No. Better to let history make itself, as it always has, and focus on making news. And it’s likely there will be quite a bit of it coming out of D: All Things Digital 6. With this year’s lineup, how could there not? Microsoft’s Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer onstage together just a month before Gates steps back from his day-to-day duties as company chairman. Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes talking strategy as the media giant prepares to spin off Time Warner Cable and tries to figure out just what the hell to do with AOL. Lowell McAdam of Verizon Wireless (VZ) and FCC Chaiman Kevin Martin appearing separately, but together offering an insider view of the telecom industry as it grapples with issues of Net neutrality, open access and early termination fees. And then there’s Yahoo’s (YHOO) Jerry Yang and Sue Decker, who’ve been struggling to right a foundering Internet pioneer as it battles Google (GOOG), Microsoft, investor-agitator Carl Icahn and itself.

And that’s just a sampling. Clearly, there’s much to talk about. Much news to be made.

Sure, we may not have managed to arrange another tete-a-tete as historic as last year’s Gates/Jobs interview.

But we did manage to get Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo Co-Founder Jerry Yang on the same stage–albeit at different times. Still, no easy feat, that.

And who knows, perhaps we’ll get them onstage together as well.

So join us at d6.allthingsd.com tomorrow for as-it-happens, all-access coverage of the conference. Liveblogs of the sessions and demos. Videos of the speakers. Photos of attendees. You’ll find it all here.

(Photo illustration by Beth Callaghan)

Really. You don’t say?

Anyway, Google’s lucky it got what it wanted from the auction without really spending anything. “If Google had won a license, there was only downside risk for them,” said Gregory L. Rosston, a former F.C.C. official and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. “Now they can just spend $1 million a year on a law firm to ensure Verizon lives up to the openness requirements.”

The FCC instituted the auction’s “Stage Two Transition” this morning, requiring participants to bid more actively or withdraw. The move inspired hundreds of new bids, pushing the auction total to $19.02 billion. That said, aside from two middling bids on the Alaska C-Block license, no new bids were entered for the C Block licenses covering the 50 states.

With just a few more days to go, it’s looking more and more like the C Block will be sold to the bidder who offered $4.74 billion for the regional licenses that comprise the national C-Block license. Presumably, that bidder is Verizon. Which means that Google, which supposedly pushed the C-block auction over its $4.6 billion reserve price, thus activating its open-access provision, is off the hook. If it wants to be, anyway.

“Verizon wants more spectrum to close the gap between it and AT&T,” Stifel Nicolaus analyst Rebecca Arbogast told Forbes. “I’m reasonably confident that Google does not have the spectrum now.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• The 700-MHz Auction Is Decadent and Depraved
• We Want the Airwaves, Baby …
• The 700 MHz Club

Great news for Google, which sought the provision that requires the winning bidder to open the C block spectrum to all devices and software applications. Great news, too, for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who has promised a $10 billion contribution to the federal budget from the auction.

Who placed that $4.7 billion bid? We don’t yet know, as the FCC’s auction rules require bidders to remain anonymous. It’s worth noting, however, that bidding for the C block stalled yesterday at $4.3 billion, just short of the $4.6 billion needed to trigger the open-access provision. Could that $4.3 billion bid have been Google forcing the hand of an incumbent telecom?