industry -- to take much more control over what we do online.

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• The public is thoroughly cynical about political campaign advertising.
• Much of the public is misinformed about major issues.
• Fox News viewers are especially prone to believing things that are not true.

The report, from the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, won't surprise anyone who's been paying attention to national affairs and the media. We have an information crisis. Influence peddlers and opinion launderers can now spend unlimited amounts of money, much of it raised from anonymous sources, to push political issues and candidates. A system that has absolutely no accountability is almost guaranteed to become a sewer, and this one certainly has.

Meanwhile, "news" outlets are becoming not just advocates but outright partisans in the worst sense of the term. They treat policy as war, and in wars the truth comes second to winning.

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(Please see the note at the bottom of this piece.)

Yahoo says it will try to sell its Web bookmarking service, Delicious. This news, posted on the Delicious blog, comes a day after widespread reports -- unchallenged until now by Yahoo -- that the company was shuttering the service.

One result of the earlier reports was a frenzied search for a new social bookmarking service to replace what many people, including me, have used over the years to stockpile and organize links to online material we've found interesting. A second result was a further hit to Yahoo's declining reputation.

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The Nexus S hits the American shelves at Best Buy today, and it's one of the best Android phones on the market right now -- it definitely boasts the best version of Android, since it's the only phone with that version at the moment. But I'm not sure if I want to buy it, which is a bit surprising given that I'm the kind of gadget hound who always feels compelled to get the latest and greatest. I'm ambivalent because A) the Nexus S has some annoying design flaws, including lack of support for the fastest current data networks; B) it'll be surpassed quickly by even better hardware, albeit devices that customers will have to hack in order to get to all the potential; and C) the Nexus One is still pretty useful.

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