Friday, November 20, 2009
Google Books Settlement Proceedings to Drag on Until Mid-February
The latest revision of the Google Books settlement has been granted preliminary approval by a New York district judge, though it will be some time before that approval is finalized–if it is finalized. Judge Denny Chin of the Southern District of New York said Thursday that he will hold a hearing Feb. 18 on the new agreement, which will restore access to millions of out-of-print books, but may also one day give the company a monopoly on the largest digital library in the world.
Google is violating the Net neutrality principles it so strongly advocates–according to AT&T, anyway. In a letter to the head of the Federal Communications Commission’s Wireline Competition Bureau Friday, the telephone company described Google as “one of the most noisome trumpeters of so-called net-neutrality” and asked the FCC to order it to “play by the same rules as its competitors.”
Approved without incident by Sun shareholders in July and the U.S. Justice Department in August, Oracle’s planned $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems seemed poised to easily pass muster with European regulators as well. Sadly for Oracle, that’s not how things have played out. Citing “serious concerns” about the deal’s effect on competition in the market for databases, the European Commission has opened an in-depth investigation into it.
September third. That’s the day the European Commission will determine whether or not to clear Oracle’s planned $5.6 billion merger with Sun. And though there would seem, on the face of things, to be no serious antitrust objections to the deal, one never knows. Questionnaires distributed by the EC suggest the agency is particularly interested in the merger’s potential impact on MySQL.
What happened between Apple’s January 5 disclosure of Steve Jobs’s “hormonal imbalance” and the company’s January 14 announcement that the CEO would be taking a six-month leave of absence? That’s the focus of an ongoing Securities and Exchange Commission probe into Steve Jobs’s health, an investigation that seems to, well, be going nowhere. 
Looks like the fireworks have begun early in Mountain View. On Thursday afternoon, the Department of Justice officially notified Google that it is investigating its book deal for violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The notification after the jump.
Oracle was “almost” able to resolve the Justice Department’s concerns over its proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Almost, but not quite. The 30-day review period for the $7.4 billion deal was set to expire midnight Friday. But instead of approving it, the DOJ extended its examination, issuing a second request for more information.
A 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.
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. 
Now that the Justice Department has asked a hotshot litigator to review the proposed search-advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo, everyone seems to be getting into the act. California Attorney General Jerry Brown is reportedly looking askance at the deal, apparently with an eye toward an investigation.
China’s state-run newspaper, the Shanghai Securities News, has got it all wrong. Beijing isn’t investigating whether Microsoft engaged in discriminatory pricing. Nor does it plan to file an antitrust lawsuit against it once the country’s anti-monopoly laws are enacted in August. At least that’s what China’s State Intellectual Property Office is claiming, anyway. 
