Mobile World Congress kicks off in Barcelona this week: the massive tech conference is always full of exhibitions and big announcements from technology companies, and this year’s event might see new phone announcement from Samsung. But a big theme in Barcelona will also be messaging apps. Seperately, we’ve had a bit of a winter break from our regular Techsplainer segment, but we’re back: our friend at Harvard, Jonathan Zittrain, helps to answer a simple question: Who owns the internet?

What better way to wrap up the week than a round of Silicon Tally? Also, tech industry big wigs are always talking about doing stuff in the cloud. So are companies. When they’re selling you products… or selling each other products. This week Microsoft gave it’s service a makeover… the company’s Cloud storage offering is now called OneDrive. But when it comes to storing all of our data online… to be accessible from anywhere… whose servers should we be storing that information on?

Facebook announced it is buying WhatsApp, the messaging smartphone service, for $19 billion. WhatsApp lets users text free of charge. Facebook paid $16 billion for WhatsApp, plus an additional $3 billion in restricted stock that will be paid out to WhatsApp employees over the next four years.  Venture capitalists have been eyeing instant messaging technologies like WhatsApp as one of the most promising growth sectors for 2014. Think back to Facebook’s $3 billion offer for Snapchat (the one they turned down).

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is scheduled to meet with French President Francois Hollande. On the agenda will be the question of whether or not Europe should build its own internet. Seriously. Plus, think of some of the companies and services we talk about often on this show: Twitter, Facebook,  Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat. These are companies worth billions of dollars. But where does that value actually come from? As the saying goes: When the service is free, the user is the product. Whether that product can be sold is the topic of a new documentary, “Generation Like,” airing on Frontline this week.

Countries like China represent huge potential markets for U.S. tech companies, but homegrown options pose stiff competition for upstart American entrants. That’s exactly the challenge facing the taxi hailing app Uber as it launches in China. Crowdfunding website Kickstarter was hacked over the weekend and Microsoft has partnered with the company DocuSign to make electronic signatures easier in their Office software. Both of these headlines point to a still-growing challenge of the Internet age: proper authentication.

Fashion week is done here in New York. But social media week is just starting. It involves 2,500 events in 25 cities. As events get underway we wanted to talk a little bit about the state of social media. Plus, why 2014 has been such a rough year for Bitcoin.

If the U.S. government allows a $45 billion merger deal between Comcast and Time Warner Cable, many changes could be coming, and not just when it comes to the logo that sits on top of some 30 million monthly cable bills. There could be new departments, new restructuring and improving so-called “operational efficiencies” — otherwise known as job cuts. Plus, Brendan Francis Newnam from APM’s The Dinner Party Download joins us this week to play Marketplace Tech’s Friday numbers game: Silicon Tally.

Senator Rand Paul files a class action law suit against the National Security Agency. The Kentucky Republican has long been known for Libertarian politics, but going up against the National Security Agency is by some measurements a bold move. Also, we check in on a story we’ve covered about growing tensions in and around Silicon Valley, where ideas about class and even tradition are being disrupted. And where there are plenty of accusations that the tech industry in northern California is way too insular.

If there was a Net Neutrality Paranoia Index, it would be way up this week. There’s a new quarterly report from video streaming company Netflix. It looks at how well Netflix’s content streams on different internet service providers. And there’s been an interesting pattern. Both Verizon and Comcast’s performance on this report have been dropping for several months.