The Google/Motorola deal is lawyer repellent, or rat poison, if you prefer. It is a tragic and wasteful byproduct of our screwed-up patent system. Just this year, $18 billion is being spent not on innovation and invested not in entrepreneurship and growth but instead in fending off lawsuits. Damn straight, we need patent reform.

Having said that, this is good for Google (GOOG) and Android and its ecosystem. That’s why HTC, LG, and Sony (SNE) all released statements praising the deal. Google isn’t going into competition with them. Google is buying them protection to defend against Apple (AAPL), Nokia (NOK), and other patent holders and legal thugs.

The net result is that Android can now explode even more than it has already. I imagine — I hope — there were other companies in other fields — cars, appliances, TV, devices of all sorts — that were waiting for some

We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future.

Holding out blind hope for the magical appearance of new jobs and the reappearance of growth in the economy is a fool’s faith. Politicians who think that merely chanting the incantation “jobs, jobs, jobs” will bring them and the economy back are fooling us if not themselves. When at least a tenth of Americans are out of work, for Wall Street to get momentarily giddy at the creation of 117k jobs is cognitive dissonance at its best. No one can make jobs out of thin air. Jobs will not come back. A few new jobs reappearing won’t fix anything.

Our new economy is shrinking because technology leads to efficiency over growth. That is the notion I want to explore now.

Pick an industry: newspapers, say. Untold thousands of jobs have been destroyed and they

There’s no telling how the News Corp. (NWS) saga will turn out, but I’ll try. Here’s a scenario that leads to the breakup of News Corp., the Murdochs out of power, the deflation of institutional journalism, a break in the too-cozy media-government complex, an unfortunate rise in regulation of media, and a fortunate opening for newcomers. This story of legality and morality will quickly shift to one driven by business.

A week ago, I speculated that News Corp. would need to get out of the news business. Not so crazy. Since then, the FT’s John Gapper speculated similarly, as did John Cassidy at The New Yorker.

And since then, News International head Rebekah Brooks resigned and was arrested; Dow Jones head Les Hinton resigned; Murdoch gave up on BSkyB; the Murdochs agreed to testify before Parliament; and the revelations of corruption between News Corp. and police and

The question is, what’s more valuable to the Murdoch clan: power or money?

I’d follow the money every time. Oh, Dad, cares about power, for sure. He cares about his legacy, too. Given his time left on this earth, I’d say there’s no time to repair that legacy in journalistic and political terms. If he also leaves a company worth nothing to his heirs, then he has no tangible legacy. That is surely what his heirs care most about — most do: money.

So I wonder whether News Corp. (NWS) will have to get out of the news business to save the business of News Corp. For it’s not so bad to be rapacious when you’re in the entertainment business.

You might say that Rupert would have his newspapers pried from his dead hands and that might well be the case. But know well that he is not loyal to

They laughed when Arianna sat down to the keyboard. They were wrong. I was wrong, too. I hadn’t imagined that Huffington Post would become the force in media and politics that it became.

Tim Armstrong and AOL are smart to acquire Huffington Post as a media property and Arianna Huffington as the head of content.

I was just thinking yesterday that though AOL has lots of content and plans to make a lot more, I never think to go there, apart from heading to one of its brands, such as Engadget. Portals are burned toast. Making content for search is not, I believe, a growth strategy, as the more Google (GOOG) becomes personalized and successfully seeks out signals of quality and originality, the more SEO will die as a black art.

So to execute on its content-and-advertising strategy, AOL needs brands with engagement. Huffington Post is

I have not seen News Corp’s (NWS) Daily (I was invited to the preview last night but travel, exhaustion, health, weather, and thus prudence had me take the train home and I couldn’t get in today because of the ice). So I have nothing at all to say about the product. I am trying to get my head around the economics and I hope better mathematical and business minds than mine will analyze what it will take for the Daily to succeed.

Rupert Murdoch said the Daily went through $30 million in development costs that are already written off. He said operating costs will run $500,000 a week. So in the first year, the Daily will cost roughly $55 million. That’s a lot. For comparison, Portfolio went through somewhere between $40-100 million. I said we’d never see another publication launch of that scale. I was wrong. Also for comparison, News

Believe it or not, I was disappointed that Cablevision (CVC) settled with Fox (NWS), albeit grumpily, agreeing to pay retransmission fees for its signals. It’s not surprising: Baseball fans wanted their World Series; the FCC was hankering to intervene (without the power); and one really couldn’t imagine going without Fox forever … not yet. So Cablevision caved. Some say this is a sign that content remains king. I think it’s more a case of Humpty-Dumpty teetering.

Hanging tough against Fox was a first shot in the next media battle: the unraveling of TV, the separation of programs from channels. Old TV channels have become an unnecessary layer of curation. It’s the shows we want, not the networks. Networks are and always have been meaningless brands. They provided services: distribution, promotion, monetization. But as in the rest of media — as with news publishers, book publishers, radio

AT&T’s (T) service sucks. (Just listen to our most trusted newsman on the topic.) But AT&T response to this core business problem is not to improve its service or to invest in better ways to handle more customers.

No, AT&T’s response is to change its pricing to make us use its service less.

That’s cynical. It’s evil.

AT&T got rid of unlimited data (except for grandfathered accounts… else those changed accounts could all cancel without paying AT&T’s just-increased cancellation fee). They paint it as lowering the price, but in truth they lowered the value.

The sick and stupid irony of this is that it was AT&T — in the person of Tom Evslin, then head of AT&T WorldNet (remember them? AT&T killed that golden goose, too) — that turned off the ticking clock on the internet when it established flat-rate pricing of $19.95 a month for unlimited

I’ve amended my proposed Bill of Rights in Cyberspace thanks to a suggestion in the comments from Jeff Sonderman: All data are created equal. I made that all bits are created equal, which broadens it somewhat and is quite relevant today in the discussion of net neutrality that will explode because of an Appeals Court decision in Washington that told the FCC it did not have jurisdiction to tell Comcast (CMCSA) to stop discriminating on bits.

Here’s the rub: On the one hand, I do not want government regulation of the internet. On the other hand, I do not want monopoly discrimination against bits on the internet. I see it as a principle that all bits are, indeed, created equal. But how is this enforced when internet service is provided by monopolies? Regulation. But I don’t want regulation. But… That is the vicious cycle of the net

I tweeted earlier that after having slept with her (Ms. iPad), I woke up with morning-after regrets. She’s sweet and pretty but shallow and vapid.

Cute line, appropriate for retweets. But as my hangover settles in, I realize that there’s something much more basic and profound that worries me about the Apple (AAPL) iPad — and not just the iPad but the architecture upon which it is built. I see danger in moving from the web to apps.

The iPad is retrograde. It tries to turn us back into an audience again. That is why media companies and advertisers are embracing it so fervently, because they think it returns us all to their good old days when we just consumed, we didn’t create, when they controlled our media experience and business models and we came to them. The most absurd, extreme illustration is Time Magazine’s app, which is essentially

As soon as Buzz was announced — before I could try it — I tried to intuit its goals and I found profound opportunities.

Now that I’ve tried it, reality and opportunity a far piece apart. It’s awkward. I’d thought that I had wanted Twitter to be threaded, but I was wrong; the simplest point quickly passes into an overdose of add-ons. Worse, Google (GOOG) didn’t think through critical issues of privacy — and it only gets worse (via danah boyd). I won’t go as far as Steve Rubel and some others, who instantly declared Buzz DOA; there is the essence of something important here (which I think will come out in mobile more than the web). But there’s no question: Buzz has kinks.

I was going to use that line in the headline — that Buzz is a beta too soon — but

Including my parents, we currently own four Toyotas (TM) in my family; over time, we’ve probably owned eight or 10. Will we ever buy another? Depends. Depends on whether we can trust the company given its performance lately.

There’s a reason we bought our Toyotas. They are incredibly reliable. I abuse mine, skipping service calls. But — knock wood — I’ve not had any major problems. So, even though I don’t much like Toyota design and — as a professor, can no longer afford to pay for that styling with the Lexus brand — I thought I was pretty much stuck buying them forever. Why fix what’s not broken, eh?

But now we find out that our Toyotas are broken. We find out that Toyota has known this for too long and has done nothing. We call our dealer and get stonewalled about the problem with the brakes in the

In 2005, Rupert Murdoch gave a rousing speech to the American Society of Newspapers Editors calling on them to listen to digital natives. This Monday, his deputy, Les Hinton, gave a speech to the World Association of Newspapers in India warning them to beware geeks bearing gifts.

Murdoch in 2005:

Like many of you in this room, I’m a digital immigrant. I wasn’t weaned on the web, nor coddled on a computer. Instead, I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know. My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives. They’ll never know a world without ubiquitous broadband internet access.

The peculiar challenge then, is for us digital immigrants – many of whom are in positions to determine how news is assembled and

The next phase of media, I’ve been thinking, will be after the page and after the site. Media can’t expect us to go to it all the time. Media has to come to us. Media must insinuate itself into our streams.

I’ve been trying to imagine what that would be, and then I was Skype-chatting with Nick Denton (an inspirational pastime I’ve had too little of lately) and he knew exactly what it looks like: @stephenfry.

Spot on. Fry insinuated himself into my stream. He comes to us. We distribute him. He has been introduced to and acquired new fans. He now has a million followers, surely more than for any old web site of his. He did it by his wit(s) alone. His product is his ad; his readers his agency. How will he benefit? I have full faith that he of all people will find

In the discussion about news, there’s always a divide – because news loves divides. The splits have been old vs. new, mainstream media vs. blogs, professional vs. amateur, institutional v. entrepreneurial and, lately, paid vs. free.

But I fear another divide we’re beginning to see develop: walled vs. open. The legacy players – in what I believe is their last-ditch effort to save their old ways, model, and empires — are threatening to put up walls. News Corp. (NWS) is forever rumored to be putting up both pay walls and more walls to keep Google’s (GOOG) hordes of Huns (aka us useless asshats) out.

Some say, 'fine, digital suicide couldn’t happen to a better mogul.' But I say we should fear the precedent, the balkanization of the web into isolated worlds. It’s true that all the data on the web is not today available via search —