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Now that the video rental store is all but dead, many people are turning to Internet services to get TV shows and movies. By some measures, Apple is No. 1 in online video, but by others, Netflix is leading.

Apple released new statistics on the videos it provides in the iTunes Store. The company said customers were downloading 800,000 television episodes and 350,000 movies a day. In a recent study, the NPD Group, a research firm, said Apple was by and large the leader for home video downloads. For television shows, iTunes accounted for 67 percent of this market in 2012, and Microsoft’s Xbox video service was a distant second with 14 percent of the market, NPD said. For movies, iTunes had a 65 percent share of the market, with Amazon and Microsoft far behind at 10 percent each, it said. Another popular method for watching movies and TV online is paying a subscription and streaming as many as you want. In the subscriptions-based video streaming market, Netflix is dominant, with a 90 percent share, and Hulu Plus and Amazon are still hardly relevant. To put things in perspective, subscription-based streaming is the most popular method for watching online video. For all the movies watched at home in the first quarter of 2013, 19 percent of consumers watched a movie using a subscription-based service like Netflix, and 5 percent downloaded a movie rental from an on-demand service like iTunes, according to Russ Crupnick, an NPD analyst who follows the online video industry. About 74 percent of consumers watched a movie on a DVD or Blu-ray disc they bought or rented, he said.

[Commentary] Since people rely on the Internet for such a wide range of services today, it's important that their Internet connections work well. This means that people should be able to access the broadband services of their choice using the connections they pay for--and those services should be fast, reliable, and low-latency.

To some extent, this means that consumer Internet service providers (ISPs) need to do what it takes to make sure the popular services their customers demand--the reason they subscribe to broadband to begin with--work well. This is not about an ISP looking into the traffic a customer has requested (or is sending upstream) and giving it differential treatment. It's one level higher, and it's about whether an ISP will connect with other networks on the Internet in a way that's designed to enhance its customers' experiences, or in a way that is motivated by business interests that do not align with those of the customer. In some sense, to a customer, these are distinctions without a difference. All that matters to a customer is whether she can access the Internet and use the services she wants to use without having to know the details of what makes it all work. But ISPs should always remember that they are paid by their customers to provide Internet access and that they have a positive responsibility to make the experience a good one.

"Competition is a power unto itself that must be encouraged. Competitive markets produce better outcomes than regulated or uncompetitive markets." That's a platitude that could easily have been uttered in the late 1990s, when financial markets were being deregulated. Or during the 1970s, when the airlines were being deregulated. But it was uttered on June 18, by Tom Wheeler, President Obama's nominee as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

Not that the statement is entirely wrong, of course. But it's understandable that some people will be a bit concerned when it's spoken by a guy who, during the same Senate Commerce Committee hearing on his nomination, cited his experience as a lobbyist for some of the industries he'll soon be charged with regulating as a reason he'll be a great chairman. And it's understandable that people will be that much more concerned about the fact that Wheeler was a top bundler for both of Obama's presidential campaigns, raising about $700,000 in total. Wheeler's actual view on regulation seem to be a lot more nuanced than his statement would suggest. At another point in his testimony, he characterized his view of regulation as "protecting competition with appropriate oversight to see that it flourishes."

David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, beat back against allegations that the search company is "in cahoots with the NSA" and has allowed the spy agency to tap into its servers for user data.

"I’m not sure I can say this more clearly: we’re not in cahoots with the NSA and there’s is no government program that Google participates in that allows the kind of access that the media originally reported," Drummond said in response to a question asked during a live Web chat hosted by U.K. newspaper The Guardian. "There is no free-for-all, no direct access, no indirect access, no back door, no drop box," he added.