Bloomberg

Graeber traveled from New York to Nairobi to learn how to pay for things with a phone -- and to understand why Kenya has gained a reputation as the mobile payments future.

Almost everyone in the country uses M-pesa (M, for mobile; pesa is payment in Swahili) to transfer money from one phone to another via encrypted short message service, or SMS. In all, there are about 18.2 million active customers in a nation twice the size of Colorado.

Dish Network’s head of product management said the satellite-TV company would be interested in bidding on the rights to broadcast the National Football League’s Sunday games if rival DirecTV fails to renew its deal.

“It’s the only exclusive still left for TV content,” Vivek Khemka, Dish’s senior vice president of product management, said. “I’d be an idiot to say I didn’t want it.” “NFL Sunday Ticket” has been offered only on DirecTV since 1994, and the two sides are negotiating exclusively to renew the $4 billion agreement, which expires at the end of 2014.

The deal is so critical that AT&T, in its agreement to acquire DirecTV, retained the right to back out of the deal if the contract with the NFL isn’t renewed. In the event talks with DirecTV fail, the league could separate the rights to offer “Sunday Ticket” over the Web from the traditional TV contract, Khemka said.

Television executive Marci Burdick is gripped by a drama that isn’t appearing on her company’s CBS affiliate in South Bend, Indiana: She’s watching battles in Washington that figure to reshape the broadcast industry.

The US Supreme Court is set to decide soon whether Aereo can use coin-sized antennas to capture TV signals and sell them over the Internet -- without paying broadcasters such as Burdick’s closely held Schurz Communications. A decision for Aereo might lead cable and satellite companies to stop paying $4 billion a year to station owners, too. If Aereo wins, “local broadcasters and their networks would have to have serious conversations about the business model,” Burdick, senior vice president at Schurz, said.

That’s not the only thing worrying broadcasters. The Federal Communications Commission has proposed eliminating a 39-year-old rule that bars pay-TV companies such as Comcast and Dish Network from showing National Football League games that get blacked out on local broadcast stations whenever the stadiums aren’t sold out. Without that rule, the NFL may abandon over-the-air TV for pay-TV, rather than lose control of its telecasts, according to the broadcasters who spend billions for game rights.

The challenges for broadcasters probably will continue in 2015, when the FCC wants stations to decide whether to give up airwaves for cash. The agency will auction surrendered frequencies for use by wireless providers such as AT&T and Verizon Communications, which have said they need more airwaves to meet soaring demand for mobile communications.

The trial set for July involved cases related to a ruling in 2013 that company had orchestrated an illegal scheme with publishers to raise e-book prices. A federal judge in Manhattan ordered Apple and its adversaries to submit a filing seeking approval of their accord within one month.

Details of the agreement weren’t disclosed.

The US government sued Apple and five of the biggest publishers in April 2012, claiming the maker of the iPad pushed them to sign agreements letting it sell digital copies of their books under a pricing model that made most e-books more expensive. Under the contracts, the publishers set book prices, with Apple getting 30 percent.

Apple and the publishers used the contracts to force Amazon.com, the No. 1 e-book seller, to change its pricing model, the government claimed. At the time, Amazon was selling electronic versions of best-selling books for $9.99, which was often below cost.

US District Judge Denise Cote ruled against Apple after a non-jury trial. Steve Berman, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said that all the US attorneys general and consumers settled the case. Berman said he filed a memorandum of understanding with the court under seal, which prevents him from describing the agreement.

After seven months of testimony and legal arguments, jurors in the News Corp phone-hacking trial started deliberations.

“You are under no pressure of time,” Judge John Saunders said, sending the jury out to deliberate their verdicts after 130 court days since the trial began in late October. “You have to reach your verdicts according to the evidence.”

Rebekah Brooks, the 46-year-old former editor of the News of the World, is one of seven people on trial for phone hacking and bribing public officials by journalists at the company’s Sun and News of the World newspapers.

News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch closed the News of the World in 2011 in a bid to temper public outrage over the hacking of the phone of Milly Dowler. Brooks, who headed News Corp’s UK unit, is charged with conspiracy to intercept voice mails, conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office and two counts of perverting the course of justice.

Amazon.com isn’t accepting pre-orders for Warner Bros movies on its website, the latest of the online retailer’s contract feuds to spill into public view. Customers trying to pre-order films such as “The Lego Movie,” “300: Rise of an Empire” and “Winter’s Tale” are instead asked to sign up to be notified when the item becomes available.

Digital downloads of the movies are available for purchase through Amazon Instant Video. The world’s biggest online retailer is seeking concessions from Warner Bros that would give it more of a margin on sales of DVDs and digital versions of its movies, said a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the negotiations are private.

[Commentary] For the same reason the merger of AT&T and T-Mobile US didn’t go through in 2011, a Sprint/T-Mobile joinder shouldn't be permitted either: No matter how the deal is conditioned, it will cause a reduction in competition. We already have a highly concentrated mobile-phone marketplace.

It's a "duopoly with a fringe": Two behemoths, Verizon Communications and AT&T, take home three-quarters of mobile revenue in the US. Their spectrum holdings, existing physical networks, powerful brands and lobbying heft create significant barriers to entry in an industry in which scale and scope are everything.

Sprint, with about 16 percent market share, argues that combining with T-Mobile (13 percent) will create a viable third player. But if a Sprint/T-Mobile deal is approved, the combined entity will have less incentive to be disruptive and more incentive to raise prices than either of them have now as separate businesses.

That matters even if you're not one of their customers. T-Mobile's aggressive marketing plans have driven Verizon Wireless and AT&T to act differently, offering better and cheaper family plans to some of their customers.

[Crawford is a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law]

[Commentary] Few presidential candidates enjoyed better press than Barack Obama in 2008. He reciprocated by promising unprecedented "openness in government" and a new era of transparency. He has fallen far short of the promise.

This administration has prosecuted more whistle-blowers for leaks and gone after more journalists than any of its predecessors.

The issue was crystallized anew recently when the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from New York Times reporter James Risen, who has been ordered to testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former Central Intelligence Agency official.

Sterling is charged with giving Risen classified information about an attempt to sabotage Iran's nuclear program. The Justice Department has relentlessly pursued Risen, and he could face jail time for failing to comply with the subpoena. Similar claims about protecting national security are being made about Sterling, who proclaims his innocence. A federal judge dismissed the proceedings against Risen, but the Obama administration successfully appealed the decision. On the federal level, much depends on an administration's attitude.

As it stands, in the US, the news media has considerable protections when it comes to censorship or libel, but they don't apply to news gathering. Attorney General Eric Holder has vowed in private meetings and some public pronouncements to change this approach. With the decision by the Supreme Court, the Risen case offers the opportunity to do so.

As Sprint nears an agreement to buy T-Mobile US, the man in the hot pink T-shirt will soon step into the limelight. John Legere, the chief executive officer of T-Mobile who’s known for wearing company-branded shirts and taunting his competitors on Twitter, is likely to run the combined company, according to two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the plans are private.

He’s being favored over Dan Hesse, the 60-year-old CEO of Sprint, who took over a broken company in 2007 and did enough fixing, even while operating at a loss, to attract a new owner in 2013.

As negotiators hammer out the finer points of an agreement, Legere will increasingly be responsible for the prospects of an enlarged company. It would fall to him to integrate disparate management teams and divergent marketing strategies, while also combining two networks that are years behind the technological advances of their biggest rivals, AT&T and Verizon Communications.

The German government is considering setting up arbitration courts to weigh in on what information people can force Google and other search-engine providers to remove from results.

Following a European Union court decision in May granting consumers the “right to be forgotten,” the Interior Ministry in Berlin would seek to establish “dispute-settlement mechanisms” for consumers who file so-called take-down requests. If search providers introduce automatic deletion, public information would be at risk, the ministry said.

“Politicians, prominent figures and other persons who are reported about in public would be able to hide or even delete reports they find unpleasant,” it said. The ministry suggested that the removal of information shouldn’t be left to company algorithms.