Friday, November 6, 2009
Is Verizon’s New Early-Termination Fee Anti-Consumer?
Beginning Nov. 15, Verizon subscribers looking to get out of their smart-phone contracts early will pay $350 for the privilege. That early-termination fee is double the current one, but Verizon insists it’s justified because of the higher prices of today’s phones. An interesting move for a carrier that just last year agreed to pay $21 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by California consumers over the very early-termination fees it is now increasing.
Though some analysts claim otherwise, MySQL is an asset, not baggage, and Oracle has no plans to unload it. Nor does the company think it will be forced to win regulatory approval for its proposed purchase of Sun Microsystems. “No, we’re not going to spin [MySQL] off,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told attendees of a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley Monday evening. 
EMC has long claimed that its bid for Data Domain is clearly superior to NetApp’s, and today NetApp finally agreed. After market close Wednesday afternoon, NetApp said it has terminated its merger agreement with Data Domain, giving the data storage technology vendor leave to accept EMC’s unsolicited takeover bid–at $33.50 a share cash, an 11 percent premium over its own.
Now that sales of the Pre in the states have tapered off to a point where supply and demand are roughly in parity, Palm is gearing up to bring the handset to Europe. In a statement issued this morning, the company said Telefónica’s O2 subsidiary will carry the Pre in the U.K., Germany and Ireland, while its Movistar brand will offer it in Spain. 
“Good for competition.” That’s how Omid Kordestani, Google’s senior VP of Global Sales and Business Development, described the company’s partnership with Yahoo yesterday. But the U.S. Justice Department isn’t quite buying his professions of altruism.
Google co-founder Larry Page recently discounted the idea that a Google-Yahoo partnership would present any potential antitrust problems. We may soon find out if he’s right. This afternoon, just a few hours after announcing the not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper conclusion of its negotiations with Microsoft, Yahoo said it had inked a non-exclusive search-advertising deal with Google that could be worth about $800 million in annual revenues.
