April 2011

Public interest groups urged the Federal Communications Commission to group together review of AT&T’s proposed merger with T-Mobile and AT&T’s acquisition of spectrum from Qualcomm. The point, the groups said in a letter, is to show that if both mergers are complete, AT&T will disproportionately own too much 3G and 4G radiowaves and give it too much advantage over other carriers. The mergers “would further empower an already dominant wireless carrier to leverage its control over devices, backhaul, and consumers in ways that stifle competition,” Free Press, Media Access Project, Public Knowledge, Consumers Union and the Open Technology Initiative of the New America Foundation said in their letter. “As with other mergers, the competitive impact of the two transactions in combination may be even greater than the impact of each separately.”

In a separate letter, Sprint, the Rural Cellular Association, Cincinnati Bell Wireless, MetroPCS and others also told the FCC to combine the proceedings. Steven Berry, the president of RCA, said: “It is clear that AT&T is doing everything possible to gain market dominance by making not one but two major spectrum grabs … Neither of these transactions will benefit consumers nor provide a path to restore competition to the wireless marketplace.”

Responding to accusations that the iPhone tracks users with an unencrypted file, Apple said the file is part of a crowd-sourced database of WiFi hotspots and cell towers that stores so much information — up to a year of location data — because of a bug in its latest version of iOS.

Individual users cannot be located based on the data, the company said. Apple said it sees no reason to store data for more than seven days and will fix the bug in an upcoming update. Apple said it will update software to fix three issues in iOS 4: It will reduce the size of the database file on each individual handset, stop backing up the cache and delete the cache if users opt out of location services. The company will also encrypting the cache in its next major software release, making it more difficult to access the file should a phone fall into the wrong hands.

Privacy — like sex and money — is craved by many people. But in the Digital Age — with the insidious ease of online trackers, global positioning system devices and omnipresent security cams — privacy is becoming an increasingly rare commodity.

The more rare something is, the more valuable it is. The more valuable it is, the more savvy entrepreneurs want to traffic in it — buy and sell, swap and pawn. And so we are seeing the rise of a new economy — commerce that works overtime to give the rest of us some alone time. "We trade privacy for security," says Bob Garfield, advertising critic and author of The Chaos Scenario: Amid the Ruins of Mass Media, the Choice for Business is Stark: Listen or Perish. "We trade it for cents off at the supermarket cashier, so that Safeway knows exactly what ointments you use and in what quantity. Online, with varying degrees of awareness, we trade it for utility." Every step we take, every move we make, somebody's watching us. "Google searches, Foursquare check-ins and even basic browsing leave a practically neon trail," Garfield says. "And on Facebook, we trade privacy for a sense of community; we fear Big Brother, but we tell lots of 'little brothers' everything." For the first time in human history, Garfield says, privacy is extremely scarce "and therefore should be increasingly valuable. I'd call it the Garbo Economy, for people who just want to be left alone."

CenturyLink, the Louisiana-based fixed-line phone and Internet company that just completed its acquisition of Qwest, agreed to buy Savvis for $2.5 billion to add services that let business customers store and access data and applications online.

Savvis stockholders will receive $40 a share, consisting of $30 in cash and about $10 in CenturyLink shares, the companies said today in a statement. That’s 11 percent more than Savvis’s closing price April 26. CenturyLink will also assume about $700 million of debt. The purchase lets CenturyLink Chief Executive Officer Glen Post add so-called cloud-computing services as he seeks to offset declining home-phone demand and challenge larger rivals such as Verizon Communications Inc. Verizon agreed in January to buy Savvis competitor Terremark Worldwide Inc. for $1.4 billion.