Net-neutrality proponents howled when Comcast started throttling traffic from BitTorrent, a bandwidth-hogging program people use to swap video files. The Federal Communications Commission sided with the open-Internet folks, ruling that Comcast could not selectively choke off traffic.

Carrier networks were originally built for connecting phone calls. Now they're getting swamped with bandwidth-hogging data applications. Keeping up will require huge investments. Who's going to pay for that?

The iPod Touch is basically an iPhone with the phone part taken out, which is fine - since making calls is the one thing that the iPhone doesn't actually do very well.

Fixing mistakes is one thing. Apple's bigger strength has been its ability to keep improving hit products.

I often wonder what the world would be like if more companies were like Apple.

In addition to making Android available for free, Google also lets phone makers change the code and customize it so that an Android phone made by, say, Samsung has a different user interface than an Android phone from Motorola.

Android is the kind of runaway smash hit that techies spend their careers dreaming about.

Nobody ever imagined how quickly the Android mobile-phone platform would take off - not even Andy Rubin, the Silicon Valley engineer who created it.

Social gaming is not something Zuckerberg could have imagined back when he was creating Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004. The change began in May 2007, when Facebook announced it would let outside developers create applications that run on top of Facebook.

Can anyone create an enduring business on the Web, where it's easy to build new companies, and when survival depends on the whims of fickle users? The big lesson of 'Digg' may be simply this: if someone offers you a ridiculous amount of money for a company that wasn't that hard to build, don't think twice. Take the money and run.

Remember the early days of the Net, when everything was going to be open and free, and we were all going to share information in a techno-utopia? That was great until people realized that their user data could be turned into gold. Now there are billions at stake, and nobody is playing nice anymore.

Google views Facebook as a threat to its business and has been trying to launch a social-networking service to compete with it.

Since the beginning of the internet era, it has been pretty widely accepted that when you join an online service, whatever data you put into it belongs to you.

One way Groupon hopes to gain an edge is by using software to learn about its members so it can deliver more relevant offers: my wife will get the manicure-pedicure deal, but I'll get an offer on fly-fishing lessons. The key now is execution - delivering great customer service and keeping everybody happy on both sides of the transactions.

There's no special technological wizardry involved in what Groupon does.

What needs to change is the nature of advertising itself. That business hasn't really evolved since the days of Don Draper.

PayPal, which was founded in 1998, may be the closest thing to a global currency that has ever been created. Based in San Jose, California, the company operates in 190 markets, sending and receiving payments in 24 currencies on behalf of 90 million active members.

'Do not track' probably won't spell doom for online advertisers. But it will put the burden on them to explain to consumers what targeted advertising is and why it's good for them. They'll have to come out of the shadows; they'll have to be honest with people. What a radical concept. I'm all for it.

For the most part, cookies aren't dangerous. They were created so advertisers could get a better idea of who you are and what you're interested in, so they could send you ads you're more likely to find relevant.

I used to be a pretty hard-core iPhone fan. But over time, I grew more and more frustrated with the lousy service on AT&T. My iPhone simply could not reliably make and hold a phone call. Not just in New York and San Francisco, where I spend a lot of time, and where AT&T's service has been notoriously bad for years.

Android phones are sold by dozens of hardware makers, the biggest being Samsung, Motorola, and HTC. There are lots of different form factors. Slider phones. Phones with keyboards. Big screens, small screens, midsize screens.

Early on, Android phones were pitched as kind of ersatz iPhones, devices that could do most of what an iPhone did - but were available on carriers other than AT&T, a relatively horrible network that was the biggest source of complaints about Apple's transformative device.

Apple is on fire, delivering smash hits across its entire product line. It's hard to think of another company that has ever been on such a roll.

Apple is very, very good at almost everything it does, and that includes corporate communications.