Al Franken: AT&T and T-Mobile Merger Will Kill Competition

Sen. Al Franken is urging regulators to pull the plug on a proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile.
The Minnesota Democrat says a marriage of the two companies would mean that only three national wireless carriers would remain.
The deal would leave AT&T in control of 43 percent of the market, with Verizon overseeing 39 percent of the industry. To the left-leaning legislator that’s a dangerous recipe.
“The merger of AT&T and T-Mobile would be a major step towards the creation of an entrenched duopoly in the wireless industry,” Franken writes in a 24-page letter to the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission. “It would concentrate enormous power over the entire telecommunications sector in the hands of only two companies, and it would incentivize AT&T and Verizon to coordinate prices to the detriment of consumers.”
Moreover, Franken says that the merger will result in decreased competition, less innovation and fewer jobs in a rapidly shrinking mobile landscape.
Franken says that the T-Mobile purchase continues AT&T’s pattern of attracting new customers through mergers rather than by innovation.
“American consumers rely on the DOJ and the FCC to protect competition,” Franken writes. “It is only through competition that wireless spectrum usage will become more efficient, handsets more innovative, customer service more responsive, network coverage broader, and prices lower.”
Franken’s objections second those of his fellow Democrat, Sen. Herb Kohl, but the merger between the two telecommunications companies has recently received corporate support from the likes of Facebook.

Mozilla building mobile OS to battle Chrome

Mozilla revealed preliminary plans today to take the Gecko engine that drives its Firefox browser and turn it into an open-source operating system that will eventually work on phones and tablets.

Called Boot to Gecko, it is known that the source code will be released to the public "in real-time," wrote Andreas Gal, a Mozilla researcher. Gecko is the rendering engine that powers Firefox and the e-mail client Thunderbird. By contrast, while Google's Androidmobile operating system is open source, the main development work on it does not become available until after Google has green-lit its publication--sometimes not until months afterward.

"We will do this work in the open, we will release the source in real-time, we will take all successful additions to an appropriate standards group, and we will track changes that come out of that process. We aren't trying to have these native-grade apps just run on Firefox, we're trying to have them run on the web," Gal said in a forum post. Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of technical strategy, said that the Boot to Gecko apps won't use the Android SDK but instead run new and current Web app APIs

He also identified four areas for development. One is new Web APIs, which means building "prototype APIs for exposing device and OS capabilities to content." This is how the operating system would support current essential mobile features such as telephony, SMS, cameras, USB, Bluetooth, and near-field chips. A second area for development is to build a privilege model, which is a key security feature for ensuring that new features are "safely exposed to pages and applications," he said.

Boot to Gecko will include some low-level Android code for kernel and driver support so that it can run on Android devices. This does not exist yet, and porting it to a new system could prove to be extremely challenging. Then there is the final area of development--that of applications. The idea behind Boot to Gecko is to create a system where native Web apps can run just as well as the native apps for iOS do on that device.

Shaver added that the company is looking at Tegra 2 devices because they offer hardware acceleration of open audio and video formats.

For people who want to get a stronger idea of what Boot to Gecko will amount to, Gal noted that its "starting point" is a device running Firefox for Android as its homescreen, with some custom APIs thrown in. He also admitted in that post that there is an "ultimate goal" to the project, that of "breaking the stranglehold of proprietary technologies over the mobile device world."

State Bank allows relaxations in Export Finance Scheme to facilitate exporters

An exporter shall be eligible to avail financing under EFS Part-I and/or Part-II, if total amount of overdue export bills at the time of availing facility is not more than 5% of previous year’s export performance, says SBP circular issued Saturday.
In case overdue export position of an exporter is greater than 5% of previous year’s exports, exporter will not be entitled to avail EFS facility till such time that overdue position is reduced to 5% benchmark level, circular said, adding that these instructions, which will come into effect from October 01, 2011, have been issued by SBP to streamline procedure for availing finance under EFS by exporters who have overdue export proceeds.
Each exporter will be required to give a Certificate on a prescribed Form showing consolidated position of overdue export bills outstanding against all bank(s) {as per record of Foreign Exchange Operations Department (FEOD)}, as a percentage of total exports of preceding    year finalized in EE-1 statements. Certificate will be submitted through the bank to concerned SBP BSC office on a six monthly basis by 31st March & September 30, each year, circular said, adding that certificate will remain valid up to next six months. Process of submission of the certificate would commence from September 2011.
SBP has communicated necessary guidelines to banks for processing requests of exporters with overdue export proceeds for availing finance under EFS. Any misreporting/ misstatement shall attract imposition of fine on bank/exporter at the rate prescribed under the Scheme, it added.
Moreover, concerned SBP BSC office(s) shall verify export overdue position of exporter from relevant data and check 5% benchmark. In normal cases this practice shall be adopted twice a year before granting refinance.
The existing waiver for exporters with overdue export bills is being extended up to September 30, 2011 to cover the period until the certificate is submitted by exporters for the first time, circular added.

Google Says It Rejected Sun’s $100 Million Java-Android Deal

Google Inc. rejected an offer by Sun Microsystems Inc to pay $100 million in royalties to use Java in its development of the Android operating system before Sun was acquired by Oracle Corp. (ORCL), a Google lawyer said.
Robert Van Nest, Google’s attorney, said yesterday at a hearing in federal court in San Francisco that the proposed $100 million three-year “all-in” deal in 2006 was for a technology partnership to jointly build Android, rather than for just a patent license.
Separately, Oracle won permission yesterday to question Google Chief Executive Officer Larry Page in a deposition about his knowledge of the search-engine company’s alleged infringement of patents that Oracle got when it acquired Sun.
Oracle, based in Redwood City, California, is seeking as much as $6.1 billion in damages from Google in a lawsuit that claims Android software uses technology that infringes Oracle’s patents. Google denies infringing and asked U.S. District Judge William Alsup at yesterday’s hearing to throw out Oracle’s damage estimate.
Alsup said it appeared that Google “has a product out there that is in direct violation of these patents,” and pressed Van Nest to explain why the Mountain View, California- based company discussed a license with Sun.
“There wasn’t any specific discussion of patents,” Van Nest said. While a few lines of code in Android are “identical” to Java, that code probably came from a third party, he said. “We are investigating that,” Van Nest said.

Programming Language

Android uses a Java programming language that is open to anyone for free, said Van Nest.
Alsup cited a document to a Google executive from Google’s Android project leader that said, “‘We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java.”
“Don’t you think a good lawyer will convince a jury that it’s a license for patents?” Alsup said.
While Oracle’s damages may be in the millions or billions of dollars, Alsup said it was “crazy” for Oracle to equate its damages to the entire market value of Android.
Michael Jacobs, Oracle’s attorney, told the judge that Google adopted “the entire architecture” of Java into Android.
“Our position is that there is no infringement, there is no willful infringement,” Van Nest said.
Oracle sought to depose Page about negotiations from 2005 to 2010 between Sun and Google over a Java license for Android and Page’s decision to acquire Android due to its strategic value, according to today’s court filing.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Donna M. Ryu ruled that Oracle may depose Page for two hours “soley on topics relevant to the willfulness of defendant’s alleged patent infringement, and the value of Android” to Google, according to the order.
The case is Oracle America Inc. v. Google Inc. (GOOG), 10-03561, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco)