If you haven't guessed already, we believe that change is about to start accelerating radically in the telecom/computer/internet/entertainment convergence. Where policy issues may be the most important is in telecommunications. Webreview has a overview of those policy issues.

On the theme of the AOL-Time Warner merger, Salon’s Scott Rosenberg has an editorial on the threat that he feels the merger poses to the current open free nature of the internet. The merger has also been a wonderful source of merger. Segfault has a great piece that merger and mergers in general. They thought somebody else ought to be part of a merger bigger than most country’s GDPs.

Is a Big Bad Bully running for President beating you up just because you parody him? Get some press coverage and wait for a white knight think tank to send you a lawyer. Holy Big Money Batman!

And in another measure of how quick corporate mistakes float to the surface with the internet, it took less than a week from Apple’s iTools announcement to the discovery that the iTools plug-in sends passwords unencrypted. So, a reasonably knowledgable person can figure out how to snag bunches of passwords as the fly around the ether. I think I'll wait to sign up. More coverage: Macintouch

According to an email sent to Browserwatch, the next version of Netscape Navigator is now stable enough that it's now the primary browser for the most of the development team. They may have a beta release in February.