Mobile network operator Sprint has been wrangling the prepaid wireless business since well before its acquisition of Virgin Mobile USA last year. While the network consistently lost "postpaid" contract subscribers, it consistently gained more prepaid customers than any other major mobile carrier.

In the company's earnings call two weeks ago, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said "I think we're really going to start to pick up prepaid momentum in the second half of the year … Prepaid, in terms of its percentage of the overall wireless industry, is going to grow, so our turnaround is really focused on prepaid becoming a more and more important part of the company and doing better in that market."

Three monopolies. All vying to be the next Microsoft. Will one of them succeed, and will it cost you dearly?

Today, I officially announce the end of the Wintel hegemony. Like IBM before it -- heck, even the Roman Empire starting about 19 centuries ago -- Wintel will continue to dominate huge swaths of the technology industry, while rapidly declining in relevance. Perhaps duopolies Microsoft and Intel will make a last rally, maybe by changing leadership, and hold out longer against the advancing mobile-to-cloud hordes. Rome's decline was long, so could be Wintel's.

Since 1996, the Federal Communications Commission accepted, and has positively argued even up until two months ago, that broadband Internet service is an information service under US law -- an enhancement to telecommunications service that is regulated under Title I of the Communications Act. But when the FCC made its strongest effort to censure a carrier for net neutrality violations -- its fine of Comcast for throttling BitTorrent -- the DC Circuit Court said that wouldn't fly under Title I.

So policy advocates pressed the FCC to simply redeclare broadband Internet service as a real communications service under Title II. That would put broadband on a par with wireless voice, and give the Commission the authority to tell Comcast, or anyone else, how not to police its network traffic. The downside of that approach could be that US carriers may pull back on broadband buildout investments, which could render the ambitious goals of the Broadband Plan unattainable.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has finally begun to enable top-level domain names based on non-Latin alphabets. The first three country code top level domains (ccTLD) written in Arabic script are now available for use.

The three new top-level domains are: "Al-Saudiah," "Emarat, and "Misr," and they allow site names to be written right-to-left.

Partly in a bid to keep PC pricing down in a tough economy, most of HP's nine new business notebooks are available only with AMD chips, and so are most of the eight new entries on the consumer side.

HP's nine new business notebooks include seven new ProBook models, priced starting at $619, along with the new 14-inch HP 425, offered for $549 and up, and the 15.6-inch HP 625. The 425 and 625 come with spill resistant keyboards; a choice of two types of LED-backlit displays; a 2 megapixel webcam with an integrated microphone; and multiple wireless networking options, said Mike Hockey, HP's worldwide public relations manager for business notebooks, during a press conference.

WiMAX is indeed gaining momentum as the United States' first and only commercially available "4G" wireless technology.

In its earnings report for Q1 2010 today, network operator Clearwire added 19 cities to its list of upcoming 4G deployments: Nashville, Tennessee; Daytona, Orlando and Tampa, Florida; Rochester and Syracuse, New York; Merced, Modesto, Stockton, and Visalia, California; Wilmington, Delaware; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Eugene, Oregon; and Yakima and Tri-Cities, Washington.

Will you buy Microsoft KIN? That's my question for Betanews readers on this fine hump day of the week. Will you or perhaps someone in your family purchase KIN? The Microsoft smartphone -- in KIN ONE and KIN TWO versions -- goes on sale tomorrow through Verizon Wireless. I took the "KIN is good for teenagers" stance last month. Today, here at Betanews, Tim Conneally asserts "KIN is not just for teenagers." So there's another question for you: Who is KIN for?

Pricing isn't exactly tween budget friendly, since the lowest pricing -- $49.99 for KIN ONE, $99.99 for KIN TWO -- is only obtainable by $100 mail-in rebate, which comes as a debit card. That means the kiddies will pay 150 or 200 bucks out of pocket. Then there are the data fees -- $29.95 a month, which doesn't include texting (that costs 20 bucks more). Verizon's pricing is more like AT&T's for iPhone -- separate data and text -- but without the benefits.

The United States does not officially have an office, bureau, or commission for the oversight of online privacy policies and the enforcement of privacy laws. However, the Federal Trade Commission has acted in that stead, although with limited tools. Yesterday, one of Congress' leading advocates for Internet users' rights published an early draft of legislation he intends to offer on the floor of the House of Representatives, presumably this term, that would not only give the FTC enforcement authority, but also fine-tune the terms the law uses with respect to how a service provider may infringe upon users' privacy rights.

Now, some of the same rights advocates who had earlier pleaded for action against questionable policy changes, especially recently at Facebook, are expressing outrage that such action is apparently coming from the government.

Owners of the Roku Netflix set-top box have had an MLB.tv icon on their home screen since August 2009. The logo on the screen originally included a message saying the service would launch with the beginning of baseball's spring training season. MLB.tv subscribers would pay either $99.95 or $119.95 per year to have access to full streaming versions of available pre-season, and then every in-season Major League Baseball game as they happened, with local blackout exceptions. For big baseball fans, it is an excellent package.

But when spring training started, the service was still being beta tested and non-testers couldn't access it. Then the service's opening message changed to say it would be ready to launch on opening day. But when opening day rolled around, the MLB.tv message on the Roku home screen changed again to "Tune in in Mid-April."

Apple's reported problems with the Feds -- possible investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, US Justice Department, or both -- needs a primer. So I've prepared a list of 10 Things you should know about Apple and also US antitrust law. Should the FTC launch the investigation, as explained in #7, Apple's short-term risk would be greater but some kind of amicably resolution more likely. I would do another list then.

Then there is #9, where I for the first time express my feelings about the US government's antitrust case against Microsoft and what that should realistically mean for Apple. With that introduction, here are the 10 things, presented in order of informational value rather than importance:

Starting tomorrow (May 6th,) Microsoft's new KIN phones will be available through Verizon Wireless' website, and in stores on May 13th. The first two devices, logically named KIN one and KIN two, are geared toward the always-connected individual interested in social networking and sharing. Their feature sets fall somewhere between feature phone and smartphone, but the user experience is completely new.

That experience could actually be described as a combination of Windows Live and Zune. Users sync all of their social network and exchange data with their Windows Live account and with their cloud-based KIN Studio, which keeps an archive of all the pictures and videos they share.

Technically, comedians and comedy writers cannot be held liable for certain copyright violations, especially if their parodies are presented in the context of a comedy show. But that doesn't mean major sponsors can't pull strings other than legal ones; and Tuesday morning, comedienne Ellen DeGeneres found herself apologizing -- in her own self-deprecating way, of course -- for a parody of an iPhone commercial that appeared on Monday's show.

As the show's own Web site admitted, "Apple wasn't thrilled with it, and now Ellen's in hot water!"

Are you paying Rupert Murdoch 18 bucks a month for a Wall Street Journal iPad subscription? I dare you to confess. Today, during News Corporation's earnings call, CEO Murdoch claimed that the Journal has 64,000 active users on iPad. Presumably one of them is you. Confess -- comments are open -- and tell us all what is your reason.

I ask because I see the Journal as having gone too far with its paywall approach. I'm testing iPhone 3GS again, and I downloaded the WSJ app last week. I logged in with my Web subscription account, and the Journal let me read for a couple days. Then came the demand for more cash. Not much, just a buck a week. But I'm already paying for the Web subscription, for which the Journal charges about $150 a year. So Murdoch wants another 52 bucks a year for iPhone and about another $215 for iPad, which I also am testing? OK, it's only $207 a year for iPad if taking advantage of the $3.99-a-week promotion.

The latest political football between technology platform vendors that were already skirmishing with one another anyway, is HTML 5, the forthcoming standard for the layout and presentation of Web resources and the framing of interactive content. The way the World-Wide Web Consortium had planned it, HTML 5 would incorporate a number of new standards for audio, video, and interactivity, such that browser makers could incorporate those standards freely without anyone sneaking up from behind and charging royalties.

Telling the major vendors and W3C members to behave and to not seek platform supremacy over one another, is a bit like telling all the rhinestone-speckled characters from some 1970s championship wrestling show to sit down together in a nice circle, legs folded, backs straight, and stop throwing chairs. When W3C itself projects 2022 (no, that's not a typo) as the earliest date that a final HTML 5 specification can be completed and published, some are actually saying that date is optimistic.

The last two major WiMAX expansions for Sprint and Clearwire were somewhat understated events. At the end of March, Houston became the seventh Texas city to have its 4G network switched on; and last weekend, Harrisburg, Lancaster, Reading and York launched their networks to cover southeastern Pennsylvania.

Clearwire expects more than 80 markets to be completed this year, but has not officially announced which markets these will be in a comprehensive list. Last year, the company said the rollout would include Boston, Denver, San Francisco, New York, and Washington DC; and at CTIA this year, it added Cincinnati, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Miami, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, and St. Louis to the list.