Last week, the Associated Press reported that Kevin Martin, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said he would recommend that the other four commissioners rule that cable giant Comcast had violated the agency’s principles regarding open access to the Internet. While the ruling is not final, the statement marks a major victory for Free Press, a non-profit advocacy group that filed the original complaint against Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company.

On Monday, I interviewed Marvin Ammori, general counsel for the Free Press. We talked about what happened last week, what happens next, and why we should all care.

For background, the original complaint is here. And more background on the history of the fight can be found here.

Going forward, Martin needs two more commissioners to sign on to his proposed decision within the next couple of weeks for it to become official. While the FCC is not recommending a fine, Ammori said his group would be satisfied with the ruling that Martin has proposed.

Earlier this month, I interviewed Mari Kuraishi, one of the founders of the GlobalGiving Fund. She and Dennis Whittle, chairman and CEO, left their jobs at the World Bank back in 2000. The idea was to create an online marketplace to connect donors with philanthropic projects around the world. The fund continues to grow, but not necessarily in the way originally planned. Kurishi and Whittle have had to make adjustments and do some rethinking along the way.

Andy Sternberg interviewed Wired editor and The Long Tail author Chris Anderson at the 2007 O’Reilly Tools of ChangeConference.

Anderson described the premise for his upcoming book project — titled “Free” — to be published in mid-2008 by Hyperion. He also discussed future plans for Wired’s Web site and introduced his new start-up, BookTour, which was launched at the conference.

(We apologize for the subpar audio quality. We had some technical problems.”

Nicole Wong, Google’s deputy general counsel in charge of compliance, is the point person for growing criticism of Google’s privacy practices. More than two dozen European privacy regulators have launched an inquiry into Google’s data protection practices. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission is probing Google’s pending $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, an online advertising company. Last week, Privacy International, a London group, ranked Google’s practices the worst among 23 top Internet services, including Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL. Wong spoke with the Mercury News about her job and Google’s approach to privacy.

We sit down with Technorati’s CEO to discuss why he’s stepping aside as founder, whether the company is for sale and what plans exist to grow the San Francisco blog search engine into a media powerhouse.

We’ve gone video. Yes, Inside Silicon Valley is now available in full color with moving pictures and everything. Find it here. For this show, we visited Brickhouse, the new idea incubator that Yahoo recently opened in the trendy South Park neighborhood of San Francisco. Yahoo is hoping that this new campus will evoke a start-up vibe and spur innovation within the company. Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz explains how it will work.

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Joost is one of the most talked about new companies on the Internet TV scene. The European company wants to redefine how people consume TV. We caught up with Joost chief technology officer Dirk-Willem van Gulik at the Web 2.0 Expo this week to talk about Joost.

Dean Takahashi and Mike Antonucci talk about the Xbox Elite, HDMI technology and the history of the gaming industry.

Betsy Flanagan of the Startup Studio podcast is “guest host” this week with an interview with Matt Shobe, co-founder of Feedburner.

Franz Och heads up Google’s machine language translation efforts. He talks about efforts to make the content on the web more accessible to people, regardless of what langauge they speak.