The New York Times has a piece on the downside of broadband adoption. It seems like low-income kids enjoy playing video games and hob knobbing on social media sites like Facebook. (No wonder Zuckerberg wants to target 13 year olds.)

As quoted in The New York Times, “Despite the educational potential of computers, the reality is that their use for education or meaningful content creation is minuscule compared to their use for pure entertainment,” said Vicky Rideout, author of the decade-long Kaiser study. “Instead of closing the achievement gap, they’re widening the time-wasting gap.” In short, the time-waste gap is the new digital divide.

The irony of it is that the Federal Communications Commission wants to spend $200 million to teach households how to put technology to productive use. The FCC will be teaching households how to be productive? Really?

Cynicism aside, turning the computer at home into true capital stock by teaching young people how to use it could be a boon to employers looking for young employees with keystroke and data entry skills. Also, the efforts may help engender the next self-taught programmer who comes up with the next big idea in tech, whether it’s a new app or a new type of media company.

Microsoft and Best Buy are helping to fund some similar digital literacy initiatives so this may be a good investment in the long term for American labor. What the markets need, however, is for young people to put any digital literacy they garner to productive use.

According to Gigaom.com, Consumers are uploading 72 hours of video to YouTube per minute. That’s a lot of content.

YouTube is owned by Google, Inc.

With all the smart phones equipped with cameras, uploading video is easier to do. This increases demand for access to the airwaves or spectrum. Will technology, and more importantly, regulation be able to keep up?

What this also tells me is that Google is a much bigger threat to Facebook as we know it. Google has a much more lucrative advertising business. They are able to get more eyes to their content because of YouTube. All that is missing is the social networking piece. They will either keep plodding along with Google+ or go after Facebook.

Now that would be fun to watch on YouTube or anywhere else.

Honestly never heard of Megaupload before this news broke. Their services remind me of those lockers you see at airports and bus stations. You rent a box and the box owner probably warns you up front not to put anything in there that you wouldn’t want seen on the evening news.

Megaupload could probably claim that it did not know that copyright material was being uploaded and downloaded, but that would be a bit naïve on their part, especially since their technology was replacing an older, less efficient file sharing technology. The “I didn’t know” argument may not hold up against the prosecution’s argument of willful blindness, however. Time for their attorneys to take a look at the Pentalpha and Grokster cases for further guidance on litigation strategy or better yet, guidance on a settlement. Not only won’t willful blindness hold, but their file sharing business model may have induced more consumers to infringe on copyrights.

Fortunately these guys aren’t a public company or else investors would be seeing shares tank.

CNBC’s Julia Bornstein brings her insights to whether Google is favoring its Google + social network when consumers search the web for “@usernames”. Twitter, according to Ms. Bornstein, argues that Google suppresses the “@” sign during a consumer search, and instead sends the consumer to one of its Google search options.

The antitrust question maybe, is Google using its dominance in search to elevate its options over Twitter’s.

On the surface it seems a big what to do about nothing. If I’m that hard up to do a search for someone’s Twitter handle, I’d go to Twitter and do the search. Consumers have that option if they have problems with Google.

Hopefully the FTC or the Justice Department will find that they have other things to do.