May 2012

Google probe said to speed up as U.S. queries site operators

The Federal Trade Commission told eBay and Yelp to provide information on whether Google is competing unfairly, speeding up a probe that began a year ago. The shopping and review websites were among about a dozen companies that received civil investigative demands, which are similar to subpoenas, from the FTC. In its requests, the FTC is seeking examples of Google failing to follow through on promises to direct consumers to websites that compete with its own services. Agency officials also asked if Google, the world's most popular search engine, is selling rivals prime advertising space on search results pages.

Google Privacy Inquiries Get Little Cooperation

Google might be one of the coolest and smartest companies of this or any era, but it also upsets a lot of people — competitors who argue it wields its tremendous weight unfairly, officials who says it ignores local laws, privacy advocates who think it takes too much from its users. Just this week, European antitrust regulators gave the company an ultimatum to change its search business or face legal consequences. American regulators may not be far behind. The high-stakes antitrust assault, which will play out this summer behind closed doors in Brussels, might be the beginning of a tough time for Google. A similar United States case in the 1990s heralded the comeuppance of Microsoft, the most fearsome tech company of its day.

But never count Google out. It is superb at getting out of trouble. The secret Street View data collection led to inquiries in at least a dozen countries, including four in the United States alone. But Google has yet to give a complete explanation of why the data was collected and who at the company knew about it. No regulator in the United States has ever seen the information that Google’s cars gathered from American citizens.

Partnership to Bring Ultrahigh-Speed Internet to Six Communities

A start-up company plans to announce that it has raised $200 million to deliver ultrahigh-speed Internet service in six communities surrounding research universities around the country.

The company, Gigabit Squared, will work with Gig.U, an alliance of public and private universities that want to build islands of superfast networks to foster economic development and to promote services like education, health care and scientific research in the communities. The six communities have not been named. Gigabit Squared, based in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, is in negotiations with its first university and says it will make announcements about timing and participation later this year. Mark Ansboury, the company’s president and co-founder, said the investment in high-speed wired networks was needed because American telephone and cable companies had shifted their focus to wireless systems, which are convenient but much slower. Gig.U is the brainchild of Blair Levin, former director of the government’s 2010 National Broadband Plan, which originally called for high-speed network islands around military bases. Levin later settled on university communities as a better starting base for future Internet services.

Verizon says T-Mobile hypocritical about spectrum

Verizon told the Federal Communications that T-Mobile is two-faced in opposing the SpectrumCo deal because its parent company is telling investors it has excess network capacity while T-Mobile is telling the FCC it has too little.

“T-Mobile’s regulatory advocacy is so different from its parent’s view that one can only conclude it is misusing the regulatory process solely to impede a competitor’s 4G plans or extract concessions,” Verizon wrote to the Federal Communications Commission in a letter filed late May 21. T-Mobile is one of the many opponents of the $3.9 billion deal that would assign the wireless frequencies held by the Comcast-led SpectrumCo and Cox Communications to Verizon. In addition to the frequencies, the cable companies and Verizon have agreed to a series of marketing agreements that allow the companies to market each other’s services. “With respect to T-Mobile’s capacity argument in particular, its parent company’s statements again directly contradict its regulatory story,” Verizon wrote. “Deutsche Telekom’s characterization of T-Mobile’s ‘empty network’ suggests that T-Mobile is the one with excess capacity — a situation that it says might extend for six years or more.” Verizon’s smackdown comes after T-Mobile took a swipe of its own last week when a cadre of company representatives told FCC senior officials that there is no need to hand over valuable frequencies to Verizon.

If Video Sites Could Act Like Cable Companies

Most consumers have no idea what an M.V.P.D. is, but they mail a check to one every month. What they call Comcast or Time Warner Cable or DirecTV, the government calls a “multichannel video programming distributor,” or M.V.P.D. for short. When that mouthful of a phrase was coined decades ago, it was pretty easy to identify what was a multichannel distributor — any cable or satellite company — and just as important, what wasn’t. But the Internet is changing that — so profoundly, in fact, that the Federal Communications Commission is now rethinking even the definition of the word “channel.” In a public comment period that ends in the coming weeks, the FCC is asking whether the rules of multichannel distributors — like the right to carry certain popular channels and the responsibility to carry some less popular ones — should apply to new online distributors like Hulu and YouTube. If it decides that they should, then more companies could stream TV shows to computers and smartphones, hastening an industrywide shift to the Internet.

Sirius Airs Static in Liberty Clash (corrected)

Sirius XM Radio Chief Executive Mel Karmazin said he resisted John Malone's Liberty Media taking control of the satellite-radio operator partly because he didn't want to report to a majority shareholder.

Sirius XM Radio Chief Executive Mel Karmazin, who has resisted John Malone's Liberty Media taking control of the satellite-radio operator, said he didn't want to report to a majority shareholder. "I want to be held accountable," Karmazin said at Sirius's annual shareholder meeting in New York. "I don't want to be responsible for somebody else making a decision." "Even Warren Buffett" wouldn't be a suitable boss if he controlled the board, Karmazin said. Karmazin said he didn't want Liberty to take control of Sirius without paying a premium. "If John Malone or anyone else wants to buy that stock, there is nothing we can do," he said. "But I don't want them to get control of the company that way without paying a premium."

For AOL, a Costly Gamble On Local News Draws Trouble

Patch, a network of small-town news sites owned by AOL, has emerged at the center of a tug of war over the Internet company's future. The high cost of running the local-news sites has fueled a campaign by dissident investor Starboard Value LP against AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong's strategy of investing heavily in online content.

Starboard, which is waging a proxy battle to win several seats on AOL's board at next month's annual meeting, says that Patch should be closed, sold or put into a joint venture, with a partner sharing the cost. Inside AOL, Patch is also a flash point. Arianna Huffington, who took charge of Patch and AOL's other news and entertainment sites after AOL acquired her Huffington Post last year, distanced herself from the business after disagreements over how it should be run. "They wouldn't let Arianna fix it, so she walked away from it," said one media executive familiar with the matter.

Obama Online Tool Targets Volunteers

President Barack Obama's re-election campaign on Wednesday plans to introduce its online organizing tool for 2012, hoping to spur the volunteer enthusiasm that carried the president to the White House four years ago. The program, known as Dashboard, has been in development since last year and builds off technology used by the campaign in 2008. It is meant to replicate a campaign field office, allowing volunteers to do phone banking, organize events and talk to campaign leaders from their laptops or smartphones. "The immediacy of Dashboard really sets it apart from 2008," said Obama campaign spokeswoman Katie Hogan. "It provides a good volunteer experience online that is directly tied to our field-operation goals." "The investment we've seen the Obama campaign put into this project suggests they're convinced it's a game changer," said Micah Sifry, co-founder of TechPresident, a website that tracks online campaigning. "We're living in an age of mass participation in politics."

Tech world cools to President Obama

Mitt Romney has been mining Silicon Valley — a cash-rich part of the country that was turned off in 2008 by septuagenarian John McCain, who “never particularly felt the need to e-mail.”

The pro-Romney super PAC, Restore Our Future, has raised $1.76 million in Silicon Valley — including from venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen, the Netscape co-founder who gave $100,000 this year, an about-face from 2008 when he made a maximum contribution to Obama. In recent months, Andreessen has been critical of the president. The argument for Romney: He knows what it takes to make a company succeed, and he won’t hammer innovators with the taxation, regulation and prosecution that critics say Obama seems intent on pursuing if he wins a second term. Nothing personal, just business.

Google Void Seen As Opportunity For China Mobile App Store: Tech

Google’s Android operating system runs two-thirds of the smartphones sold in China yet the company’s online app store, Google Play, isn’t open for business there because of censorship concerns. That’s creating an opportunity for China Mobile. The world’s biggest phone company by subscribers opened its Mobile Market store for Android apps in 2009, and it now has 158 million registered users. Customers have downloaded more than 630 million apps, making Mobile Market the world’s largest carrier-operated app store, said Jack Kent of IHS Screen Digest. The success of Mobile Market comes at a welcome juncture for the wireless giant, fueling revenue growth as its core business matures.

Benton

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