Tech news and forums this week have been overrun by chatter about the legislative proposal for net neutrality that Verizon and Google jointly released on Monday. The proposal, which both Google and Verizon posted to their blogs at 1:38 p.m. EST and 1:47 p.m. EST, respectively, was, they say, intended to spark discussion, and spark discussion it did. If your head is spinning with this week’s discussions of network neutrality, wireline, wireless, a private Internet, and “differentiated online services”, read on.

You win some, you lose some. Put Google Wave in the latter category. Today Google announced that it was officially pulling the plug on Google Wave, its wiki-like service that was created to offer “real time communication and collaboration” to the masses.

Google news has started mining Twitter to flesh out their latest news headline results, including displaying your tweets as “latest news” mixed in with the news headlines, in a rolling marquee that does an auto-refresh much like a Facebook page does. A perfect, albeit sad, example is today’s news that actor Andrew Koenig – son of Walter Koenig, who played Checkov in the original Star Trek – was found dead of an apparent suicide, in a park in Vancouver. As thousands tweeted about the sad event, their tweets started showing up in Google News along with news headlines about Koenig.

In an Internet law ruling that is not only the first of its kind, but that may have wide implications – indeed worldwide implications – for Internet law, privacy law, and Google and any other sites that host images, three Google executives have been sentenced to 6 months in prison by an Italian court, over the public posting of a video of a disabled boy with Downs syndrome being subjected to bullying by four bullies, in Turin, Italy. The three convicted Google executives are Google Privacy Director Peter Fleischer, Senior VP David Carl Drummond (formerly director of Google Italy), and George De Los Reyes, a retired Google financial executive.

Imagine our surprise today when, while checking out Slashdot’s RSS feeds (or, as those in the biz like to call it, /. ) we noted a full-colour advertisement exhorting us to check our credit score, and another for Tek Systems. In fact, there is now an advertisement along with every story summary in the Slashdot RSS feed – ads for penny stocks, even ads for Google Chrome.

As Google threatens to pull completely out of China, following allegations that the hack attacks against Google, code named “Operation Aurora” and first disclosed by Google last month, originated at two Chinese universities with strong governmental ties, the Chinese government is trying their own brand of shaping the Internet – by encouraging its citizens to send “red text messages”, also being referred to as “red snippets” and even “red jokes” (although they are not jokes). The Chinese term actually translates as “Red Duan” – ‘duan’ relating to measurement, such as a piece or stretch of time – in other words, a red era. According to authorities in China, the red text message – or red snippet – is intended to facilitate “the spirit of Chinese culture for an Internet age” and to combat the invasion of American culture. In the meantime, Google contemplates pulling out of China altogether after their discoveries in the wake of the Operation Aurora hacks, unless China agrees to allowing uncensored search.

Google, Apple and Yahoo (as well as Oracle and Applied Materials) this week prevailed against a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request that was seeking to require them to share their workforce data as it relates to race and gender. Under the Freedom of Information Act request, the San Jose Mercury News newspaper wanted to know what percentage of Apple’s, Google’s, and Yahoo’s workforce was African American, what percentage was Hispanic, Asian, caucasion, etc., and what percentage were women. Apple, Google and Yahoo, and Oracle and Applied Materials, claimed that these details were trade secrets, and that their businesses would be negatively impacted if they were forced to reveal this information.

It’s true – Google is developing the Google Translation Phone. In fact, even though it is, by all accounts, two years off, the world is abuzz (we can no longer say aTwitter without risking a copyright complaint, can we?) with news of the Google Translator Phone. Is this the Star Trek Universal Translator, or the Babel Fish from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, come true?

It may be the biggest celebrity breakup of the 2009-2010 season. No, it’s not Brad and Angelina, or Jon and Kate Gosselin. It’s Apple and Google. In a meeting at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters last week, Steve Jobs let loose a no-holds-barred rant against Google and their pretence (at least) of do no evil, culminating in his saying that their “don’t be evil” motto is “a load of crap.” Some observers even claim that what Jobs actually said was that Google’s ‘don’t be evil’ is “bullshit”.

There is a lot of chatter on the Internet today about the search term “Exercise Bike Clearance” and how Target has been gaming Google search results so that no matter what you search for (such as, for instance, “Exercise Bike Clearance”) you will find a link to a Target page in the top of the search results, even though Target doesn’t have the item for which you are searching. In fact, that’s even more the rub – because these Google listings pointing and linking to Target.com are a result from Target telling you that “We could not find matches for {your search term}. Please try your search again.”

Google hasn’t moved to Greenland, even though the TLD (Top Level Domain) of its new URL shorten service “Goo.gl” is the domain for Greenland. With the announcement of Goog.gl, Google takes on other URL shortening services such as Tiny URL and Bit.ly. And in case you are wondering what does URL stand for or “what is a url”, here is the URL definition: The term “URL” refers to the web address of a page on the world wide web. URL stands for ‘Uniform Resource Locator” – “uniform” because the addressing is standardized, “resource” refers to the content (or ‘resource’) on the web that you want to see, and “locator” referring to the fact that it points to that resources location on the web. The Goo.gle service allows you to take a long URL and shorten it to something that is much shorter but still takes you to the original page.

Google has just launched their own public DNS service, and appears to have focussed (now) competitor OpenDNS firmly in its crosshairs. We’ll get into that in a moment, but first, for those of you with a glazed look who are wondering “just what is DNS, and why should I care?”, a little tutorial on what DNS is, and why you should care.

Now this is new! If you have a Facebook account, searching for your name in Google will turn up not only a link to your Facebook page, but includes a list of your friends, as well! And that’s even if your privacy settings on Facebook are set to disallow public access, such as the “only My Networks and Friends can see my profile and personal info” settings.

Google is gracing nearly 50 airports in the U.S. with free airport wi-fi for the holidays. Two of the airports – Seattle and Burbank – will keep their free airport Internet access, and offer free airport wi-fi permanently. (The full list of airports offering free Google wi-fi is below.)

The City of Los Angeles will be paying Google $7 million to allow the city to move email hosting for all 30,000 of Los Angeles city workers to Gmail. That’s right – what tens of millions get for free, Los Angeles will be paying a cool seven million for. Of course presumably by paying for Gmail premium, they will be getting a few other services, like the ability to call in for tech support during normail business hours.