December 2011

Early in the morning on Aug. 31, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson appeared on CNBC, promising to bring 5,000 new jobs to the United States if his company was allowed to buy rival T-Mobile. But just hours later, Justice Department officials announced their intention to sue to block the $39 billion merger, a move that would be the beginning of the end for a deal that would have created the largest wireless carrier in the U.S. AT&T said it was “surprised and disappointed.”

That contrast between AT&T’s rosy optimism and federal officials’ uncompromising smackdowns came to mark the T-Mobile acquisition bid that officially ended on Dec 19. The failed attempt, which will cost AT&T $4 billion in breakup fees besides legal and other costs, left observers wondering how a company with the legal, lobbying, and political presence of AT&T could have seemingly misread the Washington situation so badly.

AT&T spent $16 million on lobbying from January to September, and rolled out a long string of endorsements from lawmakers in Congress, state governors, unions, and nonprofit groups. Federal agencies like the Justice Department and the FCC don’t operate in a vacuum, and lobbying efforts can put pressure on the relatively apolitical regulatory and law enforcement processes, Brunell said. But those efforts never really came into play. Nor was it particularly close. The process never made it to wrangling over merger conditions, when political clout could be more valuable. The Justice Department acted more quickly than expected, and left little room for AT&T to maneuver. When the FCC moved to block AT&T’s application to buy T-Mobile’s spectrum licenses, it was game over.

One day after the International Trade Commission approved a formal ban on certain HTC products that infringe on an Apple patent, an ITC administrative law judge has issued an initial determination finding that Motorola has infringed on four claims of a Microsoft patent with its Android products. The initial ruling, however, whittles away most of the other patent claims of Microsoft against Motorola. The judge found that Motorola did not infringe on six Microsoft patents. The trade commission will now review the finding and issue a final ruling in the coming months. Both Microsoft and Motorola claimed victory.

A new paper to be published next year in the Journal of Business Ethics finds that people are more likely to lie via text compared to face-to-face communications, video conferencing or audio chat.

The paper is based on a study of 140 students that were grouped into pairs and asked to engage in a role-playing game. One student took on the role of a stockbroker, the other student played a buyer. Researchers told the "stockbroker" that the stock they had to sell would lose 50% of its value in one week. They also gave the "stockbroker" a financial incentive to sell as much of the bad stock to the "buyer" as possible. Researchers found that the stockbrokers were most likely to engage in duplicitous behavior -- either lying about the quality of the stock, or not mentioning how bad it was -- if they conducted the buy/sell conversation via text message. They were most likely to be honest about the quality of the stock if the conversation happened via video, which beat out both face-to-face communication and audio chat.

The Association of Public Television Stations proposed the $3 billion figure that made its way into the Republican version of the spectrum incentive auction bill and had Democrats complaining about the size of that proposed broadcaster pay-out.

The Republicans had proposed setting aside "up to" $3 billion to compensate the broadcasters who did not give up spectrum for the expense of being moved or repacked to free up contiguous blocks of spectrum for auction to wireless broadband. The money would also go to cable and satellite operators for any technical adjustments to receive and retransmit the new signals. "Our engineers calculated that $3 billion was the number we needed -- $2 million to $3 million per station [commercial and noncommercial] -- and we asked for $3 billion accordingly. We're very grateful to Chairman [Greg Walden (R-Ore.)] and his House colleagues for supporting this request," said an APTS spokesperson.