BART workers remove a man atop a train during a protest at the Civic Center station in San Francisco last month. Authorities closed the station where demonstrators condemned the fatal shooting of a man by transit police the week before.

For apparently the first time in the United States, a government agency shuttered mobile-internet and phone service in a bid to quash a demonstration — the same type of speech suppression exercised by Middle Eastern tyrannies to quell dissent.

Thursday’s move by Bay Area Rapid Transit authorities was greeted by an uproar of comparisons to Egypt and Libya. The h...

Google’s proposed acquisition of Motorola Mobility is another one of those big “should have seen it coming” moments the search giant seems to delight in springing on us. After all, Android is the leading mobile handset software, and Google needs to to diversify so it is not utterly dependent on search-ad revenue. But Google’s previous flirtation with handsets — the HTC-branded Nexus One “Google Phone” — was a disaster. And handset loyalty is where the action is.

The future of an Android “supercharged” by a Google-owned Motorola isn’t clear. Android’s success has come from wide acceptance by han...