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Thursday, October 8, 2009

Feds Launch Antitrust Probe of IBM

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Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Google Books Settlement Evidently in Need of Further Editing

googbooksLooks like the Google Books Settlement won’t be hitting the shelves until later this year–at the earliest. Days after the U.S. Justice Department criticized the deal and the forward-looking business arrangements it seeks to create as cause for “significant legal concern,” Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers requested a delay in a judge’s final “fairness hearing” scheduled for Oct. 7 so that they can amend it.

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Thursday, August 20, 2009

DOJ Clears Oracle-Sun Deal

oraclecreosotejpg-198x300-150x1501The Justice Department’s extended antitrust review of Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun apparently turned up few issues of concern. Oracle said this afternoon that regulators have approved the $7.4 billion deal with no restrictions.

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Apple CEO to Palm: I’ll Quit Sniffing Your Org Chart if You Quit Sniffing Mine

steve_jobs_jaccuseApple appears to have a particular affinity for the unwritten no-poaching agreements said to be so popular among the nation’s biggest tech companies. Earlier this summer, the New York Times reported that Apple may have quietly negotiated an agreement with Google not to hire away each other’s top talent. Now, Bloomberg claims that the company attempted to win a similar commitment from Palm, but was rebuffed.

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Tuesday, August 4, 2009

More Measly Gains for Bing

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Monday, July 6, 2009

Hell of a Way to Get Out of Your AT&T Contract, Varney…

iphone-attEarlier this year, Christine Varney, the new antitrust chief at the Department of Justice, said she planned to return the DOJ to a policy that led to landmark antitrust suits like the one against Microsoft in the ’90s. And she delivered on that promise in short order. Since her confirmation in late April, the DOJ has seen a sort of Trustbuster renaissance. It has begun inquiring into potentially anticompetitive recruiting practices in Silicon Valley. It’s opened an investigation into the Google Books settlement. And now it’s scrutinizing cellphone exclusivity deals, like the lucrative one between Apple and AT&T.

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Thursday, June 11, 2009

Sun to Oracle Customers: Reduce Costs and Eliminate Vendor Lock-In! Oh…Wait…

vendorlockin_thumbTo hear tell from Sun executives, the company’s impending acquisition by Oracle will be of great benefit to Sun, its technology and its customers. “Is this Oracle thing a good thing for Java?” Sun chairman Scott McNealy asked last week at the company’s JavaOne conference. “And is it a…good thing for the community, and all the rest of it?…It’s absolutely a good thing.” Thing is, this wasn’t always Sun’s opinion. In fact, the company’s touting of the benefits of the Oracle acquisition is, dare I say, a tad ironic given its preacquisition opinion of Oracle’s prices.

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Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Feds Checking Out Google Books Deal

googbooks

The Department of Justice’s inquiry into Google’s proposed book-search settlement continues on apace with various publishers today claiming to have received civil investigative demands from the agency’s antitrust division. These are simple requests for information and indicative of little more than the DOJ’s concern that the settlement might impair competition in the market for digital books. That said, that the DOJ even has such concerns is problematic for Google.

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Friday, May 8, 2009

Sun Open-Sources U.S. Antibribery Laws

briberyA couple bombshells in Sun Microsystems’s latest 10-Q filing. Seems the company believes it may have violated the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans bribery of foreign government officials. Oh, and some of its shareholders are suing to block its acquisition by Oracle.

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Wednesday, April 29, 2009

DOJ Checking Out Google Books Settlement

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A Google Book Search for “Antitrust Law” Ought to Come in Handy Here…

googbooksGoogle’s gone and run afoul of the Department of Justice again. Its interest piqued by the growing outcry over the company’s proposed book-search settlement with authors and publishers, the agency has opened an inquiry.

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Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Congratulations Google, You’re the New Microsoft

“Google abandoned [its deal with Yahoo] not because pressing ahead with it ‘risked’ a protracted legal battle, but because it guaranteed one.” I wrote that on Nov. 6, following the official dissolution of Google’s proposed advertising partnership with Yahoo. Turns out the guarantee to which I referred was an ironclad one. Sanford Litvack, the attorney who would have been lead counsel in the event of a government antitrust case against Google, tells American Lawyer Daily that the Department of Justice was literally hours away from suing the company when it bailed on the deal.

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Thursday, November 13, 2008

Google Take All

No wonder the Department of Justice was going to file suit to prevent Google’s proposed advertising partnership with Yahoo: The company controls nearly three quarters of the search market. Research outfit Hitwise reports that Google’s share of the U.S. Internet search market rose to 71.7 percent in October from 71.16 percent in September.

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Saturday, November 8, 2008

Weekend Update, 11/8/08


It was an eventful week–a new President-elect, Yahoo still playing the field with no takers, and the hovering recession beginning to hit a little harder, a little closer to home. It was hard to keep the storylines straight, so let’s approach it thematically.

Election 2008
Whether or not those voting machines malfunctioned or miscounted votes, Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States, much to the chagrin of comedians like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who–since the beginning of the McCain/Palin partnership–were handed once-in-a-lifetime material. Between the brilliant Saturday Night Live parody sketches of (and by) both Palin and McCain, and Obama’s victory speech, the other big winner (by a mile) was YouTube.

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Friday, October 3, 2008

Odd, the Parental Controls on Sen. Kohl’s Copy of IE Have Been Set to Block YahooGoogleFacts.com

With a Department of Justice ruling on Google’s advertising partnership with Yahoo expected by late next week, a key legislator is urging further scrutiny of the deal. In a letter to the DOJ, Sen. Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, encouraged it to monitor the Google-Yahoo deal, even if the agency signs off on it.

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About John

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.

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Ethics Statement

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.

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