Tom Krazit

[Commentary] Most people know that Facebook manipulates their News Feed, and a lot of that manipulation is not at all noteworthy (do you really need to see the 892nd picture of the toddler born to the girl who sat next to you in 10th grade biology?).

Go ahead, wander over to Facebook and refresh your news feed eight or ten times in a row: you’ll get a different series of updates at the top of that feed nearly every time.

But when Facebook starts altering the content of your feed based on an emotional social graph it wishes to feed you, that makes a lot of people sit up and take notice. And in an era in which Facebook is one of the largest sources of referral traffic to traffic-starved online publishers struggling to break even in an era of digital pennies, the ramifications of those alterations have a clear impact on how you get your news and the type of news you get.

Faced with difficult questions about his company’s pending takeover of Time Warner Cable -- which would combine the two largest cable Internet providers in the US into a company consumers will likely hate twice as much -- Comcast CEO Brian Roberts made one thing very clear: his company is determined to sit directly in the middle of the tech world.

Roberts said Apple co-founder Steve Jobs once told him that Comcast “should be the best dumb pipe,” a common sentiment in the tech industry that Internet service providers should get out of the way of the content and device industries and just provide reliable broadband service. But avoiding that low-margin fate has been a telecommunications vow for decades, and Roberts made it very clear that Comcast wants to be “the best pipe.” That means it wants to preserve a gatekeeper role.

In a series of analogies, Roberts likened his company’s role to that of a postmaster, pointing out that Netflix pays hundreds of millions of dollars to mail DVDs to its customers but now expects to be able to deliver the same content over the Internet for free.

[Commentary] One of the founding principles of GigaOm is that connectivity is the lifeblood of the tech industry, and over the years we’ve tried to shape our coverage as much around that topic as possible.

It has become increasingly clear to us that the Internet is under siege from for-profit business interests, aging and outdated laws and policies, and the ever-growing demands that we place on its infrastructure.

We thought it was time to take a look at the current state of the Internet and outline our proposals for how we think the Internet -- including everything from last-mile broadband to wireless spectrum to movies and TV -- might be reinvented if it were being conceived in 2014, knowing what we now know about its evolution and the world’s reaction to its expansion.

We have five pieces to this special report:

1. Stacey Higginbotham on next-generation broadband
2. Kevin Fitchard on the future of wireless networks
3. Janko Roettgers on content business models and the Internet
4. David Meyer on how privacy could be reinvented on the Internet
5. Jeff Roberts on how governments can more wisely regulate networks