Google’s proposal to buy Motorola should pass regulatory muster. Motorola isn’t being taken out of the market. There is no threat to consumer choice. If Motorola can leverage Google’s Android platform to offer handsets at a lower price, this causing other handset makers to drop their prices, consumers will win with the increase in their welfare. Other handset makers will be forced to step up their ability to innovate. This is well needed market disruption…

Facebook is introducing a new video chat feature in partnership with Skype. The platform will provide one-on-one chat services powered by Skype. Mark Zuckerberg and company may be responding to a little heat from Google’s new social networking platform, Google +, which also has a video chat feature that allows members within groups to video chat with each other.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to try Google +. As a blogger the last thing I need is another reason to remain floating around in cyberspace with more “friends” and “followers”, most of whom I’ve either not met or seen since I was in the first grade.

More importantly, here, at least sometime down the road, is another reason to worry about spectrum crunch. All it’s going to take is for a few businesses to form focus groups online, or a bunch of AKAs to hold a grad chapter meeting online and boom, you’ll have an increased demand for spectrum.

Thanks to the czarina of tech news, Cecilia Kang at The Washington Post, for herarticle on the settlement agreement between Google and the Federal Trade Commission.

The FTC, who I think was unfairly described as a regulatory lapdog by the Center for Digital Democracy, got Google to agree to rework its privacy policy and audit itself periodically. If not, then the company is looking at a fine of $16,000 per violation.

That’s a lot of cheese given Google’s size and blonde ambition for some of Facebook’s market share in the “we’re making money off of free consumer-provided content” industry.

But that’s the thing about free. Social media and social networking is free, at least access wise, for the consumer. The consumer gets to add followers on Twitter like Jesus added disciples in Galilee. Consumers add so many friends on Facebook that shows like “Living Single” and “Friends” would have never got on the air in the first place if social networking were around in the 1990s. All this networking for free.

In the legal world parlance, if a consumer is getting this unprecedented access to people who would otherwise walk past them without speaking, where is the consideration due to Facebook, Google, and Twitter? Why shouldn’t they get something for all they have invested into making the consumer feel like they are putting together their very own virtual mafia family?

Sure one can argue equity for the social network consumer who wants to know how much information about him is being put out there. The real problem, however, is the consumer’s unwillingness to educate himself about the basics of a medium that to this day its power he doth not appreciate.

The bottom-line is that concerns about privacy in the digital age are being blown out of proportion. If you don’t want it out there, keep it to yourself. Otherwise, learn how to leverage and make a market for the content you put out there.

The New York Times is reporting that Google, Inc., has modified its algorithms so that lower quality sites do not show up high during a consumer’s online search.

Interesting. On the surface, it sounds like Google, probably the world’s most prolific content provider of content it never originally produced, is practicing their own kind of net neutrality. Yeah. Let’s call it search neutrality. Access providers must provide consumers with access to Google while Google reduces the consumer’s access to other content.

Within the past five years there was talk, especially out of the U.S. Senate commerce committee, about promoting ala carte cable programming. This is where consumers could pick and choose their own bundle of shows.

Kind of like the old Burger King commercials where the cute actresses would sing, “Have it your way, have it your way.” It may have been in response to McDonald’s “two all-beef patties, special sauce, cheese, lettuce, pickles, on a sesame seed bun.” (Don’t ask me how I remember that.)

Bottom line, the argument was that consumers should be given more choice. The counter to that from the cable industry was that it was cost prohibitive to provide consumers with a la carte and that the sum of the pieces would be more expensive than the whole for consumers.

Well, it looks like Internet technology is providing us with a way to get a la carte programming. By purchasing televisions with applications from Yahoo! and Google, we can surf the Web for programming.

Unfortunately, some content providers aren’t ready to provide access to their content by televisions embedded with Internet apps. They don’t want to upset the current business model. Biz speak for they haven’t figured out how to get paid for the content that would bypass traditional cable and go directly to my web television.

Fair enough. Hopefully they can figure out something soon.