Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s resignation from Apple’s board this morning was a nice gesture, but it’s not going to end the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation of the ties between the Google and Apple boards. In a statement issued this afternoon, the FTC applauded the move, but said the two companies are foolish if they think it will simply abandon its inquiry as a result.
If the Federal Trade Commission takes issue with Google and Apple’s interlocking boards, Google will be well prepared. Last October, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati–the company’s outside law firm–gave a presentation on this very issue. Ironic, yeah? Click through to read the document in its entirety.
He had a good run of it, but Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s stint as an Apple director may be coming to an end. Now that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether the close ties between Apple’s and Google’s boards of directors violate antitrust laws, Schmidt’s seat on the former’s board, which he has held since August 2006, seems more trouble than its worth.
Aside from a spontaneous “Happy Birthday” sung to an absent CEO Steve Jobs, Apple’s annual meeting today was something of a nonevent. Shareholders re-elected the company’s board of directors despite concerns about its handling of the disclosure of Jobs’s health problems. And the board continued to wave off questions about the company’s succession plans and Jobs’s well-being.
He did this [holds up Blackberry]. Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years–comes right through the Commerce Committee–so you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”
– John McCain’s domestic policy adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin gives the senator his Al Gore moment
Note: John Paczkowski is on vacation and won’t be writing or posting videos until he returns next Monday.
To keep you abreast of tech news while he’s away, we’re compiling a daily digest of 10 must-read tech stories.
“Gore and Doerr in 2008” doesn’t have the same alliterative ring to it as “Gore and Doerr in 2004,” the slogan splashed across those spoof political buttons that popped up in Silicon Valley in the late ’90s.
Doesn’t make much of a presidential campaign slogan, either. But then it doesn’t need to. Because former Vice President [...]
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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