Walt Mossberg

[Commentary] A way we can protect the internet, at least in America, from both political whiplash in DC and the constant commercial overreach that threatens it. I say we treat the internet as both a unique resource and a great common engineering project, something that merits government protection.

I suggest that Congress pass a broad law setting out the national interest in protecting the internet and the general principles by which that protection would be defined. This wouldn’t be one of those famous 1,200-page bills nobody can read. It would be meant as a sort of statutory manifesto.

Then, in that same bill, Congress creates a special, permanent, nonpartisan independent commission, or even a special, narrowly focused court, to adjudicate disputes about internet issues as they arise, by interpreting the law. This would build up a body of precedent. Notice I am not suggesting the writing of any regulations, because this idea aims for the lightest touch possible. This entity would also remove the politically charged, slow-moving, compromised Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission from internet regulation.

If you don’t like this plan, come up with a better one, or a modified one. But we do need a plan. Every few years, the feds and the courts change direction or fail to answer important questions. And every day, the internet becomes more of a platform for lousy ads, for increasing the power of a few rich companies and for intrusive tracking. It’s too important to leave unprotected.

If the $85 billion AT&T-Time Warner merger goes through, it would, in my view, represent an unhealthy concentration of power between a distributor and a maker of content. And it could be a threat to small players on the mobile web, if AT&T extends to its Time Warner content a technique called “zero-rating,” in which selected content and services don’t count against users’ data plan caps. That makes favored content much more attractive to users than similar content from other sources, which uses up your scarce data allotment.

For media companies, for consumers, for advertisers, the best solution is to keep distribution and content separate, so consumers and creators meet on a level playing field. AT&T, which seems more excited right now about owning media than running a network, should be forced to choose whether it wants to be in one business or the other.

[Commentary] Over the last seven years, since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, the PC has gradually been dethroned by the smartphone (and to a lesser extent, by the tablet) as the key digital device.

PC sales have fallen significantly in recent years, racking up their worst annual sales in 2014, while smartphone and tablet sales have soared.

Almost all of the energy that developers once put into making software for laptops and desktops is now devoted to making mobile apps and mobile websites.

Just recently, it has become clear that a serious effort has begun to merge the smartphone and the PC, or at least to bring some of the more familiar features of the surging smartphone to the tanking PC. We are seeing the start of what I expect to be a long-term trend to make PCs look and act more like smartphones, and to bring to the PC some of the functions of the phone.

Startup Artemis Networks showed off a new technology called pCell (which stands for “personal cell”) that it claims deliver fast, unshared bandwidth to each smartphone, tablet or laptop, even in packed places like stadiums.

The pCells are generated by small transmitters that look sort of like a larger version of a home wireless router and can be placed all over a building or a city. If adopted, they could even one day replace cell towers, according to Artemis founder Steve Perlman, who formerly worked at Apple and Microsoft and helped invent products like QuickTime and WebTV.

The pCell system works with standard LTE phones, so no new handset technology is required. And they can coexist with the current cell phone transmission system. But there’s a catch: Deploying them will require the active cooperation of the major wireless carriers, who may be suspicious of relying on a radical new technology from a small startup.

Each of the top mobile operating systems -- Android and Apple’s iOS -- has some obvious features that the other is missing. And it would benefit consumers if each adopted its own version of these. These are some things Apple and Google could learn from each other:

• Email: Android typically comes with two email apps, one of which is strictly reserved for Google’s Gmail. On the other hand, Android’s main email app, the one for Gmail, allows you to attach any file to an email as you are composing it.
• Screens: In both systems, the screens are mainly filled with icons that launch apps. But Android offers more creative options.
• Quick Settings: Because wading through smartphone settings can be tedious, both platforms include a quick-settings feature -- with a subset of common settings, like turning on airplane mode or adjusting brightness -- that you access by simply swiping from the top or bottom of the screen. By contrast, on the latest Samsung, the “quick” settings are so long you either have to swipe through a row of icons wider than the screen, or select an even more extensive list with 20 settings that includes marginal items.
• Privacy control: On iOS, there’s a special settings section for controlling privacy. It allows you to decide which apps can use your location, contacts, calendar, photos, microphone and more -- all in one place. Some of these options are available on Android, but I couldn’t find any similar, detailed, unified privacy-control panel on the latest Samsung, Nexus or HTC models.
• Customization: Apple doesn’t allow iPhone users to customize common features like the lock screen (beyond choosing a photo or design) and keyboard. By contrast, many Android phones do allow customization.
• Tablet apps: Apple boasts around half a million apps optimized for the iPad in its App Store. These apps make use of the larger tablet screen to add additional panels or other user interface features that aren’t available in iPhone versions.

Sprint Chairman Masayoshi Son lambasted the Internet service currently available to US consumers as “horrible” -- way too slow and way too costly -- even the Internet service offered currently by his own company, the nation’s No. 3 wireless carrier.

But he said he could fix that, if the Obama Administration were to allow Sprint to merge with No. 4 carrier T-Mobile. He said that such a merger -- which he stressed hasn’t been agreed to -- would allow the combined company to gain enough scale to install new technology nationally that he claimed would offer speeds up to 10x current levels in homes.