FTC head won't recuse from Google deal
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The head of the Federal Trade Commission said Friday she won't remove herself from an antitrust review of Google Inc.'s purchase of online advertising company DoubleClick, rebuffing requests from privacy groups opposed to the transaction.
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InfoWorld - An online advertiser that drove traffic to its Web sites by sending out spam with misleading subject lines has agreed to settle a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC)Â complaint charging that it failed to tell consumers they had to spend money to receive so-called free products, the FTC announced Wednesday.
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Korean FTC acts The Korean Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) has told Google to rewrite sections of its AdSense contracts which empower Google to unilaterally cancel any deal, and are considered unfair under Korean law.â¦
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Google Inc., fighting to consolidate its trademark globally, faces an obstacle in the world's second-largest Web market: China's Gmail.cn is refusing to sell its Internet address to the US giant.
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Two consumer groups Wednesday asked a federal official to recuse herself from an antitrust review of Google Inc.'s $3.1 billion purchase of Doubleclick.
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InfoWorld - Google&#39;s claims that&#160;Microsoft&#39;s built-in Vista desktop indexing and search tool violates its antitrust agreement&#160;could be difficult to prove even if the software does slow down the performance of Google&#39;s competitive Google Desktop offering.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigatingÂ Google's proposed $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick, according to news reports Tuesday. The investigation began at the end of last week as a result of concerns over privacy issues and the potential for anti-competitive practices, the New York Times reported, quoting anonymous sources. The two companies announced the all-cash agreement last month, with both Google and Microsoft pursuing the online advertising company, as the competition between the two for a greater share of the online ad market increases. Privacy groups, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD),Â filed a complaint with the FTCÂ on April 20, asking that the government agency block the merger unless Google will ensure users' privacy, including deleting information that could identify an individual user once that user ends his or her session with a Google site. Antitrust issues are likely to be of greater concern than privacy ones, with regulators more concerned about the merger's effect on other online ad players and their ability to compete against the new combined entity, the report said. Â
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The Results Group, a telemarketing firm that sold Web site services, has been banned from further phone sales and will return $435,000 to customers under a settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
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Federal Trade Commission Chair Deborah Platt Majoras is being asked to recuse herself from a review of Google's planned DoubleClick acquisition.
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Don't expect a patent deal between Microsoft and Ubuntu Linux distributor Canonical anytime soon. CEO Mark Shuttleworth says he won't pay for something he thinks has no legal merit.
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC)&#160;has settled a complaint with a Web-based company it accused of selling people&#39;s telephone records without permission, the agency said Monday.The settlement with CEO Group, doing business as Check Em Out, bars the company and its operator Scott Joseph from marketing or selling phone records, and it requires the company to give up $25,000 of its profits from selling phone records. Selling phone records to third parties is illegal under federal law, the FTC had charged.The FTC in May 2006 filed complaints in U.S. court against five Web-based companies that obtained and sold confidential phone records to third parties. In addition to the settlement with CEO Group, the FTC has settled two other cases and obtained a default judgment against a fourth company. The complaint against the fifth company is still active.The FTC&#39;s complaints came after complaints from privacy groups and members of the U.S. Congress about pretexting, when someone obtains a telephone customers&#39; records without permission under false pretexts. In many cases, companies offering phone records over the Internet were calling telephone carriers and pretending to be the targeted customer. In September 2006,&#160;Hewlett-Packard revealed it had been spying on some of its board members and journalists in an attempt to uncover the source of boardroom leaks, and HP officials later said their investigators had used pretexting to obtain phone records.The Telecommunications Act of 1996 prohibits customers&#39; phone records from being disclosed unless &quot;upon affirmative written request by the customer.&quot; The FTC charged the five Web-based companies of engaging in unfair business practices.The settlement with CEO Group prohibits it from obtaining, marketing or selling consumer phone records or other consumer personal information except where allowed by law, the FTC said in a news release. The settlement, approved by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, includes a judgment of $222,381, the amount the company earned by selling phone records, but the defendants said they were able to pay only $25,000. If the court finds that the defendants misrepresented their finances, the entire amount will be due, the FTC said.
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Google has won a trade mark dispute, with a District Court judge finding that the search engineâs sale of sponsored search terms âGeicoâ and âGeico Directâ did not breach car insurance firm GEICOâs rights in the trade marked terms.
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A U.S. District Court judge yesterday declined to address a petition by Google that asked the government to extend its antitrust oversight of Microsoft.
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David C. Drummond, Google Inc.'s top attorney, agreed yesterday to pay nearly $700,000 to settle allegations by the Securities and Exchange Commission that, in his former job at a New Hampshire technology training firm , he failed to keep proper accounting controls in place, officials said yesterday.
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(InfoWorld) - An operation that allegedly installed illegal spyware on computers will give more than US$2 million to settle a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) complaint. The FTC has obtained a settlement order against Enternet Media Inc., Conspy & Co. Inc., Lida Rohbani, Nima Hakimi and Baback Hakimi, all based in California, the agency announced Wednesday. The defendants distributed software called Search Miracle, Miracle Search, EM Toolbar, EliteBar and Elite Toolbar, the FTC said. In an order issued by Judge Christine Snyder of the U.S District Court for Central California, the defendants are prohibited from interfering with computer use, such as distributing software code that tracks Internet activity, changes browser settings and inserts new advertising toolbars onto browsers. The defendants also are permanently prohibited from making misleading representations regarding the performance, features, and cost, of any software, including misrepresenting that the code is an Internet browser upgrade or other computer security software, music, song, lyric or cell phone ring tone. The Web sites of the defendants and their affiliates caused installation boxes to pop up on consumersâ computer screens, the FTC said in its complaint. In one variation of the scheme, the boxes offered a variety of freeware, including music files, cell phone ring tones, photographs, wallpaper and song lyrics. In another, the boxes warned that consumersâ Internet browsers were defective, and offered free browser upgrades or security patches. Users who downloaded the supposed freeware or security upgrades did not receive what they were promised, Instead, their computers were infected with spyware that interfered with their computers and was difficult to uninstall, the FTC said. The defendants' software tracked Internet activity, changed home-page settings and inserted a large frame onto browser windows that displayed advertisements, the FTC said. At the FTCâs request, the court froze the operationâs assets last fall and ordered it shut down. The settlement requires the defendants to give up just over $2 million of their spyware-related profits and includes a suspended judgment of $8.5 million. The FTC brought the case with assistance from Microsoft Corp., Webroot Software Inc. and Google Inc., the agency said.
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U.S. Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras is consulting with the agency&#39;s ethics officer to see if she should recuse herself from a review of&#160;Google&#39;s planned acquisition of online ad network DoubleClick.On Wednesday, two technology lobbying organizations called on Majoras to recuse herself, citing her husband&#39;s involvement in the matter. John Majoras is a partner with Jones Day, the law firm that is advising DoubleClick on antitrust issues relating to the US$3.1 billion buyout. Jones Day representatives, including John Majoras, did not immediately return calls seeking comment.Chairman Majoras &quot;has previously recused herself in similar matters for similar reasons where there was a lesser conflict of interest,&quot; representatives of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) wrote in a complaint submitted to the U.S. regulator late Wednesday. &quot;It is clear that she must recuse herself now.&quot;The chairman is now reviewing the matter with the FTC&#39;s chief ethics officer, Christian White, but an FTC spokeswoman on Wednesday downplayed the possible conflict of interest. John Majoras&#39; law firm has not appeared before the FTC in this matter, according to FTC spokeswoman Claudia Farrell. &quot;We learned only yesterday that Jones Day is representing DoubleClick before the European Commission, not the Federal Trade Commission,&quot; she said.Even so, the Jones Day connection may have influenced FTC staffers or the chairman herself, said Jeff Chester, executive director with the CDD. &quot;There&#39;s no question that there&#39;s a stealth set of influences here that could have shaped the staff opinion,&quot; he said. &quot;We do not know what impact it might have on the chairman.&quot;Jones Day is advising DoubleClick on &quot;international and U.S. antitrust and competition law aspects of its planned $3.1 billion acquisition by Google,&quot; the law firm says in a note on its Web site.The deal has come under scrutiny from regulators in the U.S. and Europe who are examining whether it will give Google too much control over the Internet advertising market and too much data on the online behavior of its users.&#160;
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The U.S. FTC said it will not block Google's acquisition of DoubleClick, concluding that the deal "is unlikely to substantially lessen competition."