The intersection of policy and technology is getting to be a crowded place. Lawmakers and regulators are weighing in with increasing frequency on issues like patent reform, spectrum allocation, Net neutrality and behavioral targeting and consumer privacy.

Just today, a group of industry and advocacy groups announced a united coalition that plans to agitate for a national broadband policy that would work to create affordable, high-speed Internet access for the entire country.

Details are sketchy.

One thing that's clear -- the more steam any such effort gathers, the more vigorous the opposition from Internet service providers will be.

Here at the Personal Democracy Forum conference, there were no ISPs to be found. It was a meeting of the like-minded, a crowd with no love for the cable and telecoms.

So just what role should the government play in the evolution of the Internet? A common answer is to create a cabinet-level position overseeing technology. A technology czar -- sort of like the chief technology officers employed by nearly all of the Fortune 500 companies.

Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist and a co-creator of the TCP/IP protocols that make the Internet run, took issue with that idea, calling it a "top-down solution."

"Top-down is not really the DNA of the Internet. It's bottom-up," Cerf said.

Alec Ross, an adviser to Barack Obama and co-founder of the nonprofit One Economy, clarified that a government office would not simply be a "box that you would check off."

"A CTO isn't an end unto itself," he said.

After declaring that he would abolish the FCC, Cerf spoke vaguely of a reordering of incentives to bring cable and telecoms on board with some of the tech industry's priorities, like Net neutrality and how to deploy broadband access to rural America.

"I would not mandate a particular technology. I think that would be counter-productive," Cerf said. Fiber works great in apartment buildings, but some radio-based access might be the answer for the currently underserved rural areas, Cerf said.

"It seems to me that what we need is something that will provide the right incentives to the resulting networking is something that multiple parties can produce."

As to exactly what form that will take, Cerf wasn't entirely sure.

And given everything else that's going to dominate the election debate (Iraq, the economy, healthcare, globalization), Ross pragmatically (and a little glumly) reminded us that technology will be pushed to the back burner this fall as one of those "things that are important but not urgent."

Politicians may not be willing to say it, but analysts will. A handful of those at JP Morgan offered their picks for the media and tech stocks best positioned to weather the recession that they all seem to feel is upon us.

They had little good to say about the print industry (imagine that!), recommending against magazines and newspapers as categories. Of the newspapers, E.W. Scripps has the brightest prospects, they said. Why? Because of the major newspaper companies, its business lines are the least tied to the musty print product.

Looking at tech stocks, Imran Khan singled out Google and Priceline as two that he feels are undervalued, and bucked the trend among the Street in recommending against Amazon.

"The whole Yahoo-Microsoft thing will just help Google gain market share, whatever the outcome," Khan said.

By Khan's analysis, each percentage point that Google gains in the search market translates to an additional $200 million in annual revenue.

Khan said that the lawyers he had talked with suggested that the concerns about the Department of Justice fouling up the ad deal with Yahoo were not too serious.

Conventional wisdom argues against investing in travel stocks when economic times are tough, but Khan said that Priceline was better poised than Expedia and the others to make a go of it, and even flourish in the coming months. Khan expects Priceline to enjoy exuberant growth in the European market, likening the company's position there to the how the online travel industry in general was situated in the United States in 2001. Just as online travel as a category took off at a time of economic turndown, Khan looks for a similar phenomenon in continental Europe, with Priceline as the principal beneficiary.

On Amazon, which has generally enjoyed analysts' favor for its continued innovation and sustained financial health, Khan took the road less traveled. In three of the four quarters last year, Amazon's gross profit margin was down on a year-to-year basis. Facing increasing pricing competition from Barnes and Noble, Amazon could get squeezed on its book, music and video lines, which remain its most profitable business.

"Nobody seems to think that the recession is going to affect Amazon," Khan said, but insisted that it is "one Internet stock to avoid."

Facebook and MySpace? A wildly popular waste of time, right?

Well, researchers at the University of Minnesota claim they have uncovered some real educational value buried underneath all that angst-blogging and sheep throwing.

In a six-month study of students aged 16 to 18 from mostly low-income families in the Midwest, the researchers found that social networks are actually teaching practical skills that will serve students well as they enter the job market.

They found that students come away from their virtual lives with a set of general tech skills, an understanding of layout and design principles and better communications skills.

"What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today," said Christine Greenhow, the lead researcher for the study.

Moreover, the researchers held up their results as an argument against the notion that low-income folks are on the wrong side of a digital divide. Canvassing students at urban high schools throughout the region, they reported that 82 percent have Internet access at home, and 77 percent maintained a profile on at least one social networking site. Ninety-four percent of the survey respondents said they use the Internet.

So Greenhow makes the case that teachers need to accept that these technologies are a part of kids' (of all income levels) lives and work them into the curriculum.

"By understanding how students may be positively using these networking technologies in their daily lives and where the as yet unrecognized educational opportunities are, we can help make schools even more relevant, connected and meaningful to kids," she said.

Indeed. Some schools are trying it. Others have banned the sites and threatened to expel students for using Facebook study groups to swap homework assignments. Social networks as they stand today are very much a mixed bag, and despite the increasingly trend toward professionalization, I dare say it will be quite some time before they start showing up on the public school curricula.

Apple has hit a pretty big milestone, announcing today that it's now sold more than 5 billion songs through its iTunes store.

Research from NPD Group has already crowned iTunes the No. 1 U.S. music retailer, eclipsing WalMart in the early months of the year.

Apple also said that iTunes is renting or selling movies on the order of 50,000 a day, declaring itself the world's most popular online video store.

So Apple's got music, it's got movies and it's got the support of the major movie studios (New Line, Universal, Warner Bros., Sony, MGM, Lionsgate).

So what's missing? How about the music labels? For all the talk you hear about how the music industry has learned from its chronic missteps from the early days of Napster, their persistent refusal to deal with Apple makes you wonder how much they've really wised up. (...that and how they're still suing their customers.)

To date, EMI is the only of the big four records labels to license its collection to Apple stripped of digital rights management protection. Sony, Universal and Warner have been unwilling to do so. Instead, they have cast their lot in with Amazon, hoping to break Apple's stranglehold on the market.

To no avail. Five billion and counting.

For all of us who've found ourselves consumed by the endless machinations of Deal Days at Yahoo, the shrill rhetoric and high dudgeon of spurned suitors have commonplace.

First it was Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: "It is unfortunate that by choosing not to enter into substantive negotiations with us, you have failed to give due consideration to a transaction that has tremendous benefits for Yahoo's shareholders and employees." -- Sat., April 5, handing Yahoo's board a three-week ultimatum to come to the negotiating table in good faith before took his case directly to the shareholders in the form of a proxy battle.

That didn't happen. Instead, Yahoo ran an ad trial with Google, a move that soured Microsoft on the acquisition. But Ballmer, blowhard that he can be, was at least (publicly) civil.

Of course, Microsoft's proxy posturing didn't come off. It withdrew its bid and speculation turned to what Yahoo might then do to restore investors' shaken faith in the Internet stalwart. Enter Carl Icahn, picking up the proxy mantle with gusto.

Taking Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock to task for his compensation, Icahn wrote in, "I believe most of your shareholders would be interested in seeing your time sheets -- especially in light of the fact that, in my estimation, most of your so-called 'plans' over the last few years have been failures."

Then, sharply: "Why did you permit Google to leave you in the dust?"

Well, those shots came from the folks who have been playing a pretty high stakes game of poker over the thing. Of course, the glut of coverage since Deal Days began Feb. 1 has produced no shortage of opinions from journalists, bloggers and pundits who have taken it upon themselves to give Yahoo unsolicited counsel on how to respond to the unsolicited proposal.

Most of this is par for the course, read and forgotten with equal haste. But my god, what columnist Joe Nocera wrote in Saturday's New York Times! Written as a memo to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, "Oh Jerry, It's Not Your Baby Anymore" offers a withering criticism of an executive who Nocera argues is so blinded by sentimental attachments to the company he co-founded that he has ignored the best interests of the shareholders throughout this process. The last three paragraphs:

"Jerry, you're a billionaire because people all over the world bought your stock, and trusted you to do right by them. That's the compact you make when you take a company public: you get to be really rich, but in return, you have an obligation to do everything you can to ensure that shareholders get a healthy return on their investment. It doesn't matter that you would like Yahoo to remain independent, or that you can't stand Microsoft. Your feelings aren't supposed to get in the way of your fiduciary duty.

"A takeover by Microsoft was your last, best hope of rewarding your long-suffering shareholders. Now that opportunity is gone. It says here Mr. Icahn is not going to go as gently into the night as Mr. Ballmer did -- and if I were a betting man, I would be taking odds that your days as Yahoo's CEO are numbered.

"It'll be better for everyone to have someone in that role who understands who he's supposed to be working for. Wouldn't you agree?"

No he would not agree, but many others will. The thoughts expressed in the Times will no doubt resonate with many of Yahoo's shareholders who might still be on the fence about which way to go come proxy time (Aug. 1). Icahn has already made it clear that were his board to take over, the first order of business would be to find a capable CEO and bump Yang back to his role as "chief Yahoo." Assuming Nocera isn't just talking from a vacuum, Icahn might not need control of the company for that to come to pass.

Talk of an economic slowdown is everywhere these days. Terrible. The effect of a sustained market contraction is predictable in many areas of the economy -- the price of gas goes up, people take fewer, shorter trips. Rising food costs leave less money available for luxury goods -- Faberge eggs and the like.

Well, in one corner of the economy that's become pretty important to anyone who hangs out on the Internet, the impact is less clear. Will a slowdown, contraction (anything but a recession!) hit the online advertising economy, that sublime necessary evil that makes all that content on the consumer Web free?

It's a great speculative debate, and today research firm IDC offered us some numbers suggesting that no, Internet advertising is doing just fine. IDC's figure: total online ad spend in Q1 2008 increased to $7.1 billion, up 24 percent from the first quarter of 2007.

IDC analyst Karsten Weide sides with the bulls when he argues that a collective belt-tightening means that advertisers are going to ditch the expensive traditional media in favor of the cheaper and hopefully more engaging online channels.

"What happens is that the current economic crisis puts pressure on advertisers to save money and find more effective marketing channels," Weide said. "Effectively, the crisis accelerates the shift of advertising budgets from traditional into new media."

That may ultimately be the case, but the print-to-digital shift won't be an overnight process. It seems likely that the immediate macro effect might be a decline in overall spending, which would then be followed by the shift that Weide described as advertisers assess and regroup.

But for the sake of sustaining all the content and services that are making our Web the hub of "free" content that is becoming, I like IDC's numbers.

Even with overall ad spending (all media) in danger of declining by as much as 7 percent this year, IDC looks for quarterly increases in online spending of 15 percent to 20 percent.

NEW YORK -- The elitism ran thick in Time Warner headquarters this morning. Executives from Warner Bros., People.com, TMZ.com, Entertainment Weekly and Epic Records gathered to kick around the great questions that the democratic Web is posing to autocratic media.

It's a coarse abbreviation to say that their response was simply that the top-down model is still very much in effect, but I'm going to stick with it for our purposes here (for a fuller account of their discussion click here).

The most colorful moment of the panel came when a self-identified "IT guru" asked the panelists how they planned to adapt their new models of marketing to the older generation.

"I deal with a lot of people who are interested in the technology but find it inaccessible. The biggest problem is it's very complicated. And there's a generational gap," he said. An unspecified older generation "doesn't get Twitter," and while they might be able to wrap their understanding paw around a cable remote, DVRs and streaming video are a "mystery wrapped in an enigma." So how do you reach these aging consumers?

The panelists didn't get a chance to answer.

"We're going to die soon, they don't care," an audience member called out. Peels of laughter shot around the theater. "The people they want to sell stuff to are not me. You're talking about lounge acts. This is the main show."

Oh. Is that so?

"I don't know if anyone on stage can top that." -- Scott Donaton -- panel moderator and Publisher, Entertainment Weekly

"I'm glad you said it and not me." -- Gillian Sheldon, Supervising Producer, TMZ

"Oh my god, I love it." -- Charlie Walk, President, Epic Records

"We'll leave that as the answer." -- Donaton

A serious question that got a flippant answer. And that answer was from an audience member; no panelist wanted to touch the issue. Perhaps amid the boisterous mood of the room, no clear-minded address of that important issue -- whether an older generation will ever relate to new media, or if the media industry will simply chalk them up as a collateral loss in the digital arena -- could be found. Maybe outside that room, the panelists would have something more to say on the subject. Maybe, and I hope so.

You've always got to be a little skeptical about self-promoting research. We see a lot of it, and the latest comes from Massive, a Microsoft subsidiary whose specialty is placing branded ads within video games.

Massive teamed with the research firm Interpret to test the effectiveness of the medium and, turns out, they work! The survey evaluated four advertisers who use Massive's network -- Adidas, and three others named only as a quick-service restaurant, a candy-bar and a movie studio.

In response to the survey, healthy percentages of gamers said not only that they remembered the companies' tag lines, but that the ads actually enhanced the reality of the experience and made it more interactive. More astounding: A full 72 percent of the focus group agreed with the statement that the candy bar is "a great snack to eat while playing video games." Indeed.

For advertisers looking to build a brand and reach a youthful male demographic, in-game placements seem like a logical ingredient of the marketing mix. Product placement in movies and television extends naturally enough to video games, but I can't help but wonder if the claims staked around this "rapidly maturing medium" might score some credibility points with a heavier shade of modesty.