Fortune

Congressional lawmakers promised to hold hearings for AT&T's proposed $48.6 billion acquisition of DirecTV, mere months after Comcast's $45 billion proposal to acquire Time Warner Cable.

Analysts monitoring the proceedings say the quick succession of mega-deals in the telecommunications industry could pave the way for other deals between telecom companies and cable and satellite providers, forcing regulators to quickly set a course that will sustain them through a period of predicted consolidation.

"We have seen waves of mergers transform industries, time and time again," said Jeff Kagan, a longtime independent analyst covering the wireless and telecom industries. "They seem to come in waves. There are quite a number of mergers, then nothing for several years. Then it starts again. Comcast with Time Warner Cable and AT&T with DirecTV look like they are trying to start this next wave of mergers."

The two recent mega-deals have certainly caught the eye of the nation's lawmakers.

Invasive, pervasive, sometimes abrasive -- welcome to a world where businesses believe there to be value in "big data."

Though the field is nascent -- many businesses don't yet understand what data they have available to them, and even if they do, they may lack the resources to run sophisticated analytics on them -- it gained high-profile attention when the Obama Administration released its Big Data and Privacy Working Group Review.

"The big data revolution presents incredible opportunities in virtually every sector of the economy and every corner of society," wrote John Podesta, counselor to the president, in his introduction to the report. "But big data raises serious questions, too, about how we protect our privacy and other values in a world where data collection is increasingly ubiquitous and where analysis is conducted at speeds approaching real time."

Is the administration in line with the business community? Fortune asked a few experts to compare notes with the White House.

• Be discriminating. Many companies will need to get a better understanding of their data and how it's collected, added Mark Schreiber, a litigation partner with Edwards Wildman Palmer as well as chair of the firm's Privacy and Data Protection Steering Committee and chair for Privacy Matters at the World Law Group.
• Be transparent. Be open and honest with consumers about the data you collect and what you do with it, including how it's being kept secure, the White House cautions.
• Abide by the law(s). There are already numerous legal precedents regarding the use of personal data, Simkoff noted, so "don't be exploring conclusions or trying to do big data analysis queries in areas where there is legal precedent saying you shouldn't."
• Put privacy front and center. Privacy choices, preferences and features should be recognized and embedded early in product development through what Schreiber calls "privacy by design," a notion that "will become increasingly important and standardized," he said.
• Watch for opportunities. "Privacy along with big data will become a business in itself, with an increasing number of privacy and data protection jobs in corporations, government, healthcare, and education," Schreiber said. "Privacy training in companies -- which is rarely done other than where required, such as in industries like healthcare or financial services -- will become routine and commonplace."

[Commentary] Outside of completely unplugging from the grid, there really is no way to avoid being a beacon of personal data for services that feed off of the minute details of your life.

As an unintended side effect, unplugging may even make ourselves more conspicuous. After all, many of the top names on the National Security Agency's suspect list are culled from the ranks of people who are habitually overcautious about leaving any trace. The year is 2014, and dissolving your digital footprint is no longer a practical option.

An informed public needs to ensure that personal data is handled responsibly by demanding that companies have the following protocols in place: 1) clear information on the way personal data is used (i.e. not buried in the Terms of Agreement), 2) a cohesive plan if a privacy infraction occurs, and 3) engineers that are up to speed on the latest security standards.

If a company fails to acquiesce to these demands, then users must take a step back and balance their privacy concerns with the novelty and utility the service provides. By fighting for transparency and remaining vigilant, we can reap the benefits of the personal data economy -- without ever having to take a step off the grid.

[Tuttle is CEO of Expect Labs]

[Commentary] The Federal Commication Commisison’s scheduled vote on network neutrality rules will be a test of just how far the tech industry has come in the intervening years.

The FCC voted to move ahead with Chairman Tom Wheeler's plan for crafting new "net neutrality" rules. Chairman Wheeler's plan, governing how Internet providers can charge content creators for speedy delivery of their data, has been the subject of intense debate between the telecom and tech industries and, increasingly, consumer advocates and grassroots activists.

For now, one of the biggest wild cards remains just how far tech heavies are willing to go in their battle with the telecom giants. As far as Beltway influence goes, Google, for example, was a virtual nonentity back in 2006. It spent less on lobbying that year than Boston University. Its fledgling political action committee doled out a measly $37,000.

Google is, by any measure, a behemoth in Washington these days. Its political action committee (PAC) doled out more than $1 million during the 2012 election year (less than half of what AT&T gave, but still) -- and actually narrowly edged the phone giant in lobbying expenses in 2013. That growth has tracked with Google's rise globally as a corporate colossus, with all the attendant complications.

[Commentary] The Federal Commication Commisison’s scheduled vote on network neutrality rules will be a test of just how far the tech industry has come in the intervening years.

The FCC voted to move ahead with Chairman Tom Wheeler's plan for crafting new "net neutrality" rules. Chairman Wheeler's plan, governing how Internet providers can charge content creators for speedy delivery of their data, has been the subject of intense debate between the telecom and tech industries and, increasingly, consumer advocates and grassroots activists.

For now, one of the biggest wild cards remains just how far tech heavies are willing to go in their battle with the telecom giants. As far as Beltway influence goes, Google, for example, was a virtual nonentity back in 2006. It spent less on lobbying that year than Boston University. Its fledgling political action committee doled out a measly $37,000.

Google is, by any measure, a behemoth in Washington these days. Its political action committee (PAC) doled out more than $1 million during the 2012 election year (less than half of what AT&T gave, but still) -- and actually narrowly edged the phone giant in lobbying expenses in 2013. That growth has tracked with Google's rise globally as a corporate colossus, with all the attendant complications.

Q&A with Amazon Studios director Roy Price about how to make good TV and why it makes sense for Amazon.

The COO spoke about Amazon’s business model for original programming.

“Our business model is fairly straightforward because we have a subscription service so the goal of our program is simply to attract people to Amazon Prime,” he said. He said Amazon has put out 24 pilots so far, which is more than a typical broadcast network will do per year for prime time. “We're busy because we don't have a slate, a lineup. Maybe in a few years we can pull it back a little bit,” he said.

Price said this makes sense for Amazon. “What you really want in the on-demand environment, which is different than the broadcast environment, is that you need to find people who really like the show enough to seek it out. You need to really want to watch the show in modern TV, Price explained. "It's not about changing the channel anywhere, or just seeing what's on. It's not good enough to be good-ish,” he said.

[Commentary] Some will rely on comparative valuation analysis to argue that private and public prices for companies are overvalued. That's fine though imprecise, and almost no help in terms of timing. Others will point to scarcity of real estate, salaries paid for engineers, or the inability to nail down a reservation at a hot San Francisco restaurant. All are good tells of a tech bubble.

Mine, however, revolve around my personal experiences of having lived through the last one. The oversupply of journalism jobs covering the technology industry, for example, is a good indicator.

Silicon Valley is the hottest story going these days, and not just because The New Yorker, New York magazine, and the New York Times Magazine have discovered it. New digital publications devoted exclusively to covering technology have sprung up, including PandoDaily, The Information, Re/code, and (in its early years) Mashable. That, in turn, has provoked a frenzy of tech-coverage hiring at the likes of the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News.

All of these reporters are now competing for what a wise editor at one of these publications calls "micro scoops," stories that are fresh, exclusive, newsy -- and most likely irrelevant to all but a group of people you could count on your hands and feet.

The caveat is that I have no idea when this game of musical chairs will end and who will be left standing. I just know that it will end. This time around, I plan to keep my eyes open for the interesting companies and entrepreneurs that are sure to survive this strange period. Because the tech bubble is upon us -- and I fully expect it to burst.

While synonymous with the search business, perhaps Google's most significant legacy will be its organizational obsession with data-driven decision making. Google's intellectual and strategic impact has encouraged the measurement of -- well -- everything.

Consider how Nielsen, among the world's oldest media companies, has changed. Long known as the official ratings firm, companies and careers have lived or died based on Nielsen's ratings.

First, Nielsen created deep data partnerships with Facebook, Twitter and Experian to make their panel reporting considerably more accurate. Second, Nielsen is nearing the conclusion of a 4-year odyssey to set measurement standards for video -- a kind of Gross Rating Point (GRP) across all media and devices that measures the size and engagement of the viewing audience. Now Google, Netflix, Apple and others have a stake in how video GRP will be calculated. Nielsen has reinvented the GRP, a standard that has been the source of much of the television market's hegemony in media.

In partnering with an array of digital data providers, Nielsen looks, feels, and acts more and more like an Internet company that measures with substantially increased precision.

In this exponentially fractured media landscape, television audiences will likely get smaller (they have been for decades). Marketers will struggle to justify their upfront advertising purchases because content will be consumed at time-shifted moments using panoply of devices and distribution services.

Streaming television services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu have long held appeal to so-called cord-cutters who seek to enjoy TV content without having to subscribe to conventional cable TV.

Who needs 1,000 channels, they ask, with a monthly bill to match?

The challenge: Many cable companies also serve as Internet service providers, making it difficult to truly cut the cord. Netflix announced that it had struck a deal with the seventh-largest cable operator in the US, Suddenlink, to put its streaming service on cable boxes for the cable operator's 1.2 million customers.

In late April, three smaller cable companies -- RCN, Grande Communications, and Atlantic Broadband -- announced that they too would carry Netflix on cable boxes provided to some 500,000 customers through an agreement with TiVo. Netflix and its peers, commonly referred to as over-the-top (OTT) content, were supposed to disrupt the traditional cable business. Have they become part of the problem?

"Netflix has been commonly positioned as competitive to cable TV," said David Isenberg, chief marketing and strategy officer for Atlantic Broadband. "But the two services are really very complementary."

Amazons want to be an entertainment giant.

During Amazon's first quarter alone, the company released its long-rumored Fire TV, a $99 TV streaming and casual gaming device, unveiled its first video game courtesy of Amazon Game Studios, and inked a major deal with HBO that gives its Prime Instant Video service rights to older HBO shows such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and The Wire.

"We get our energy from inventing on behalf of customers, and 2014 is off to a kinetic start," CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement.

A portion of the new catalog likely stems from the recent HBO deal. Amazon has also invested heavily in original content creation via its Hollywood arm. In the short-term, it's easy to think of Prime Video as a Netflix competitor, the former gaining ground on the latter company with new distribution deals and original content.

But Prime Video is just one piece in a bigger plan. Amazon wants to create an entertainment experience that's so compelling it can't be ignored. It wants to offer original and exclusive content streamed via Amazon services and served up on slickly-designed Amazon hardware, so competitively priced that few competitors can keep up.