Wall Street Journal

More evidence, if any was needed, that the balance of global mobile telecom power continues to tilt away from the West towards Asia.

China will overtake the US to become the world’s largest mobile phone market by revenue for the first time in 2014, according to a report from Strategy Analytics, a Boston, Massachusetts-based research group.

Mobile phone sales in China will rise 15% to 430 million units in 2014 driven by the country’s rapid shift to 3G and 4G smartphones, and generating a 53% surge in trade -- or wholesale -- revenue to $87 billion in 2014, it forecasts. In contrast, mobile phone sales in the US will flat-line at 163 million units, with revenues up just 4% to $60 billion, it adds. In 2013, both countries recorded almost identical revenue at around $57 billion, reflecting a wide difference in performance. Overall, mobile handset revenues are forecast to grow 13% worldwide during 2014.

Major Asian brands, such as Samsung, Huawei and Lenovo, are aggressively expanding their distribution channels and product ranges across the region to meet strong demand from Chinese consumers for more advanced mobile phones, say analysts. The revenue growth is propelled by a decrease in the ultra-low tier market and an increase in other higher-price range segments.

Google's proposed settlement with European Union antitrust cops is under increasing threat of being revised or scrapped, amid calls to more tightly regulate the Web giant in the run up to European Parliament elections.

Politicians from France and Germany have in recent days ramped up rhetoric against the settlement with Google, which aims to resolve accusations that the company abuses its dominance in online search to promote its own businesses. Germany's economy minister said the deal should be improved. His French counterpart said that the European Commission -- the bloc's executive arm -- should reject it as it stands.

Behind closed doors, commission officials have suggested to opponents that some elements of the deal -- in which Google has pledged to dedicate space for competitors atop its search results --could be revisited, according to people involved in the discussions. Google officials, for their part, have been holding similar meetings to press their case that their settlement is fair, and tougher than regulators might get by pressing formal antitrust charges, people familiar with those meetings said.

"The offers by Google aren't worthless, but they're not nearly enough," said EU Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger, among the 28 commissioners who must approve a settlement before it becomes binding. "We don't want to become a digital colony of global Internet giants," said French Economy Minister Arnaud Montebourg said at an event to oppose the antitrust deal. "It is necessary, indeed urgent, to put in place a framework that guarantees a level playing field" for European companies.

Google and three other Silicon Valley companies recently settled a lawsuit alleging that they agreed not to recruit each other’s employees. Maybe Google didn’t need to worry about poaching.

The search giant ranked as the top US employer for compensation and benefits, according to employee ratings compiled by Glassdoor. Facebook ranked third. Overall, 12 tech companies ranked in the top 25.

How much do Google employees make? Glassdoor shared survey results for software engineers at five top tech firms. Those show software engineers at Google have an average base salary of $128,000. Apple software engineers did slightly better, making $132,000. Facebook’s made $120,000 and Microsoft's and Amazon’s made closer to $111,000 and $105,000 respectively. Of course, salary is not those employees’ only compensation: Perks can include stock options or restricted stock, not to mention free lunch.

The US House of Representatives passed a bill overhauling the National Security Agency's heavily criticized telephone-surveillance program -- the first legislative move responding to revelations about the agency's spying by former government contractor Edward Snowden.

The bill, which passed 303-121, would restructure the way the NSA collects and searches Americans' phone records as it investigates terrorism. Instead of collecting millions of Americans' phone records en masse, the NSA will ask phone companies to query their databases for connections to suspicious phone numbers.

The fate of the bill now lies with the Senate, where the measure received a key endorsement from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT)). He said his committee will take up the bill next month.

However, the House bill faced last-minute opposition from lawmakers concerned that the measure's language had been revised in a way that would expand the scope of spy agency data searches.

Critics have vowed to pursue a more restrictive version of the provisions in the Senate.

"While far from perfect, this bill is an unambiguous statement of congressional intent to rein in the out-of-control NSA," said Laura Murphy of the American Civil Liberties Union. "We will fight to secure additional improvements in the Senate."

Advertising may be coming to your thermostat and lots of other strange places, courtesy of Google.

In a December letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the search giant said that it could be serving ads and other content on “refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities.”

Google made the statement to help justify why it shouldn’t disclose revenue generated from mobile devices, a figure the SEC had requested and that companies like Facebook and Twitter both disclose.

Google argued that it doesn’t make sense to break out mobile revenue since the definition of mobile will “continue to evolve” as more “smart” devices roll out.

“Our expectation is that users will be using our services and viewing our ads on an increasingly wide diversity of devices in the future,” the company said in the filing.

Dish Network currently finds itself on the outside looking in amid the deal mania taking place in the cable and telecom industries. AT&T agreed to acquire DirecTV for $49 billion, a deal that follows Comcast Corp's $45 billion agreement in February to buy Time Warner Cable, Sprint has also been forging ahead on a possible bid for T-Mobile US.

Dish, run by Chairman Charlie Ergen, is noticeably absent from those pacts. Analysts say the company, which has amassed valuable wireless airwaves, needs a partner to start putting that spectrum to use. The more that the industry consolidates without Dish getting in on the activity, the fewer options it will ultimately have when trying to make a deal.

“We’d be surprised if Charlie Ergen sat on the sideline for long,” Credit Suisse analyst Joseph Mastrogiovanni, wrote in a note. “This deal could be a catalyst that causes Dish to act sooner rather than later.”

Ergen has said that Dish wouldn’t compete for DirecTV because the price would be too high, but Mastrogiovanni said he doesn’t necessarily believe him. “We believe he could get involved,” Mastrogiovanni wrote. “If nothing else, a higher bid would force the price up on AT&T.” Still others said regulatory hurdles to such a transaction would be far harder for Dish to clear than AT&T.

SoftBank halted plans to shuffle its Japanese assets, canceling a move that would have resulted in an extra ¥450 billion ($4.4 billion) in the Internet and telecom firm's war chest for acquisitions.

Japan representatives said the company changed its mind after studying the challenges in operating its own network and setting pricing plans. Now all the parties say the deal has been scrapped.

Some investors said they were troubled by corporate-governance issues in the now-abandoned deal. SoftBank was an early investor in Yahoo of the US and retains a small stake in the US firm, which in turn owns 35.5% of Yahoo Japan. In Japan, SoftBank operates one of the big three mobile-phone carriers and owns eAccess, the No. 4 player that specializes in data plans.

If US regulators end up allowing telecom companies to set up fast lanes on the public Internet, companies that make the needed gear say the remaining service would inevitably get a little slower.

The idea of a fast lane, or "paid prioritization," means preferred traffic moving inside broadband providers' networks would be ushered through congested spots first.

The process works a bit like cars moving through a tollgate. When packets of data show up, the equipment that routes them along their way checks to see which ones have paid for priority access and slots those packets into faster moving queues. The rest would have to wait a little longer than they would have otherwise.

"You can reallocate what's in the pipe, but it can't get wider," said Don Bowman, chief technology officer for network-gear maker Sandvine. As an alternative, broadband providers could instead route traffic down separate channels for "managed services" that telecom and cable companies currently use to carry their own services, like video.

When AT&T approached Wall Street about its plan years ago to buy T-Mobile, it shocked bankers with the amount of work it had already done.

"When we got their materials, you sort of threw up your hands and said, 'OK, so what are we going to do on this?'" said one banker who advised on the failed attempt.

The work was the product of AT&T's internal merger team, a group of about 20 people that the company has turned to again and again as it built itself up from a Midwestern regional carrier into the country's largest telecom by revenue. Now, the team is active again with talks to buy satellite-television provider DirecTV in a deal that could be valued at nearly $50 billion, people familiar with the matter said.

Working through such options falls in large part to a deal team that is unusually powerful within the company and unusually independent when it comes to working with Wall Street. The group has completed more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in acquisitions over the past two decades, including debt, according to data from Dealogic.

The team also weighs in on key business decisions. It was called in to review AT&T's initial deal with Apple to carry the iPhone, giving a crucial thumbs-up to the unusual agreement, a person close to the decision said. Its leader, Rick Moore, is present at most AT&T board meetings, other people familiar with the matter said.

Emerging technology that replaces a network's hardware with software may help companies lower their IT costs and potentially provide a platform for new products and sources of revenue.

The transformation under way in the network is an extension of virtualization, which began a generation ago with mainframes and started to have a big impact on servers about a decade ago. That process has been meaningful for businesses from the very start, and CIOs expect that the significance of network virtualization will be just as big.

"Server virtualization was so impactful and led to more cloud computing. Networking people will tell you that network virtualization will be even bigger," American Airlines. CIO Maya Leibman said. IT leaders at companies such as American, Royal Dutch Shell and Mazda North America say they are beginning to explore, and in some cases implement, virtual networks within their own premises.

Telecom providers are rolling out wide area virtual networks, which will have even broader consequences. AT&T said in May that it planned to deploy the first of its virtual network products to big companies by June.

"Now you are talking about going beyond your data center," Leibman said. "Some will ask, why do you even need servers at all? The network can be the backbone of everything that happens in technology. Costs, speed to market and paradigms will be changed."