Ray Rice gets video-taped punching out his wife in an elevator in a casino.  Wes Welker gets videotaped at the Kentucky Derby looking like he has imbibed a bit too much.  We have couple students that, well, let’s just say those photos won’t help them get jobs.  And everyday people are You-tubed doing stupid things they wouldn’t want to get caught doing.  And hackers download photos of celebrities in various states of undress that they thought were secure.  We do not understand the Cloud and we do not understand all the wires that make the internet a useful and productive tool that houses the cloud.  The internet is a great information sharing tool, but almost anything is exchangeable.  To date the internet is open to all, but the wires are owned by corporations.  If you watched the 60 Minutes episode recently with Michael Lewis as he talked about Wall street brokers gaming the stock market by using internet cabling to accelerate their access to your data (his book is Flash Boys), you should not be surprise if corporations won’t want to restrict those tools that help them, including cables and satellites.  Jim Hightower in a recent Lowdown newsletter outlines the reasons we should be watching the mergers of the large entities like Time-Warner who own and therefore control the internet connections.  They can and will impose fees for access of certain types.  Instead of equal access, those who pay can and will receive preferential connections.  They also will get access to data.  Wall Street saw the benefit of using the wiring and cloud and data sharing to their advantage, even when it is your data, so certainly these media giants know all about it.  It makes sense form a business perspective.  It works against you, me and our local water and sewer utilities who do not have the luxury of being able to pay and pay for better access.  Keep it on your radar screens – at home and at work.  Keep in mind deregulation and merger of the airlines didn’t reduce air fares or make service necessarily better.