New York Times

Telecommunications bankers are running out of deals to pitch. Since 2011, a rush of multibillion-dollar acquisitions has reshaped the United States wireless market.

Now, with Sprint and T-Mobile zeroing in on an agreement to join forces, one of the last big deals for the industry may be nearing an announcement. Some of the deals that have led up to this moment were foregone conclusions.

Verizon always planned to take full control of Verizon Wireless, but waited until the debt markets could support its $130 billion purchase from Vodafone, its partner in the venture. Others had been long rumored and finally came to fruition. After AT&T was blocked by regulators in its attempt to acquire T-Mobile, it was expected that T-Mobile would try to grow on its own. That’s why it merged with MetroPCS. O

thers were surprise moves that set off a chain reaction that is still playing out. AT&T, unable to buy more wireless customers, has turned its attention to television, agreeing to buy DirecTV.

The lines separating telephone, Internet and television companies, meanwhile, continue to blur, as each muscles into the others’ territory. But between these announced deals and the impending announcement by Sprint and T-Mobile, it is hard to see what meaningful assets telecommunications companies can set their sights on next. In the wake of all this consolidation, there are only a few potential targets remaining.

Independent music groups, angry with YouTube’s demands over licensing terms, have asked government regulators in Europe and the United States to intervene on their behalf.

Trade groups representing thousands of independent record labels and musicians said that they had appealed to the European Commission for “formal regulatory action.” They accuse YouTube, a division of Google, of offering unfair contracts for a planned subscription music service, and of threatening to block the labels’ content if they do not sign.

“YouTube are shooting themselves in the foot with their attempt to strong-arm independent labels into signing up to such low rates,” the singer-songwriter Billy Bragg said. “They’re in danger of launching a streaming service that lacks the innovative and cutting-edge sounds that independent artists bring.”

When it comes to online video, people may not want to cut the cord. Instead, they want to take the cord with them. People are streaming broadcast television on their smartphones in record numbers, according to Adobe’s state-of-the-industry report on digital video viewing.

Online video has reached record numbers, according to the report, compiled by Adobe Digital Index, the marketing and research arm of Adobe. Mobile video viewing went up 57 percent over the same time in 2013, and overall online video was up 43 percent, representing more than 35 billion viewings. Among the report’s more interesting findings are that TV Everywhere -- a term for authenticated viewing of broadcast shows from channels you subscribe to on your cable or satellite network -- is approaching mainstream use and is growing much faster than other online video sources like YouTube, Hulu or Daily Motion.

However, Adobe’s numbers do not include Netflix, which has about 48 million subscribers worldwide, so cord-cutting might not be entirely off the table. Authenticated TV viewing is more palatable to content providers than services like Netflix, because it encourages people to keep their ad-rich cable subscriptions, and gives them the benefit of streaming the TV they already pay for.

The authorities in China have made Google’s services largely inaccessible in recent days, a move most likely related to the government’s broad efforts to stifle discussion of the 25th anniversary of the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square on June 3 and 4, 1989.

In addition to Google’s search engines being blocked, the company’s products, including Gmail, Calendar and Translate, have been affected.

“This is by far the biggest attack on Google that’s ever taken place in China,” said a co-founder of GreatFire.org, who asked to remain anonymous to prevent retaliation by the authorities. “Probably the only thing comparable is when the Chinese government first started blocking websites in the 1990s.”

While Internet users in mainland China could reach international versions of Google search until a few days ago, “all Google services in all countries, encrypted or not, are now blocked in China,” GreatFire.org wrote. These include the Chinese-language version based in Hong Kong, Google.hk, and Google.com, Google Australia and others. Unlike the websites of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and The New York Times, which are reliably blocked by the authorities, Google services are being disrupted in a way that affects about 9 out of 10 Chinese users, according to GreatFire.org.

By allowing some access, “the Chinese government is trying to pin the blame on Google,” the GreatFire co-founder said. Google says that it is not the problem. “We’ve checked extensively, and there are no technical problems on our side,” said a Google spokeswoman, who declined to elaborate. Google’s traffic from China on all its services just fell 50 percent, according to the company’s transparency report.

The Supreme Court has turned down an appeal from James Risen, a reporter for The New York Times facing jail for refusing to identify a confidential source.

The court’s one-line order gave no reasons but effectively sided with the government in a confrontation between what prosecutors said was an imperative to secure evidence in a national security prosecution and what journalists said was an intolerable infringement of press freedom.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond (VA), ordered Risen to comply with the subpoena. Risen has said he will refuse. “I will continue to fight,” Risen said.

His lawyer, Joel Kurtzberg, urged the Justice Department to hold its fire. “The ball is now in the government’s court,” Kurtzberg wrote. “The government can choose not to pursue Mr. Risen’s testimony if it wants to. We can only hope now that the government will not seek to have him held in contempt for doing nothing more than reporting the news and keeping his promises” to his sources.

Google released statistics on the make-up of its workforce, providing numbers that offer a stark glance at how Silicon Valley remains a white man’s world.

Thirty percent of Google’s 46,170 employees worldwide are women, the company said, and 17 percent of its technical employees are women. Comparatively, 47 percent of the total workforce in the United States is women and 20 percent of software developers are women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of its United States employees, 61 percent are white, 2 percent are black and 3 percent are Hispanic. About one-third are Asian -- well above the national average -- and 4 percent are of two or more races.

Of Google’s technical staff, 60 percent are white, 1 percent are black, 2 percent are Hispanic, 34 percent are Asian and 3 percent are of two or more races. In the United States workforce over all, 80 percent of employees are white, 12 percent are black and 5 percent are Asian, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Google’s disclosures come amid an escalating debate over the lack of diversity in the tech industry. Although tech is a key driver of the economy and makes products that many Americans use everyday, it does not come close to reflecting the demographics of the country -- in terms of sex, age or race. The lopsided numbers persist among engineers, founders and boards of directors.

Billy Hawkes might be the most important tech regulator you’ve never heard of. When Hawkes took over in 2005 as Ireland’s data protection commissioner, he said, it was a relatively quiet job focused on local issues. But in the years since, Ireland has become a preferred spot for giant tech companies to place their international headquarters, largely because of the country’s low corporate tax rates.

That has put Hawkes at the center of a growing debate over how these companies use people’s online data. Hawkes is tasked with handling privacy complaints about any company based in Ireland, leaving him responsible for protecting around a billion Internet users -- both European citizens and those further afield. “The biggest change is the number of controversial companies that fall under my remit,” said Hawkes, who will step down from his role. “It’s a shift from a domestic to an international focus.”

The role of Ireland’s data protection regulator is set to expand even further under proposed privacy changes in Europe expected to be approved in 2015. The legislation will allow companies that meet the data protection requirements in one European Union country to operate freely across the Continent. Now, companies like Microsoft and Google have to comply with regulators in each of the union’s 28 member states, which often take different views on how local privacy rules should be enforced.

ConnectEDU, a popular college and career planning portal in Boston that had collected personal details on millions of high school and college students, filed for bankruptcy. Now federal regulators want to stop the company from selling off students’ names, email addresses, birth dates and other intimate information as assets.

Jessica Rich, the director of the bureau of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission, argued that such a sale would violate ConnectEDU’s own privacy policy, a potentially deceptive practice. The company’s privacy policy states that, in the event of a sale of the company, it “will give users reasonable notice and an opportunity to remove personally identifiable data from the service.”

“Information about teens is particularly sensitive and may warrant even greater privacy protections than those accorded to adults,” Rich wrote. “These users, as well as their parents, would likely be concerned if their information transferred without restriction to a purchaser for unknown uses.”

Rich recommended either that ConnectEDU give each student who had registered for its sites the choice to remove his or her personal records from company databases in advance of a sale -- or that the company destroy the entirety of the personal details it had collected.

YouTube’s plans for a subscription music service have stalled over a dispute with independent record labels, which contend that the online video giant has offered unfair licensing terms and threatened to block their music from the site.

Members of the Worldwide Independent Network, an umbrella for various trade groups around the world, complained that the contracts YouTube had offered independents are “out of step with the marketplace for streaming,” and less favorable than those that have apparently been agreed to by the three major labels -- Universal, Sony and Warner.

Negotiations between independents and YouTube, which is owned by Google, have dragged on for months. But according to several people with direct knowledge of the talks, the indies’ decision to speak out was driven by a recent warning that if labels failed to agree to YouTube’s licensing terms, music on the indies’ official YouTube channels would be blocked.

In addition, those labels would be unable to collect advertising revenue from user-uploaded videos that included their music. In response, a YouTube spokesman said, “We have successful deals in place with hundreds of independent and major labels around the world; however, we don’t comment on ongoing negotiations.”

[Commentary] Amazon is confirming its critics’ worst fears and it is an ugly spectacle to behold. For years, authors and publishers have warned that Amazon, Jeff Bezos’ book-selling giant, would one day use its power for ill.

Sure, so far, Amazon has marketed itself as a book buyer’s best friend. It sells books at terrifically low prices, it delivers them amazingly quickly, and it constantly invents new technologies to improve the way we read. Amazon has also invested heavily in publishing new authors and it has pushed exciting new formats made possible by electronic distribution. Yet the literary community has always greeted Amazon’s moves with suspicion.

The fear is mostly about the future. What will happen to books when Amazon controls the entire industry? How will authors and publishing houses reckon with Amazon’s unchecked power? Most recently, as part of a contract dispute with the publisher Hachette, we’re seeing Amazon behaving at its worst. The company’s willingness to nakedly flex its anticompetitive muscle gives new cause for concern to anyone who cares about books -- authors, publishers, but mainly customers.