It's Friday, so we're stepping away from the controls for a bit. Enjoy yourselves in the comment section below.

• Free Mobile's impact--we should have seen it coming [fiercewireless.com]
• Uh Oh! Not a good sign: Broadband speed demon Korea starts throttling 'data hungry' smart TV's [whathifi.com]
• Apple, Samsung own 95% of all mobile phone profits [cnet.com]
• LightSquared Customers Plead with FCC [wirelessweek.com]
• Amazon: No plans to launch a standalone video service soon [gigaom.com]
• Surprise! BitTorrent Piracy Doesn’t Affect US Box Office Returns, Study Finds [torrentfreak.com]
• Amazon readying 9-inch Kindle Fire for 2012? [cnet.com]
• iOS has surpassed Mac OS X in total Web market share for the first time [cnet.com]
• Carrier Support Showdown: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Tested [laptopmag.com]
• Ford making Bluetooth, app integration standard on Fusion, Flex [cnet.com]

Late last year Iranian leaders made it a criminal offense to bypass the country's Internet filters using VPNs or any other technology. The announcement by Iranian Telecommunications Minister Reza Taghipour insisted the move was made to combat a "soft war” being waged by Western countries against Iran (read: we want to spy on our own citizens and stifle information exchange among liberal thinkers).

Torrent Freak directs our attention to the development of a new BitTorrent client whose developers claim is impossible to shut down without pulling the plug on the entire Internet. Dubbed Tribler, the client uses pure peer to peer communications and doesn't require a central website to find or download content.

Back in June of 2010, Nielsen proclaimed that the idea of TV cord cutting in favor of Internet video alternatives was "purely fiction." A year and a half later and the company's latest report (reg. required) almost goes out of its way not to acknowledge cord cutting exists, despite finding that homes with broadband but without paid TV are on the rise.

Late last year Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström announced he'd be launching a new wireless carrier in 2012 that provides free wireless service. Zennstrom and company are being a little murky about the specific financials behind the service, which is supposed to piggyback on the so-far-nonexistent LightSquared network.

While carriers here in the States seem to do everything possible to demonize heavy bandwidth users as the worst sort of gluttons (despite benefiting from billing them out at $10 per gigabyte), one Russian wireless provider is doing everything possible to encourage users to use more data. Russian carrier MegaFon has been running a promotion encouraging 21 Mbps 3G users to consume as much data as humanly possible in order to win a 150,000 ruble (around $5,000) vacation. The winner of the contest managed to consume 419GB of 3G data in one week, and MegaFon got some delicious PR showing that their network works well, their definition of unlimited actually is unlimited -- and that they actually like it when people consume their product.

As we've discussed for months, the ACTA took all of this country's worst copyright ideas --many of them enshrined in the controversial DMCA -- made them considerably worse, then foisted them upon much of the globe with little to no real public discussion. With SOPA generating unprecedented public disgust, it helped draw a lot of attention to ACTA -- and now support in numerous countries appears to be falling apart. Poland, Czech Republic and Latvia have all withdrawn their support for the agreement, and now Germany has postponed their vote. Granted the the European Union and 22 of its 27 member states already signed the agreement in January, but it's clear that the growing public protests (which are expected to grow significantly louder Saturday) across numerous countries have started to make politicians nervous.

In 2009 ViaSat acquired residential satellite broadband service WildBlue for $568 million, and now it appears they're phasing out the WildBlue brand and service entirely. The company has confirmed to Light Reading they're phasing out the WildBlue name to focus on selling the company's new Exede service, which will be sold directly to consumers as well as via Dish, DirecTV, and a number of other rural satellite operators.

• Technology vs. people - how wireless evolves [fiercewireless.com]
• ViaSat phasing out Wildblue in favor of much faster Exede service [lightreading.com]
• Texas Jury Strikes Down Patent Troll’s Claim to Own the Interactive Web [wired.com]
• Market for in-flight Wi-Fi primed for takeoff [fiercebroadbandwireless.com]
• In world of copyright craziness, BitTorrent, Inc. soars to new heights [arstechnica.com]
• LTE Deployment Starting to Make an Impact [cellphonedigest.net]
• Who Gets Fined For This Violation? Major Label-Owned Vevo Caught Publicly Streaming NFL Game Off Of 'Rogue Site' [techdirt.com]
• Incumbent telcos step up to the EOC plate [fiercetelecom.com]
• How the iPhone is raising your phone bill [yahoo.com]
• 7 inch iPad coming later this year? [slashgear.com]

• FreedomPop Explains How It Will Offer Free National Broadband Starting This Summer [forbes.com]
• Nielsen: Cord Cutting, Internet TV Viewing on the rise [foxbusiness.com]
• Can WiMax 2 revitalize the WiMax industry? [fiercebroadbandwireless.com]
• RIAA: “Misinformation May Be a Dirty Trick, But It Works.” [torrentfreak.com]
• Filesharing in the post-Megaupload era [Deepfield.net]
• The Senate’s SOPA Counterattack?: Cybersecurity the Undoing of Privacy [Cato @ Liberty]
• Telus turning on LTE across Canada on Friday [gigaom.com]
• Government to detail piracy website blocking code for UK ISP's [ispreview.co.uk]
• The FCC map of places your mobile data plan won’t work [gigaom.com]
• Google building "home entertainment system" for wireless music streaming [arstechnica.com]
• Motorola exec blames slow Android updates on hardware [cnet.com]
• Apple will unveil the iPad 3 in early March [allthingsd.com]
• Apple now worth more than Google and Microsoft combined [appleinsider.com]
• End of an era: Kodak discontinues camera business [cnet.com]
• Second Google Wallet security vulnerability confirmed, affects all users [theverge.com]

Since 1993 the FCC has had the authority to place restrictions on auctions or conditions on spectrum (like requiring auction winners offer wholesale access) -- depending on the bidders' market dominance and/or current spectrum holdings. As their spectrum and market positions attest, neither AT&T and Verizon have been harmed by the requirements.

In 2010 Comcast decided that a good way to take aim at services like AT&T's U-Verse and Verizon's FiOS would be to change the name of all of their services to "Xfinity." Though the Xfinity rebranding did coincide with some substantive improvements to services (including the expansion of a 100 Mbps tier), most people generally found the move a little silly, noting the name sounded like a new porn channel. Following on the heels of Comcast in the States and Telus (their Optik brand which falsely suggests last mile fiber) in Canada, Shaw's launching new ads for their "Exo" branding, which this video attempts to explain. The idea of course is to sex up existing services with a brand refresh, but judging from the initial response in our Shaw forum, users aren't all that impressed.

In May of last year AT&T confirmed that at the end of 2011 they'd effectively be stopping their deployment of U-Verse upgrades, with 30 million homes passed (not necessarily served), leaving about 40-45% of their footprint on older, slower technologies. On their recent earnings call AT&T again confirmed that the U-Verse build is "largely complete," and the focus now is on ramping up adoption in deployed areas.

According to a paywalled story in the Wall Street Journal, Google is getting close to finally offering their Google Drive storage locker service. The report cites sources close to the matter who claim the service will launch in "weeks or months." Like most storage options there will be a free version, with additional storage pricing not yet specified. Google Drive is a project that we've reported as rumor for more than half a decade, though rumblings of the service grew a little louder last September with a report at Techcrunch, which noted that Google Drive will essentially be Google Docs rebranded to include multimedia storage capabilities.

Earlier this week we noted how AT&T's waging a quiet war on those "unlimited" data users it had agreed to grandfather when it eliminated unlimited data back in 2010. One, those that legally jailbreak and use unofficial tethering options are automatically being moved to metered service as punishment for refusing to pay AT&T a fee for doing nothing.

RIAA boss Cary Sherman penned an editorial in the New York Times this week that's effectively a very large pout against the recent backlash to both SOPA and PIPA. According to Sherman, opponents of the universally-considered-awful laws (including thousands of websites and technical experts in numerous fields) were engaged in a campaign of "misinformation" when they were pointing out how the law effectively created a system of website censorship while potentially breaking key components of the Internet:

Fresh off the failed AT&T deal, T-Mobile is back to playing the pesky upstart, running a new promotion that involves giving away any of the company's cellphones (and some of their tablets) for free if the user signs a new two-year contract. "New and existing eligible customers can take advantage of this deal receiving their device for free after a mail-in rebate card when they sign up for a new two-year contract on any qualifying Classic Plan or for a $0.00 down payment after mail-in rebate card when signing up on a qualifying Unlimited Value Plan," says the company. To get the phones (which you'll still pay tax on), users will of course have to sign up for supporting 2 GB or 5 GB data plans.

Last month Sprint announced that their first LTE launch markets would arrive sometime mid-year, including Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and six other smaller markets. In a press statement, Sprint this morning announced that they'd be adding both Baltimore and Kansas City to that initial launch list. The company is conducting a $4-$5 billion network upgrade that involves retrofitting every Sprint cell site, eliminating the refrigerator-sized cabinets for each technology (800 MHz, 1.9 GHz and 2.5 GHz) in favor of small, more energy efficient multi-mode base stations allowing them to offer Mobile WiMax and LTE for the foreseeable future. Sprint says their goal is to cover 123 million "pops" (potential users) with LTE by the end of 2012, and 250 million by the end of 2013.

• Web Founding Father Tim Berners-Lee Takes the Stand to Keep the Web Free [wired.com]
• Patent Troll Claims Ownership of Interactive Web –And Might Win [wired.com]
• LightSquared's funder Harbinger borrows $190 mln [reuters.com]
• Sprint to expand 4G LTE to Kansas City and Baltimore this year [bgr.com]
• In-flight broadband deployments to surpass 6,100 planes in 2015,says NPD In-Stat [eetimes.com]
• AT&T and Verizon lobby for less FCC spectrum control, Sprint and other carriers respond [engadget.com]
• Justice Department set to OK Google-Motorola deal [wsj.com]
• Apple's patent plea: Stop Samsung and Motorola from holding us hostage [yahoo.com]
• Ixia Introduces New VoLTE Application to Put HD Voice to the Ultimate Test [marketwire.com]
• BT pledges to refund ISPs after overchargbing for cancelltion of cease orders [ispreview.co.uk]
• Alibaba in $3bn loan talks to buy back Yahoo stake [totaltele.com]
• A quad-core iPad 3? Not so fast [cnet.com]
• Oregon Tries to Criminalize Tweets [forbes.com]