It's all about the relationship -- the bond of trust. Sometimes it works out better than others, as Dug Dugger can tell you. He's the general manager of Ourisman Rockmont Chevrolet in Rockville, Maryland and about the world's most likable guy. "In car sales," Dug told me the other day, "trust is everything. If you don't have trust, you have nothing."

The following is a transcription of a telephone call September 26, 2014 between William J. Baer, assistant attorney general, Antitrust Division, U.S. Department of Justice and Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast. The subject is the proposed $46 billion merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

There are taxicab confessions and there are taxicab confessions. What if you were a passenger in a cab, and the driver was one of those talkative ones? Not the kind of talkative where he complains about the mayor, or about his sister-in-law or about the cost of gasoline. The kind who matter-of-factly tell you about his greedy landlady, and how he killed her. You know, to death.

We should be afraid of a company that serves 15% of mankind and treats them like lab rats...or worse. "The Wall Street Journal" reported that concurrent with the emotions experiment two years ago, Facebook -- in designing anti-fraud measures -- informed thousands of users that they would be blocked from the site unless they could prove their users were humans, not bots -- this despite knowing all along that the users were human indeed.