Ballmer: Google Antitrust Accusations 'Baseless'
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Microsoft fired back at Google's attempts to have antitrust regulators take a second look at Vista's search capabilities, calling the search giant's claims "baseless."
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The Federal Trade Commission has opened a preliminary antitrust investigation into Google's planned $3.1 billion purchase of the online advertising company DoubleClick , an industry executive briefed on the agency's plans said yesterday.
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The top antitrust official at the U.S. Justice Department last month backed Microsoft Corp. &lt;MSFT.O&gt; by urging state prosecutors to reject a confidential complaint filed by Google Inc. &lt;GOOG.O&gt;, The New York Times reported on Sunday.
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The top antitrust official at the  Justice Department last month backed Microsoft Corp.   by urging state prosecutors to reject a confidential complaint  filed by Google Inc. , The New York Times reported on  Sunday.
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The Web site of a law firm employing the husband of U.S. Federal Trade Commission chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras contradicts an FTC explanation that Majoras has no conflict of interest in reviewing DoubleClick&#39;s $3.1 billion acquisition by Google, two privacy groups said Thursday.
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Hyperphrase case rumbles on Google has been hit by a setback in a patent row with Hyperphrase Technologies, LLC.â¦
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By Jim Morrill, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.  Feb. 14--Tax incentives to entice corporations such as Google cost taxpayers too much and aren't fair to existing businesses, former Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr told a Charlotte audience Tuesday.
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Organic The Australian competition watchdog has accused Google of "misleading and deceptive conduct".â¦
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A state court in Hamburg on Tuesday rejected a German company's lawsuit against Google Inc. over allegations the Internet search engine allows rival companies to buy ads using trademarked terms, an attorney said Tuesday.
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Google charges the software giant is aiming to apply the same allegedly anti-competitive strategies to the Net that it has used to dominate the PC.
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Google says Autonomy's white paper contains "significant inaccuracies" about its Search Appliance.
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By Tommy Tomlinson, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.  Feb. 11--Google is being modest.   For proof, just Google the phrase "unbelievably one-sided deal." You'll get links to the Kyoto environmental accords and a few terrible basketball trades.
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Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer seemed to intentionally avoid uttering the "G-word" Thursday but spared no punches in blasting archrival Google Inc.
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Google responded on Friday to a lawsuit filed against it by Northeastern University, denying claims that its search service infringes on patented technology.Google denied all charges in the suit, which was&#160;filed jointly by Northeastern, of Boston, and a search technology company called Jarg, of Waltham, Mass. Google also filed a counterclaim asking the court to dismiss the patent as invalid.The&#160;suit was filed in November&#160;in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. It seeks an injunction preventing Google from further infringement, as well as royalty payments and damages.The patent in question describes a distributed database system that breaks queries into fragments and distributes them to multiple computers in a network to get faster search results.The plaintiffs say that Google uses this system to run its search engine, and that the system was invented by Kenneth Baclawski, an associate professor at Northeastern and one of Jarg&#39;s founders. Northeastern was awarded a patent for the system, which it has licensed exclusively to Jarg.In its response Friday, Google argued that the patent is invalid and should not have been awarded in the first place. It cites various sections of U.S. patent law, including those that deal with the novelty of an invention and prior art. It also cites the doctrine of &quot;laches,&quot; which essentially requires plaintiffs to file lawsuits in a timely manner.Its counterclaim asks the court to declare the patent invalid and unenforceable.Both parties have requested a jury trial, and legal experts have said the case could be resolved in 18 months to two years.The U.S. patent, number 5,694,593, is dated Dec. 2, 1997, and can be viewed by searching the Web site of the U.S. Patent &amp; Trademark Office. U.S. patent law is also described on the USPTO Web site in this PDF file. Google&#39;s reply cites sections 101, 102, 103, and 112.
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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer rebuffed&#160;Google&#39;s accusations&#160;that an acquisition of Yahoo would be anticompetitive.The bid was made public Friday, prompting the response from Google over the weekend. Ballmer Monday at a news conference ceded ground to Microsoft&#39;s arch rival in order to justify his company&#39;s&#160;$44.6 billion cash-and-stock offer for Yahoo,&#160;which if accepted would fall under the scrutiny of U.S. and European regulators.&quot;Google&#39;s clearly got a dominant position,&quot; Ballmer said. &quot;They have about 75 percent of paid search worldwide. We think this enhances competition and anything else would be less good.&quot;A Google executive struck back at Microsoft on Sunday, charging that a combined Microsoft and Yahoo would control an overwhelming share of e-mail and instant-messaging accounts as well as portal traffic.David Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer at Google, further suggested that if Microsoft buys Yahoo it might try to unfairly use its dominance in those areas, just as it did in the PC market.Monday&#39;s news conference, in which Ballmer spoke with Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell, appeared to put further pressure on Yahoo&#39;s board to accept the offer, which at $31 a share represents a 62 percent premium over Yahoo&#39;s closing price last Thursday.&quot;We think it&#39;s an extremely competitive offer,&quot; Liddell said.In a Monday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Yahoo disclosed an e-mail sent on Friday by CEO Jerry Yang and Roy Bostock, non-executive chairman of Yahoo&#39;s board. &quot;First, we want to emphasize that absolutely no decisions have been made and, despite what some people have tried to suggest, there&#39;s certainly no integration process under way,&quot; the e-mail read.Ballmer continued with a hard push as to how a deal with Yahoo will let Microsoft move faster in building out areas such as search, online services and online advertising.&quot;We are going to have to innovate like crazy,&quot; Ballmer said.But he also stressed how long it could take for a Yahoo deal to eventually benefit shareholders. Ballmer said he looks at whether investments will pay off five to 10 years down the line, but investors often want to see results in three years.&quot;Sometimes those investments look smart, sometimes it takes a while for them to pay off,&quot; Ballmer said.
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Almost everything that can be said has been said about the latest moves by Microsoft to create Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about Linux. Countless pundits and analysts have pointed out that Microsoft threats are toothless. Some have noted that Microsoft has singled out Linux and OpenOffice, the biggest threats to its monopoly on operating systems and office suites. Surely Microsoft could claim that the *BSDs infringe on similar patents if not the same ones. But the *BSDs do not pose as great a threat to the company. Others have pointed out that Microsoft would be insane to pull an SCO and sue its own customers. Still others have noted that IBM and/or OIN could respond to a patent war with a massive retaliation in patent infringement claims. I have no doubt that Microsoft has lifted a lot of GPL code (more likely algorithms) for Windows, which would prevent Microsoft from following through with its threats. To do so would require that Microsoft open its own code to scrutiny. The list goes on, and others have covered the angles very well. There is one perspective I haven't yet seen, at least not the way I propose to deal with it. This perspective follows below.
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Allegations by Google that Microsoft's new operating system unfairly disadvantages competitors has revived antitrust accusations against Microsoft and opened a front in a bitter war between the two technology giants.