Mergers

T-Mobile's CEO won't comment on reports that the wireless carrier is exploring a merger with smaller rival Metro PCS, Dow Jones reports.

With help from Facebook and others, Microsoft is set to revamp its Bing search engine, The New York Times reports.

Google is echoing complaints that Microsoft is limiting other search engines from operating on devices that run Microsoft's new version of Windows, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Foxconn and Apple will divvy up the costs of making it nicer to work at the notorious China facilities that make iProducts, according to Reuters.

Twitter takes on patent trolls, the Wall Street Journal reports.

All of today's e-Reads can be found on our Tech Page.

Bloomberg appears to have won a significant victory in its fight to get Comcast to live by a condition imposed on it as part of its merger with NBC Universal that it include the financial news network when it groups other news channels into the same "neighborhood" on its cable systems.

The Federal Communications Commission's Media Bureau ruled Wednesday mostly in Bloomberg's favor in response to a complaint it filed claiming that Comcast was not abiding by the "neighborhooding" condition the agency imposed when it approved the cable firm's acquisition of NBCU last year. Comcast has disputed the meaning of the condition and said that Bloomberg had misinterpreted what the commission had required.

"We find that Comcast does place a significant number of news and business news channels substantially adjacent to one another in many systems' channel lineups, forming news neighborhoods, and that Bloomberg Television is not included in such neighborhoods on some systems," the FCC Media Bureau said in its order. "Accordingly we grant Bloomberg, L.P.'s ("Bloomberg") complaint in part, [and] direct Comcast to carry Bloomberg in a news neighborhood on certain headends."

The Media Bureau said the condition applies to Comcast's existing channel lineups at the time the FCC adopted its order on the Comcast-NBCU merger as well as to the cable provider's future channel lineups. In addition, the bureau also said that if four or more news or business news stations are within five spots of each other that constitutes a "neighborhood" and therefore Comcast must include Bloomberg in that neighborhood. If it has more than one news neighborhood on its cable systems, Comcast is only required to include Bloomberg on one of them.

When the Comcast-NBCU merger was announced, Bloomberg voiced concerns that the combined company would favor NBC's CNBC financial news network over Bloomberg. In response, Bloomberg pushed hard for the inclusion of the "neighborhooding" condition to mitigate such concerns.

Comcast has said it would appeal the Media Bureau's order to the full FCC.

"We respectfully disagree with the Media Bureau's interpretation of the 'neighborhooding' condition, which so clearly rewrites the history and any permissible underlying rationale for the condition," Comcast Vice President of Government Communications Sena Fitzmaurice said in a statement. "Since by definition, no 'discrimination' against Bloomberg in favor of CNBC could have taken place before the NBCUniversal transaction, any retrospective condition on this subject would have been arbitrary and capricious. And there is simply no support in any record for a four channel definition of a 'neighborhood.'"

Public interest groups that opposed the Comcast-NBCU merger have complained that the FCC needs to enforce the conditions it imposes on mergers.

"Merger conditions are only as good as an agency's willingness to enforce them," Free Press Policy Adviser Joel Kelsey said in a statement. "The FCC did the right thing by acting on this complaint and protecting competition among independent news sources."

Bloomberg's Greg Babyak echoed this view in a statement. "We are pleased the FCC had the foresight to include the news neighborhooding condition in the Comcast/NBCU merger order and the willingness to enforce it." He added that the company, looks "forward to working with Comcast to implement the order over the next 60 days."

The Federal Communications Commission approved AT&T's deal with T-Mobile on Tuesday -- but not the one AT&T had been hoping for.

The FCC gave AT&T permission to give T-Mobile USA a swath of spectrum rights as part of a breakup deal after the FCC and Justice Department shot down AT&T's bid to buy T-Mobile.

After AT&T abandoned the merger in December, it agreed to pay T-Mobile and its parent company Deutsche Telekom $3 billion plus spectrum rights worth $1 billion.

T-Mobile says it will use the spectrum as part of a $4 billion plan to modernize and upgrade its network.

"We applaud the FCC for acting swiftly to approve the transfer of these spectrum licenses," T-Mobile's Neville Ray said in statement. "Securing this additional spectrum was a key catalyst for our plans to launch LTE in 2013 and is therefore good news for our customers."

Public interest groups said Tuesday that the Federal Communications Commission's poor track record in enforcing conditions it has imposed on the Comcast-NBC Universal merger and other transactions shows why the commission should block instead of trying fix other problematic industry transactions, including a pending deal between Verizon and Comcast and other cable firms.

"Comcast's inability to live up to the conditions [imposed on its merger with NBCU] are evidence that behavioral conditions do not work in a market as consolidated as the market for telecommunications services," Free Press Policy Adviser Joel Kelsey said during a conference call to discuss Bloomberg's complaint against Comcast for failing to abide by a condition the financial news provider sought and won as part of the FCC's approval of Comcast's acquisition of NBCU.

In its complaint filed in June with the FCC, Bloomberg claimed Comcast had failed to abide by a condition requiring the cable provider to include Bloomberg's financial news channel with other news channels if Comcast "now or in the future" decides to group news channels into the same "neighborhood" of channels on its cable systems. In its comments Tuesday on Comcast's annual report outlining its compliance with the merger conditions, Bloomberg gave new examples that it says show Comcast has not complied with the neighborhood condition.

"In addition to the hundreds of news neighborhoods Comcast has already created on its systems, Bloomberg's review of cable system channel data reveals that Comcast has created at least two additional news neighborhoods in a manner that would violate the news neighborhood condition between 2011 and 2012: (a) Crescent City, Florida and (b) Claxton, Georgia," Bloomberg said in its letter Tuesday to the FCC.

Greg Babyak, Bloomberg's head of government affairs, urged the FCC to force Comcast to comply quickly becuase the conditions imposed on the deal only apply for seven years. "We hope that there's a greater sense of urgency since with every passing day we lose protections that we think [are] essential," he said.

Comcast dismissed the latest salvo from Bloomberg, saying the financial news provider is "willfully" misinterpreting the condition imposed by the FCC.

"Comcast does not 'neighborhood' news channels in the way Bloomberg seeks to be repositioned," Comcast spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice said in response to Bloomberg's latest comments. "Bloomberg is not entitled to any relief pursuant to its threatened complaint. And its continued rehashing of the same arguments it has previously made smacks of desperation."

The FCC would not comment on the spat. But Kelsey and others pointed to the dispute as a reason why the commission should reject troublesome transactions including Verizon's spectrum deal with Comcast and other cable firms. They argue that the FCC does not have the resources or the will to enforce conditions aimed at ensuring that mergers and other transactions will not harm consumers.

The FCC is currently weighing whether to allow Verizon to buy spectrum from a joint venture that includes Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks and from Cox Communications as part of a separate transaction. Free Press, Public Knowledge and other groups argue that the deal will undermine competition in the wireless market.

"The inability of the commission to decide this calls into question whether the agency is able to enforce [the Comcast-NBCU merger] conditions or any other conditions. [And it] raises questions about the spectrum sale to Verizon," Public Knowledge President Gigi Sohn said.

Parul Desai, communications policy counsel for Consumers Union, echoed this view, adding that the commission may just "have to say no" to more transactions instead of trying to fix them with conditions.

AT&T is still nursing the pain of its failed $39 billion merger with T-Mobile, and it shows.

On Friday the telecom giant jumped at the news of T-Mobile layoffs and told the Federal Communications Commission it was wrong to block the deal.

T-Mobile's decision to consolidate call centers and layoffs of nearly 2,000 people would have been prevented if the merger had gone through, AT&T's Jim Cicconi said in a statement.

During its fight for merger approval, AT&T promised to preserve jobs. Officials at the FCC, however, weren't convinced.

When AT&T abandoned the effort in December, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said: "The FCC is committed to ensuring a competitive mobile marketplace that drives innovation and investment, creates jobs and benefits consumers. This deal would have done the opposite."

Now, Cicconi says, T-Mobile's layoffs have proved AT&T was right.

"Rarely are a regulatory agency's predictive judgments proven so wrong so fast," he said. "But for the government's decision, centers now being closed would be staying open, workers now facing layoffs would have job guarantees, and communities facing turmoil would have security. Only a few months later, the truth of who was right is sadly obvious."

And Cicconi didn't stop there. The FCC, he said, needs more "regulatory humility" because its bad decisions have consequences for others.

"The FCC may consider itself an expert agency on telecom, but it is not omniscient," Cicconi said. "And when it ventures far afield from technical issues, and into judgments about employment or predictions about business decisions, it has often been wildly wrong."

In a statement of its own released on Friday, the FCC said since the merger collapsed, T-Mobile has remained a "vibrant" competitor.

"The bottom line is that AT&T's proposal to acquire a major competitor was unprecedented in scope and the company's own confidential documents showed that the merger would have resulted in significant job losses," the statement said.

The merger was first blocked by the Justice Department, which also concluded that the merger would harm competition.

It's been a year since Comcast got the green light to merge with NBC Universal and the company says it has gone "above and beyond" to meet the commitments it agreed to in order to win regulatory approval of the deal.

In its first compliance report filed with the Federal Communications Commission Tuesday, Comcast detailed its efforts to comply with the conditions it agreed to when it gained approval of its merger with NBCU. The conditions it says it has been working to meet include a pledge to help spur broadband adoption by offering lower-cost broadband connections to 41,000 homes, to increase the number of independent cable networks it carries, and expand its commitment to local news by investing "millions" in the 10 local news stations NBC owns.

The report "shows the extensive measures we've taken to comply with and in many cases go above and beyond our commitments and the FCC's conditions in connection with the NBC Universal transaction," Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen wrote in a blog post Tuesday on its report to the FCC. "As the report shows, our commitments and the conditions, though extensive, have been incorporated into our business activities and become part of the company's 'DNA.'"

But some of the company's critics beg to differ. They include financial news and data provider Bloomberg, which argues that Comcast-NBCU has refused to abide by its pledge to ensure Bloomberg's financial news network is grouped with other news channels including NBCU's CNBC financial news channel on Comcast cable systems.

"Comcast's report to the FCC includes revisionist language that deliberately misstates its own legally binding commitments to [FCC] Chairman [Julius] Genachowski and the American people on the news neighborhooding condition in the Order on Comcast-NBC-Universal," Greg Babyak, who heads government affairs for Bloomberg, said in a statement. "Comcast has refused to implement this time-limited condition for more than a year. Now means now, and news does not -- as Comcast claims -- mean infomercials. It's now time for the FCC to move swiftly to force the company to live up to its commitments."

Bloomberg filed a complaint with the FCC last summer claiming that Comcast-NBCU had failed to abide by this condition. It is waiting for the commission to rule on the matter. In its report Tuesday, Comcast argued that it has not "rearranged any news channels into a neighborhood since the close of transaction and, as a result, has not incurred any obligation to neighborhood news channels."

While Comcast touted deals it has made with online video distributors to gain access to NBC programming, Free Press, which joined other public interest groups in opposing the merger, said it doubted Comcast-NBCU's willingness to promote competition in the online video market.

"These core conditions are the only things preventing Comcast from using its market dominance to disadvantage its rivals and limit consumer choice in programming and video services," Free Press Senior Policy Counsel Corie Wright said. "We urge the FCC to ensure that these conditions are being enforced and that competition and consumer choice is protected."

Shares in pay-as-you-go wireless provider Leap jumped on news that AT&T is considering buying it, Bloomberg reports.

The Transportation Department has asked car makers to include technology that would bar people from accessing social networks like Facebook and engaging in other online activities while a car is moving, according to Bloomberg.

The New York Times says Apple appears to be trying to tie its new Mac operating system to the operating system it uses for its iPhone and iPad.

Apple's iPads are getting harder to find in China, USA Today reports.

All of today's e-Reads can be found here.

A partner at a law firm that represented AT&T in its blockbuster merger case has been nominated by President Obama to head the Justice Department office that moved to block the merger.

William Baer, a partner at Arnold & Porter, has been nominated to replace Sharis Pozen as an assistant attorney general over the DOJ's antitrust division, the White House officially announced on Monday. Last week Obama indicated he planned to nominate Baer.

Baer currently heads the antitrust office at Arnold & Porter, whose lawyers staffed top positions in AT&T's failed bid to buy T-Mobile last year. According to a confidentiality statement filed in May with the Federal Communications Commission, which also reviewed the merger, AT&T hired at least 32 lawyers from Arnold & Porter. Baer was not listed.

Pozen's antitrust division at DOJ spearheaded a court battle that ultimately led to AT&T's decision to abandon the deal. Pozen was serving as acting head of the division after Christine Varney left in August.

According to a profile on the Arnold & Porter website, Baer has represented clients like General Electric, Intel, Cisco, and Visa. He previously worked at the Federal Trade Commission when it blocked a1997 merger between Staples and Office Depot.

It's been a month since its bid to buy T-Mobile USA went south, and AT&T made clear Thursday that it hasn't forgotten the Federal Communications Commission's role in the deal's demise.

The two sides clashed Thursday after AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson complained that the FCC is taking too long and using inconsistent standards to decide spectrum transactions and other deals.

"This industry continues to see just explosive mobile broadband growth and it's providing one of the few bright spots in the U.S. economy. But I think we all understand this growth cannot continue without more spectrum being cleared and brought to market," Stephenson said on a conference call Thursday morning to discuss the company's earnings report. "Despite all the speeches from the FCC, we are all still waiting. The last significant spectrum auction was nearly five years ago now and this FCC has made it abundantly clear that they will not allow significant [merger and acquisition] to help bridge their delays in freeing up new spectrum."

AT&T reported a $6.7 billion loss in the last quarter of 2011 in large part because of the break-up fee it must pay after its bid to buy T-Mobile failed. The company dropped its bid for T-Mobile last month after both the Justice Department and the FCC objected to the deal.

Stephenson complained on Thursday that the FCC used differing sets of standards related to how much spectrum AT&T can hold in each market for evaluating its bid for T-Mobile and in its recently cleared purchase of a swath of spectrum from Qualcomm.

"We are literally sitting here in a situation where we don't know how much spectrum we are allowed to hold...who we are allowed to do business with, and so forth," he said.

The FCC fired back Thursday afternoon noting that the commission has approved more than 150 commercial mobile transactions in the last year, including AT&T's Qualcomm deal.

"Unfortunately, these facts were completely ignored in the conference call," FCC spokesman Neil Grace said in a statement. On the AT&T-T-Mobile deal, Grace added that, "The DOJ and FCC staffs concluded that this action would violate the antitrust laws and result in higher prices for consumers, and less innovation and investment in the marketplace. Those conclusions surely disappointed AT&T executives, but they followed directly from the facts and the law."

It wasn't always this way between the telecom operator and its regulator. Just over a year ago, AT&T was among the few broadband providers to endorse the FCC's controversial open Internet order. Then again both sides got something out of it. For AT&T, the order's most controversial provisions did not apply to the growing wireless broadband market. At the same time, the FCC gained the support of one of the biggest broadband providers in the country.

Shoppers flocked to their computers to do their holiday shopping on Cyber Monday, which posted record online sales, according to the Wall Street Journal.

AT&T may be willing to give up as much as half of T-Mobile USA's customers to win approval of its bid to buy the firm, Bloomberg reports.

Amazon says that the Silk browser in its new Kindle Fire tablet does not violate user privacy but a key lawmaker is not satisfied with the company's claims, Ars Technica reports.

Google is expanding its mobile mapping services indoors to include maps of airports, shopping malls and other places, the San Jose Mercury News reports.

Read all of today's e-Reads on our Tech page.