Bloomberg

Amazon’s treatment of customers means more to US antitrust authorities than how the largest Web retailer pressures publishers and movie studios.

Successfully going after Amazon at this stage “would be breaking new territory under the antitrust laws,” David Balto, a former policy director at the Federal Trade Commission, said.

That hasn’t damped debate about the tactics Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos is using against Hachette Book Group, Walt Disney and film studio Warner Bros. The question is whether he’s pushing Amazon toward the same monopolistic territory that tripped up Microsoft, Standard Oil and AT&T.

[Commentary] However one feels about municipal broadband as a matter of public policy, as a matter of law the Federal Communications Commission has no authority to preempt state laws limiting municipal entry into the broadband marketplace under Section 706 which sanctions regulation to ensure competitiveness.

Indeed, when the Supreme Court first looked at the issue of preemption in municipal broadband in Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League, the Supreme Court went out of its way to note that “it is well to put aside” the public policy arguments favoring municipal broadband to support any “generous conception of preemption.”

Why? Because the issue of preemption is one of statutory interpretation and, as such, “the issue does not turn on the merits of municipal telecommunications services.”

[Spiwak is president of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies]

Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox withdrew its unsolicited takeover offer of $75 billion for Time Warner, giving up after the attempt to reshape the media industry sent Fox shares tumbling and Time Warner’s board refused to engage in talks.

Telefonica offered to buy Vivendi’s Brazilian Internet-provider unit GVT for 6.7 billion euros ($9 billion) to expand in a fast-growing broadband market and address antitrust concerns in the country.

Vivendi would get 11.96 billion reais ($5.3 billion) in cash and shares in Telefonica’s Brazil unit. Vivendi would also get a right to buy a stake of about 8 percent in Telecom Italia from Telefonica.

Ericsson AB’s Telcordia Technologies was fairly recommended over Neustar as the winner of a telephone-numbers management contract, associations representing the largest US telephone companies told regulators. The Federal Communications Commission shouldn’t reopen bidding and should “promptly” move to award the contract, CTIA-The Wireless Association and the US Telecom Association wrote in a filing.

A private-equity company owned by a campaign donor to President Barack Obama won a waiver from the Federal Communications Commission that may help it bid in airwaves auctions.

Grain Management may not have qualified for benefits reserved for small businesses because airwaves leases to AT&T and Verizon Communications caused it to exceed the program’s income limits.

“Certainly there has not been a waiver like this,” Andrew Jay Schwartzman, a Georgetown University law professor, said. “The circumstances have not arisen” with the revenue of the largest wireless providers entering the picture.

David Grain contributed more than $60,000 to President Obama’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee in 2008, and $22,500 in 2012, Federal Election Commission filings show. He was also one of President Obama’s top fundraisers for the 2008 election, bringing in $200,000 to $500,000, according to the campaign.

“We are very excited about the waiver” because it appears to relax rules for companies other than Grain, too, and may help small and minority businesses participate in the forthcoming wireless auctions, Nicol Turner-Lee, vice president at the Minority Media & Telecom Council, said.

Verizon Communications, the largest US wireless carrier, exceeded profit estimates on stronger customer gains even as rivals including T-Mobile US brought more price competition to the industry.

While subscriber growth drove the profit gains, wireless margins and the size of customers’ phone bills were smaller than analysts expected. More than 82 percent of those new customers were tablet buyers, Verizon said.

With the company selling more tablets than phones and offering discounts on data plans, customers’ monthly phone bills will likely shrink, putting more pressure on wireless margins, said Kevin Smithen, an analyst with Macquarie Securities USA.

The average size of customers’ monthly bills grew 4.7 percent to $159.73. Verizon’s wireless service margins expanded to 50.3 percent. Verizon’s Edge plan spreads the phone charges over 20 months and lowers service plan charges by $10 or $25 a month depending on the data allotment.

While the shift threatens to erode wireless service revenue and margins, the move may help keep customers from switching to T-Mobile, which was the first carrier to offer phone financing in early 2013.

[Commentary] Twenty-first Century Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch's plan makes sense, and Jeffrey Bewkes, Time Warner's whip-smart chief executive officer, will eventually find a partner. Why?

Because even very powerful programmers such as Time Warner need increased heft to deal with the ever-more-concentrated US distribution market.

To control their own destiny, to ensure that they're able to reach viewers on their own terms (rather than paying unlimited tribute to ComcastTimeWarnerCable), programmers will need all the firepower they can muster. That means having as much sports and high-value content as possible on their side of the table. In turn, that means getting bigger.

[Crawford is John A. Reilly visiting professor in intellectual property at Harvard Law School]

The Forbes family, an emblem of American wealth and pioneer of business journalism, is giving up control over the media empire it cultivated for almost a century by selling a majority stake to a Hong Kong-based group.

The transaction valued Forbes Media at $475 million, said a person with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the terms are private. The agreement will hand over Forbes magazine and its widely followed ranking of the world’s richest people to a collection of investors led by Integrated Asset Management (Asia), founded by investor Tak Cheung Yam, Forbes said.

Opposition from incumbent spectrum license holders like 3G and 4G wireless service providers and TV broadcasters has either halted or greatly slowed the regulatory processes surrounding TV white spaces in scores of countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa, which in turn has discouraged manufacturers from building new white-spaces devices, chipsets, and infrastructure.

In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission's coming auction of broadcast TV spectrum to mobile carriers has added another layer of complexity and uncertainty, with reverberations being felt not just in Silicon Valley but down the entire global supply chain. And yet, despite all this unsettledness, white spaces are starting to find a place in the spectrum policies of developed and emerging economies alike.

Slowly and methodically, regulators in a growing number of countries are laying the groundwork to leave at least some white space unlicensed -- and useable for broadband.