FTC Chair Asked to Step Down From DoubleClick Review
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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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WASHINGTON -- The chairman of a Senate antitrust panel said Thursday that Google Inc.'s proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of online advertising firm DoubleClick Inc. "warrants close examination" by federal regulators.
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FTC shakes down Seismic Entertainment Productions
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The Center for Digital Democracy and the Electronic Privacy Information Center have jointly renewed their request that the FTC consider privacy issues in its ruling on the antitrust implications of the proposed Google-DoubleClick merger.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC)Â needs to step up its regulation of the telecommunications and broadband industries and reverse its current opposition to net neutrality rules, two consumer groups said Wednesday. Representatives of the Consumers Union and the Consumer Federation of America criticized the FTC for a lack of focus on telecom and broadband issues while testifying before the U.S. Senate's Interstate Commerce, Trade, and Tourism Subcommittee. The FTC has "failed consumers badly" by insisting there is strong competition in the broadband space and therefore not in need of regulation, said Mark Cooper, director of the Consumer Federation of America. The U.S. has fallen from the world leader in Internet service a decade ago to lagging behind several countries in speed and price, he said. "The cozy [broadband] duopoly in America dribbles out bandwidth at 10 to 20 times what other people pay in the world," Cooper said. "Consumers pay too much for too little in this country." Cooper and Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat and subcommittee chairman, both complained aboutÂ an FTC report in June that questioned the need for net neutrality rulesÂ that would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or slowing Web content from competitors. Dorgan noted that telecom providers had Internet content nondiscrimination rules in place until the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and the Supreme Court removed them in 2005. Without such rules, large broadband providers could block innovative new companies from reaching customers if they require e-commerce vendors to pay extra fees, he said. "We won't know what we miss, we won't know what we squelch," said Dorgan, who has sponsored a net neutrality bill. "What we built, we built with nondiscrimination regulations." But Deborah Platt Majoras, the FTC's chairwoman, said the Internet is changing so fast that new regulations would have unintended consequences andÂ could stop broadband providers from prioritizing traffic that consumers demand be faster, such as video downloads. The FTC sees little evidence of Web content discrimination occurring, she said. "No way is Verizon or any of these other companies powerful enough to disrupt the amount of consumer-generated content that's out there," Majoras said. "If they suddenly put a stop to that, there will be a hue and cry across this nation like no tomorrow, and they will lose a lot of customers." Majoras called on Congress to wait with net-neutrality regulations until there's a problem with blocked content. Dorgan disagreed. "I think both the lack of informed public policy and the lack of effective competition means we have one-twentieth the speed at twice the price of Internet service that many of our foreign competitors have," he said. "My hope is that you'll agree with me that rather than wait for bad things to happen, we might want to preserve the same nondiscrimination rules that we've always had." In addition to the net-neutrality debate, Chris Murray, senior counsel at Consumers Union, called on the FTC to keep a close eye on advertising for bundled telecom services, such as voice, data, and television service together. In some cases, advertising for bundled services has not reflected the real prices, Murray said. In addition, broadband providers have cut off customers for using too much bandwidth without defining a limit on bandwidth. "If that's not an unfair and deceptive practice, I don't know what is," Murray said.
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The chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission recommended against additional regulation of high-speed Internet traffic.
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By Josh Dubow  SAN FRANCISCO  --  The Federal Trade Commission has opened an antitrust investigation into Google Inc.'s proposed $3.1 billion purchase of ad-management technology company DoubleClick Inc.
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Hewlett-Packard's chairwoman says to step down if required    LOS ANGELES, Sept. 8 (Xinhua) -- Hewlett-Packard Co. Chairwoman Patricia Dunn said on Friday that she would resign if requested by the company's board.
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DoubleClick, the one-time darling of dot-com advertising, is on the block, The Post has learned. DoubleClick, which has seen its fortunes steadily decline since the Internet
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Oracle Corp. on Monday said it asked Peoplesoft Inc.&#39;s board of directors to rescind an anti-takeover provision, two days after a majority of PeopleSoft shareholders tendered their
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(InfoWorld) - Two consumer protection groups are asking the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate FastMP3Search.com.ar, a Web site that distributes software that can be used to search for digital music on the Web. The FastMP3Search plugin disables the Windows Firewall, installs adware and Trojan horse programs, and generally hobbles the user's PC, said John Palfrey, the Harvard Law School professor who is StopBadware.org's co-director. The software is also virtually impossible to remove once installed, he added. StopBadware.org and the Center for Democracy and Technology plan to file a formal complaint with the FTC on Thursday. "We are asking the FTC to take a close look at an application that we consider to be the worst of the bad applications that we've seen over the course of the last year," Palfrey said. Representatives from FastMP3Search.com.ar could not be reached immediately for comment. The Web site is registered to a company called Direct S.A., based in Buenos Aires, according to the Network Information Center Argentina domain name database. StopBadware.org was also unable to reach representatives from the company before filing its complaint Palfrey said. The company's Web site tells users that the software will provide a fast way to search the Internet for downloadable music files, "in exchange for your agreement to also install our plugin software, which may occasionally display ads on your computer." Although the FTC has sought court orders to shut down Web sites in the past, the fact that FastMP3Search.com.ar appears to be based in Argentina complicates matters, Palfrey admitted. Still the FTC has worked on international efforts to fight spam and online fraud. "When an application is hosted outside of the U.S., but is plainly affecting U.S. consumers, they can coordinate with other governments," Palfrey said. "We would hope that they would start an investigation of this application." FTC representatives could not be reached immediately for comment. Formed earlier this year with funding from Google Inc. Lenovo Group Ltd., and Sun Microsystems Inc., StopBadware.org has issued reports on dozens of software products that engage in questionable or downright malicious behavior. It has exposed problems in everything from Kazaa to the Jessica Simpson Screensaver, to AOL LLC's free client.
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DoubleClick (DCLK:Nasdaq - news - research) vaulted higher Monday after announcing it had hired a financial adviser to explore options that include a possible sale of the company.
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A Fool sees the CEO of a company he owns step down. What now?
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The FTC has taken legal action in an effort to shut down Seismic Entertainment Productions and SmartBot.Net -- two companies that have become notorious as distributors of spyware.
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Perhaps this morning's FTC blessing of Google's intended merger with DoubleClick was no surprise, but a read of the final decision reveals an astonishing reason: The Commission claims it wouldn't really have the authority to stop it.
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Google Inc. has hired a former Justice Department official to lobby the federal government on its proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick Inc., which is being reviewed by antitrust regulators.
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has asked a federal court to require an alleged Web page hijacking operation to obey previous orders barring unfair and deceptive practices.Walter Rines, business partner Sanford Wallace, and Rines&#39; company, Online Turbo Merchant, diverted users of MySpace.com to other Web sites and barraged them with ads to earn advertising commissions, according to court papers filed with the FTC. The defendants used pagejacking, phishing, and other methods to target MySpace users in violation of a previous court order, the FTC said in a news release.The FTC, in a Jan. 23 filing, asked the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire to order the defendants to give up the money they earned from their MySpace scheme.Rines&#39; listed phone number in New Hampshire was disconnected.In October 2005, the FTC charged Odysseus Marketing and its owner, Rines, with luring consumers to their Web site by offering free software, including a program that supposedly allowed them to engage in anonymous peer-to-peer file sharing. The software was bundled with spyware that intercepted and replaced search results and barraged consumers&#39; computers with pop-up ads, the FTC said. The software also stole users&#39; personal information, and users were unable to locate or uninstall the spyware through reasonable means, the FTC said.The FTC alleged that the defendants&#39; software captured consumers&#39; personal information and transmitted the information to the defendants&#39; servers. Consumers were unable to locate or uninstall the spyware through reasonable means, the agency charged. The court ordered a preliminary halt to these practices pending trial, and in October 2006 Odysseus and Rines settled the charges by stipulating to a permanent injunction.The permanent injunction prohibited the defendants from redirecting consumers&#39; computers; from changing any Web browser&#39;s default home page; and from modifying or replacing the functions of any computer application. It required Rines and his company to obtain consumers&#39; express consent before downloading or distributing any content to their computers.The permanent injunction also imposed a $1.75 million judgment, and all but $10,000 was suspended based on the defendants&#39; inability to pay.In its recent filing, the FTC alleges that Rines, his company, and Wallace knew of the permanent injunction and violated that order by diverting users from MySpace.com to their Web sites.