April 2010

CenturyTel plans to acquire Qwest Communications International for about $10.5 billion to bolster its broadband business and create a new company with operations in 37 states.

The transaction is expected to be "accretive to free cash flow per share, excluding integration costs, immediately following close of the transaction," the company said. The combination had pro-forma 2009 sales of $19.8 billion. The deal includes the assumption of $11.8 billion in Qwest debt. The deal would be the biggest between two U.S-based phone companies since the $28 billion purchase of Alltel Corp. by Verizon Wireless in 2008. CenturyTel has a market value of $10.8 billion while Qwest has a valuation of $9.07 billion. The boards of both companies approved the deal. The deal will "provide us greater scale, scope and expertise and will provide significant benefits for shareholders, customers and our communities," Glen Post, CenturyTel chief executive officer, said. Post will also be CEO of the new company. Qwest shareholders will get 0.1664 CenturyTel shares for each share of Qwest common stock they own at closing. Upon closing of the transaction, CenturyTel shareholders will own about 50.5 percent and Qwest shareholders will own the remainder.

The countries behind the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) finally released a consolidated draft text of the agreement. Though billed as a "trade agreement" about "counterfeiting," ACTA is much more than that: it's an intellectual property treaty in disguise.

Tucked inside the draft are provisions that will prevent people from bypassing digital locks on the items they buy, that will force ISPs to shoulder more of the burden in the fight against online piracy, and that bring US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules to the world. Well, not to the world, exactly. ACTA is more like a select club of countries: Australia, Canada, the European Union countries, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland and the United States of America. But the treaty it develops is really just the next rung on a ladder stretching back to 1886, and it will certainly be wielded like a weapon on the rest of the world in the future. The text is not final—that is due to happen later this year—so if you want to see changes made, the time to act is now. The agreement has already been improved under public pressure, so what's the broader reaction to its release? ars rounded up some of the most interesting reactions. If you want a sense of how the debate over ACTA will play out over the rest of this year, consider these talking points a sneak preview.

As part of our ongoing effort to develop an open platform for WhiteHouse.gov, we're releasing some of the custom code we've developed. This code is available for anyone to review, use, or modify. We're excited to see how developers across the world put our work to good use in their own applications. By releasing some of our code, we get the benefit of more people reviewing and improving it. In fact, the majority of the code for WhiteHouse.gov is already open source as part of the Drupal project. The code we're releasing today adds to Drupal's functionality in three key ways: 1) Scalability, 2) Communication, 3) Accessibility.

Last week Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-Virginia) signed SB 675, a health insurance bill that mandates coverage for telemedicine services. It requires insurers to cover all telemedicine services, making Virginia the 14th state to enact such legislation. According to the American Telemedicine Association, 23 states currently allow for Medicaid reimbursement, while California, Hawaii, New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Texas have telemedicine legislation pending.