This week, Comcast, the largest provider of cable and internet in the country, started charging for broadband using a tiered data plan - much like wireless carriers currently do. This move is not likely to affect many people right now, but as The New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter tells Brooke, Comcast might be preparing its subscribers for the future of internet pricing.

Most of us think nothing of putting our lives in the cloud; photos in Flickr, videos on YouTube, most everything on Facebook.  But what about when those services abruptly go away, taking all of our collective contributions with them?  Well Jason Scott operates on the assumption that everything online will one day disappear.  He explains to Bob why he and the Archive Team are dedicated to saving user-generated content for posterity.

This week, two class action lawsuits were filed by privacy advocates against Google, because under their new privacy policy, the company can pool user data collected from all of its web services into one place. Software researcher Tom Henderson reacted in a different way: he decided to stop using all of Google's services. Bob speaks with Tom about how he “divorced Google.”

Daniel Rossen - Up On High

One of the greatest assets of the internet is that it leads to great content discoveries that readers might not otherwise be able to find. One of the biggest liabilities is that content is frequently repackaged without crediting its creators or where it was found. Brooke talks to Maria Popova, editor of the website Brain Pickings and one of the creators of the Curator's Code, which seeks to honor the way people discover content online.

The Iranian government is set to launch a "Halal Internet" this spring as an alternative to the greater World Wide Web. Bob speaks to Fast Company reporter Neal Ungerleider about the most ambitious attempt by a government to censor the internet since China's "Great Firewall."

Quantic and His Combo Barbaro - Cancao Do Deserto

As knowledge moves onto the internet, the nature and shape of knowledge is changing to reflect the new medium.  Brooke speaks to David Weinberger, author of Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room.  He says knowledge used to be limited by capacity and filters, but not anymore.

Zammuto - Wasn't That Lucky

Brooke asks Harvard Law professor and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society Jonathan Zittrain if access to the internet should be considered a human right.  He says that according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everyone has the right to receive and impart information through any media, and today's media of choice is the internet.

In the quest to find out whether or not the internet is a human right, Brooke speaks to Vinton Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet. He says that the internet is a useful tool for improving the human condition, but because it is just a tool, it doesn't rise to the level of a human right.

The Terms of Service on sites like Facebook and Gmail prohibit anyone under the age of 13 from signing up to be in compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which regulates how companies can collect data about users under 13. But a new study finds that a lot of parents are actually helping their kids cheat the system so they can access those sites.  Bob speaks with danah boyd, one of the authors of the study "Why Parents help their children lie to Facebook about age."

Jon Ronson is one of our favorite journalists -- he wrote a very good book about extremists called Them, one of his books was turned into the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats, and he's done some great radio stories for This American Life. He's working on an online documentary called Escape and Control, about people who try to control this internet. 

The motivations of hackers are often obscure. The motivations of the handlers at the Internet Storm Center—the people who stand ready to battle the latest internet malady—are a little easier to understand.  Bob spoke with Alan Paller, the Director of Research at Sans Institute, home to the Internet Storm Center.  Paller says they do it to feel like they're making a difference, for personal pride...and a for leather jacket.

This week has been hack week here at On The Media. We've written about the Paleolithic history of hacking: the jargon file and phone phreaking – but to round out the week, it’s time for some up-to-the-minute hacking news.

It's with no small amount of trepidation that I betray one of my most shameful internet browsing secrets: I find the talk pages and the history of Wikipedia articles far more interesting than the articles themselves. I can spend hours reading about a Wikipedia entry while completely ignoring the actual content of said entry.

Despite their bad reputation, it’s hard to imagine an internet without cookies. The small, suspicious looking files sitting in the bowels of your browser are what allow you to have a shopping cart when visiting Amazon, save your passwords on frequently visited websites and receive the kind of targeted advertising that helps underwrite much of the internet’s free content. Handled responsibly, cookies can be useful tools that respect your anonymity while offering you great services. And if you really don’t like them, well, that’s what your browser’s privacy settings are for.

On Tuesday a federal appeals court reached an interesting and important decision about free speech online. Split 2-1, the 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a racist and violent online screed threatening then-candidate Barack Obama in 2008 was ‘repugnant’ but not criminal. 

This May, we weighed the merits of Apple's curated app store against the Android's big tent model, and what each meant for the future of free speech, but David-Michel Davies, Executive Director of the Webby Awards, suspects that this dichotomy might be a moot point.  Instead, he offers a third option that has been hiding in plain sight.

Since its introduction last week as an invite only service, Google's new social networking service Google+ has added over 10 million users, and has been the subject of endless speculation by the press, techies, and social networkers alike. But just what is it? How does it work? What makes it any different from Facebook or Twitter? Former On the Media producer and unabashed Google fanboy Mark Phillips gives us the lowdown on Google's latest offering.

Last Tuesday a British student logged onto a message board and announced that he was going to burn down his school. Fifty minutes later he was arrested with a gas can and a knife after another member of the message board, on the other side of the world, ...

The basic architecture of the Internet hasn't changed since it was conceived 40 years ago. But what was once the playground of wonks is now the main staging area for the global economy and open to an array of security vulnerabilities. Brooke talks with Internet experts who ponder a vexing ...