The European Commission, which acts as the EU’s competition watchdog, is investigating whether Samsung’s past use of injunctions against Apple Inc. prevented competition.

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The European Commission has given the company a new deadline of January 2013, said EC competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia. At that point, Google is supposed to produce a “detailed commitment text.”

Almunia said his organization has “substantially reduced our differences” with Google since he first opened the door to preliminary settlement talks earlier this year.

That’s a significant change from expectations that Almunia might litigate against Google, given that he has relatively more power to do so under European laws than the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which is in the process of backing down from the brink of a formal complaint, as well.

Almunia’s new statement comes on the heels of Schmidt visiting him in person in Brussels today.

The FTC was also expected to announce a settlement agreement with Google over search, search advertising and standards-essential patents early this week. That hasn’t happened yet, but will likely take place tomorrow.

Both the FTC and the EC have pulled back on broader claims against Google. The FTC agreement this week is expected to cover issues such as scraping content to display in search results, something Google had already pulled back on. According to sources, as well as many reports, the FTC is expected to delve more deeply into the more knotty issue of search bias, where competitors charge that Google preferences its own services over those of competitors.

Almunia, however, made sure to point to the search result display issue today, listing it first among his concerns, as he has before.

Even so, this latest date of January is yet one more in a long string of deadlines.

Google, as ever, said of Almunia’s statement today, “We continue to work cooperatively with the European Commission.”

On a related note, Samsung today dropped five standards-essential patent injunction applications against Apple in Europe, so that broader issue is calming down, too.

Here’s Almunia’s full statement:

After meeting Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, today in Brussels, I have decided to continue with the process towards reaching an agreement based on Article 9 of the EU Antitrust regulation.

Since our preliminary talks with Google started in July, we have substantially reduced our differences regarding possible ways to address each of the four competition concerns expressed by the Commission.

These concerns relate to:

- the way in which Google’s vertical search services are displayed within general search results as compared to services of competitors;

- the way Google may use and display third party content on its vertical search services;

- exclusivity agreements for the delivery of Google search advertisements on other websites; and

- restrictions in the portability of AdWords advertising campaigns.

On the basis of the progress made, I now expect Google to come forward with a detailed commitment text in January 2013.

We will then prepare a Preliminary Assessment formally setting out our concerns. The Preliminary Assessment would serve as a basis for Google to present formal commitments which would then be market-tested, leading to a possible decision with binding commitments.

According to sources close to the company, Yahoo is prepping to launch a major overhaul of Yahoo Mail — which sources said has a cleaner, “more Gmail-like” look.

I am not clear exactly what that means in terms of features and design. But sources said the goal of the redo — which has been initiated by new CEO Marissa Mayer, who is also pushing ahead with a new homepage design — is to better compete with the fast-growing mail offering from Google.

“Marissa thinks Yahoo Mail has been a big missed opportunity for the company and she wants to fix that,” said one person with knowledge of the effort, which had also been mulled by previous CEO Scott Thompson.

Sources said the latest iteration of Yahoo Mail will be released in early December, just after the new homepage is rolled out widely.

That’s a lot of change at a critical money-making time for Yahoo, but Mayer — a former top Google product exec — has publicly committed the company to releasing innovative and mobile-focused products as a key differentiator.

It’s a good idea when it comes to Yahoo Mail, even though it got a major refresh just about a year ago. At the time, the first change in five years got good reviews, with a cleaner design, Twitter and Facebook integration, improved spam filters and speedier delivery.

Unfortunately, since then, Google’s Gmail has become the most popular email service in the world, passing Microsoft’s Hotmail (which is now called Outlook.com after a recent rejiggering), according to recent stats from comScore. That has added up to Gmail’s 287.9 million monthly unique visitors worldwide, 286.2 million for Microsoft’s email product and 281.7 million for Yahoo Mail.

Still, in the U.S. at least, Yahoo is holding onto its longtime — though dwindling — lead, with 76.7 million using Google’s email product and 35.5 million using Microsoft’s.

It’s an important spot to maintain for Yahoo, since many of the users of its products now come to the site to access email and it has been a key driver to its content properties.

But to keep mindshare, Yahoo faces increasingly strong competition. Google’s Gmail released a series of solid improvements last fall. In addition, along with the positively reviewed Microsoft Outlook.com redo, AOL has just announced a new email product called Alto. While it is in beta to a small audience, it is aiming to help users with multiple email accounts organize them better.

In others words, the mail business — especially using it via smartphones and tablets — is another place Yahoo has to make sure it remains innovative.

Paramount Pictures

That remains to be seen. But make no mistake, the jury’s decision in this landmark case will almost certainly have some bearing on the evolving definition of anticompetitiveness in fast-changing fields like the mobile device industry.

Samsung’s view is that Apple has behaved anticompetitively by using its intellectual property to hamstring rivals. “Rather than compete in the marketplace, Apple is seeking to gain an edge in the courtroom,” Verhoeven argued. “It’s seeking to block its biggest and most serious competitor from even attending the game.” If Apple should prevail in court, he warned, the tech industry will become a collection of “giant conglomerates, armed with patent arsenals, that block competition and reduce choices for consumers.”

Given the sheer amount of litigation in the mobile device industry these days, Verhoeven’s argument does ring somewhat true. But it doesn’t really account for companies that legitimately need to protect their hard-won innovations from others that might feel entitled to borrow or emulate them.

And that was the point Apple hammered home again and again in its closing arguments: It isn’t the anticompetitive player here; Samsung is. And by allegedly copying Apple’s designs, Samsung has paved the way for others to do the same, robbing those designs of their uniqueness.

“Apple took five years to bring the iPhone revolution to us,” Apple attorney William Lee said in his closing. “Samsung took three months to copy it. … We have to protect our investment in these innovations. Because if we don’t, we won’t have people like Apple spending five years in a room coming up with a device that revolutionizes the mobile phone.”

In other words, companies should compete on the strength of their own innovations, not those of their rivals. And that argument, too, rings true. After all, where’s the incentive to innovate if you’re certain to see your innovation ingested by a competitor and used against you?

Two reasonably compelling arguments, and it’s obviously impossible to predict how they’ll play with the jury weighing the case. As Stanford law school professor Mark Lemley told AllThingsD, there’s merit in both.

“Apple presented the intellectual property view of innovation — we created it, we own it, you can’t use it,” Lemley said. “Samsung presented the competition view of innovation — everyone should make great products and let consumers choose. IP law generally sides with Apple at this broad level, though there is a pretty good argument that it is competition, not monopoly, that drives great innovation in the IT space.”

Apple versus Samsung Full Coverage

This comes through in spades in many of the pitches we hear. In fact, there are six phrases we hear repeatedly from entrepreneurs — our sweet spot is Enterprise IT — that automatically set off alarms. This is intended in a sincerely light-hearted manner, but perhaps also as a heads up. They are:

• “These projections are conservative.” Ninety-nine percent of the time those same financial projections turn out to have been overly aggressive. In reality, we don’t obsess about the exact numbers that are presented to us; we care much more about the thinking that went into producing the projections.
• “The market is enormous for this.” It’s easy enough to create a spreadsheet showing huge market estimates. But often there is no market — yet. Or there is no proof that there will be one. A huge task for any start-up is cultivating the market so that the potential is fulfilled.
• “Look at these great customers who have expressed interest in buying our product.” These can be very impressive lists, but unfortunately they are often dominated by early discussions rather than companies lining up to write a check. It’s usually a long, painful road to close those early lighthouse customers.
• “We have no competition.” Hmm. Maybe there is a reason why. You might think this is a good thing, but usually it’s not.
• “No one else can recreate this technology.” When it comes to competition, former Intel chief Andy Grove’s quote comes to mind: “Only the paranoid survive.” It’s important never to underestimate the other market players.
• “Google [or Microsoft, etc.] will play nice with us.” Please re-read Mr. Grove’s words of wisdom from above.

As investors, it’s essential for us to believe in and support the entrepreneurs we back. And while an entrepreneur’s blind optimism might lead to a slightly altered view of reality, I realize how important it is for entrepreneurs to believe 100 percent in what they are doing. So all joking aside, I actually find it a little concerning if an entrepreneur doesn’t have some aspects of this blind optimism. How can you successfully achieve the near impossible if you don’t believe you are destined to succeed?

Luke Burns is a Partner at Ascent Venture Partners, where he works with innovative early stage companies with a focus on mobility, data analytics and security. Earlier in his career, Luke was co-founder and CEO of e-commerce software provider Emercis Corporation, and he also has held consulting roles with Bain & Co. Luke holds an AB in chemistry and physics from Harvard University, and an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

“Whether it’s instant rice, country-style rice, boil-in-a-bag rice, or smartphones, Uncle Ben’s has always been committed to innovation.”

– The Onion, in an article parodying the crowded smartphone market

Justice Department officials have spoken to several online video providers, including Netflix Inc. and Hulu LLC, those people said. Investigators have also questioned Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc. and other cable companies about issues such as setting data caps, limits to the amount of data a subscriber can download each month, these people said.

Representatives of all those companies and the Justice Department declined to comment on the investigation.

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Google said in a quarterly regulatory filing that Argentina’s Competition Commission and South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission have each opened investigations into “certain business practices” at the Mountain View, Calif.-based company.

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Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

Or, at least, that was the undertone of eBay’s conference call yesterday.

The company reported strong first-quarter results, beating both top- and bottom-line projections. It also raised guidance for the year, and said its business is stronger than it has been in five years.

“Our marketplaces business has turned the corner, shifting from defense to offense, and is delivering accelerating results,” said eBay’s CEO John Donahoe in the call.

This morning, the San Jose company’s stock was up nearly 16 percent, soaring to $41.58 a share. The rally easily pushes the company’s stock past its previous 52-week high of $38.18.

A number of years ago, eBay had hit rock bottom, sort of like Yahoo or AOL today.

Since then, Donahoe has been working hard to reinvent the entire eBay.com experience. He says the first quarter results are the first indication that the work is starting to pay off.

“It’s a significantly improved experience, and it’s not just current users, but it’s new users, who are coming to eBay and saying they really like it — maybe they haven’t been here in 10 years, but they are saying ‘Wow, this is different,’” Donahoe said in an interview. ”The pace of innovation is accelerating.”

The revival was fueled by a new TV advertising campaign around the holidays that had the tagline “Get it new, get it now,” which highlighted the company’s fixed price business. During the quarter, the company’s fixed priced business grew 18 percent. The company said the number of new buyers on the site also was up 9.5 percent in the quarter.

The company’s first quarter revenues totaled $3.3 billion, an increase of 29 percent year over year. For the same period, net income totaled $570 million, increasing 20 percent.

The strong results were attributable to the turnaround in its marketplaces business, but also PayPal and the recently acquired GSI Commerce division.

During the quarter, PayPal revenue increased 32 percent year over year to $1.3 billion, and GSI generated $715 million in merchandise sales, up 26 percent over the same period a year earlier.

In addition to conducting a turnaround, eBay is also aggressively pushing into new markets.

With PayPal, it’s rolling out new payments services, like mobile payments and in-store payments at check-out. With the help of GSI and a new division called X.commerce, the company is also concentrating on building tools that third-party offline and online retailers can use to more effectively compete against Amazon.

It is both of those businesses that Donahoe is tremendously excited about.

Yesterday, I reported that Square, which is a start-up in the mobile payments space, was attempting to raise capital at a $4 billion valuation — providing some validation to a similar PayPal product called Here.

“What I’m enormously excited about is I think PayPal Here has real capabilities that are even better than Square’s,” he said. “I think there’s enormous growth in that sector.”

And the winner is … Jason Harper for “In this Shop.”

The winner, that is, of Getty Images’ innovative Mishmash creative challenge, in which anyone can submit a film from one to three minutes long, as long as it was created using Getty Images’ video, music and imagery content.

Harper’s video, which depicts a classic city barbershop, won the Global Grand Prix title, out of 300 entries worldwide. Winners were also selected for three other global regions.

Here is Harper’s winning video, set to a poem by Mark Anthony Thomas, which he called “an ode to a place I grew up.”

Lovely:

And here’s the official press release listing the other winners:

Getty Images announces the winners of 2012 Mishmash challenge

London, UK — 21 March, 2012: Getty Images has today announced the winners of its annual Mishmash creative challenge. The competition, which launched in January, received 300 entries from around the world, with winners being divided between three regions: EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), the Americas and Asia Pacific, with one global overall winner also selected.

Jason Harper’s entry, In This Shop, which explores the place of a local business in modern day America, was awarded the Global Grand Prix title, which chairman of the jury and R/GA, Chief Creative Officer, Nick Law described as “beautifully modulated, intimate and simple.” Other winners include:

Global Grand Prix and Americas: Jason Harper from the US for In This Shop
APAC: Marcia Hawira from New Zealand for Natalia
EMEA: Blake Dixon from the United Kingdom for The Newton N. Minow Experience
Public vote prize: Bartolome Barrero from Spain for Mother Nature

Each of the winning entries cleverly blurred the lines between imagery and video to create works which both impressed and challenged the judges with their creativity, story-telling techniques, slick editing and innovative subject matter.

Andrew Saunders, Senior Vice President, Creative Content, Getty Images said: “Once again we have had an overwhelmingly positive response to Mishmash, which never fails to produce work that both inspires and surprises us. The high calibre of films really showcases our creative and engaging content and we feel that the shortlisted entries demonstrate the evolution of video and media as a growing and highly engaging communication platform. A huge congratulations to all of our winners.”

Getty Images received over 300 submissions from creatives in over 50 countries — an increase of 37 per cent compared with the 2010 competition.

New for 2012, Mishmash entrants could choose to enter one of three categories: short story, music video or video art. Each film, which needed to be between one and three minutes long, was created using Getty Images video, music and imagery content.

The competition, which ran for two months, was judged by 29 of the world’s leading music, technology and film production professionals and was chaired by R/GA’s, Global Chief Creative Officer, Nick Law. Other judges included:

· Ignacio Oreamuno, President, I have an idea
· Nate Lanxon, Online Editor, Wired
· Leading Bollywood film producer Aashish Singh from Yash Raj Films

For more information on the Mishmash competition, or to view the award-winning entries, visit www.gettyimages.com/mishmash

And in 2012 — which also happens to be the 10th anniversary of the confab of tech and media titans — it’s already shaping up to be another fantastic event in terms of programming, with a lineup of onstage appearances that is sure to make some news.

There are many more very big names to come, but Walt Mossberg and I are pleased to introduce the first group of interviewees, which will give you a glimpse into the firepower we expect at D10 in late May. It is again being held in Rancho Palos Verdes, just south of Los Angeles.

The initial speakers we have confirmed so far include: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

It’s hard to imagine someone we have wanted to have onstage more than Michael Bloomberg, a man of many talents and interests. He’s known worldwide as the 108th Mayor of the City of New York. First elected in November 2001 (and again in 2005 and 2009), he is also one of the most compelling politicians in the U.S. today.

But Bloomberg is also a pioneer in terms of the business of digital news and information technology, having built a huge and groundbreaking media company and information service. Bloomberg (the company) has 310,000 subscribers to its financial news and information service, and more than 15,000 employees worldwide.

There will be a lot to talk about with him, from the upcoming presidential election to the state of our government to the future of innovation, news and technology.

Also sure to be voluble is Sean Parker, the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been on the cutting edge of innumerable important digital trends of the recent decade. In 1999, Parker co-founded Napster, the controversial and industry-changing music service, at the age of 19.

He followed up with early contact information service Plaxo, and then shifted over to his critical involvement as founding president of Facebook in its early days as a start-up, an experience which was dramatized in the movie “The Social Network.” Parker continued to found and also invest in companies, from Causes to Spotify to his most recent, Airtime, a social video company that he is doing with his Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning.

Parker will be appearing onstage with Daniel Ek, another serial entrepreneur and technologist, who started his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. The Swedish native later co-founded online music phenom Spotify in 2006, with Martin Lorentzon.

The former CTO of Stardoll and founder of Advertigo leads a company that is changing the way music is delivered and consumed by fans, against a backdrop of intense change in the industry, succeeding even as a plethora of other services have stumbled.

Also a groundbreaker is Zynga CEO and founder Mark Pincus, yet another serial entrepreneur, whose latest effort in the online gaming arena has finally resulted in his biggest success. It recently went public, and now has a nearly $10 billion market cap.

Before founding Zynga in 2007, Pincus had already started three other companies: Push start-up Freeloader in 1995; automated tech-support company Support.com after that; and early social networking site Tribe.net in 2003.

(I met Pincus when he was at Freeloader in Washington, D.C., while writing a profile of him for the Washington Post, so I have enjoyed tracking his progress since then.)

Pincus is also an avid angel investor, with early stakes in Napster, Brightmail, Twitter and Facebook.

Reid Hoffman was another early investor in Facebook, along with many of Web 2.0’s most successful ventures. Well-known in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and VC, and recently dubbed the “start-up whisperer” by the New York Times (although I am not sure exactly what that means), he’s also chairman of LinkedIn, the business-networking service that also recently went public (at a $10 billion valuation, too).

He’ll appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who started out life in Hollywood, but soon made his way to Silicon Valley as a top exec at Yahoo. After running its media division, Weiner spent a short time at venture firms before going operational again at LinkedIn.

What it takes to build and maintain momentum as tech companies move into more mature stages, as well as how the social networking space evolves, are among the many topics on tap for the pair.

The evolution of a start-up phenom — in this case, Internet telephony service Skype — will be among the topics covered by Tony Bates, who is now a president at Microsoft, which bought it last year.

As such, he is responsible, says the software giant in its description of his job, “for overseeing the company’s direction, strategy and overall mission to become a global communications service that will eventually reach billions of users.”

That’s a tall order for Bates, who came to Skype from a top job at Cisco. Bates has deep roots (or maybe, routing?) in the guts of the Internet, having done backbone-engineering strategy for Internet MCI. The U.K. native also holds nine patents.

Lastly, given all the activity we expect will happen between government regulatory agencies and tech companies over the next few years, we felt it was key to bring in FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. He has been at the FTC as a commissioner since 2004, but was given the top job by President Barack Obama in 2009.

Among his priorities, according to his bio, is “promoting competition and innovation in the technology sector through law enforcement and policy initiatives; and protecting consumers’ privacy — especially while they are using the Internet.”

Uh-oh!

Leibowitz knows from regulation, having served as the Democratic chief counsel and staff director for the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee from 1997 to 2000, where he focused on competition policy and telecommunications matters, as well as a similar stint at the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism and Technology before that.

There will be a lot more speakers to come, of course. But, so far, we think D10 is off and running fast.

T-Mobile — which just months ago was pushing antitrust authorities to approve its failed deal to sell itself to AT&T Inc. — argued in an FCC filing that Verizon Wireless’s deal poses “a clear threat to competition” and would allow the nation’s largest cellphone carrier “to accumulate even more spectrum on top of an already dominant position, while checkmating crucial avenues for growth of its smaller competitors.”

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According to the expected year-end box-office data figures compiled by Hollywood.com, the industry raked in $10.1 billion for 2011 in North America.

While that seems like a nice haul, it’s 4.5 percent less than in 2010. While not enough to result a major downturn in limo-riding and Botox, the results are likely to cause entertainment moguls some worry, since they are accompanied by continuing trends, including another year of lower attendance.

And given that the revenue was unusually bolstered by more higher-priced 3-D movie-ticket prices — Hollywood released several dozen 3-D films in 2011, double the previous year’s amount — the latest numbers are even more disappointing.

While some holiday movies did well — namely “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol,” which has taken in about $70 million domestically since its opening less than two weeks ago — it pales in comparison to such digital hits as Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 videogame, which pulled in $400 million in one day from the much-desired youth market.

It surpassed $1 billion in sales in 16 days, eclipsing the box office of the blockbuster movie “Avatar,” which took 17 days to gross seven figures.

Does that mean that the continued competition for the leisure time of pretty much everyone between digital and analog has gotten worse — an epic battle of the movie industry versus game players, tablets and smartphones?

Or is it because so many movies made in 2011 turned out to be just awful? (If you saw “New Year’s Eve,” you’ll know exactly what I mean.)

One thing is clear: No one is going to pay for poor-quality content, no matter the screen size.

More number-crunching to come, as the industry debates the issue into 2012 (coincidentally, the title of a movie I happened to like, as you can see below!), and at the upcoming D: Dive Into Media at the end of the month, down near Los Angeles, in the belly of the Web-smacked beast.

Until then, let’s hope it does not come to this next year:

The charge reflects $3 billion in cash and $1 billion worth of spectrum that AT&T will owe T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom if the deal fails to garner regulatory approval.

The companies also said they would withdraw their pending applications before the Federal Communications Commission seeking approval for the deal, though they intend to continue fighting for it.

“AT&T Inc. and Deutsche Telekom AG are continuing to pursue the sale of Deutsche Telekom’s U.S. wireless assets to AT&T and are taking this step to facilitate the consideration of all options at the FCC and to focus their continuing efforts on obtaining antitrust clearance for the transaction from the Department of Justice,” the companies said in a statement. “As soon as practical, AT&T Inc. and Deutsche Telekom AG intend to seek the necessary FCC approval.”

The FCC chairman earlier this week indicated he was seeking a hearing on the deal, which commission staff found will lessen competition and lead to fewer U.S. jobs.

AT&T is already facing a Department of Justice lawsuit seeking to block the $39 billion purchase.

“In the area of consumer communications, the investigation found that the parties’ activities mainly overlap for video communications, where Microsoft is active through its Windows Live Messenger,” the commission said in a statement.

“However, the Commission considers that there are no competition concerns in this growing market where numerous players, including Google, are present.”

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As reported in March around the time the merger was first proposed, T-Mobile, a division of Deutsche Telekom, stands to gain about $3 billion in break-up fees should the deal fail to close. AT&T would also give T-Mobile certain wireless spectrum that’s not needed for the rollout of its next-generation wireless network.

While AT&T has said it plans to fight the action in court, the sudden move by the Justice Department and the fact that the Federal Communications Commission — which would also have to sign off on the deal — has yet to weigh in on it, make it extremely unlikely that the merger will ever be consummated, says James Ratcliffe, a telecom analyst with Barclays Capital in a note to clients today. He points out that, historically, when they challenge mergers in court, the agencies tend to win about 60 percent of the time.

“We believe that the deal is by no means dead, as the DOJ has stated that the ‘door is open’ for AT&T to propose remedies, but the fact that the DOJ took this strong step this early in the process makes the probability of completion much lower,” he wrote. “We now view the probability of success at 35-40%, down from our previous 75% view.”

One of the primary arguments in the complaint (the original filing is embedded below via Scribd) focuses on government and enterprise customers. Where critics of the deal would charge that the only notable competitors to AT&T and T-Mobile are Sprint and Verizon Wireless, AT&T management would rebut that Leap and MetroPCS are also players. The DOJ complaint discounts that argument, especially with regard to business and government customers. Leap and MetroPCS are really regional players, the DOJ says, and so corporations and government agencies with many offices around the country can only realistically consider national carriers, the number of which would be reduced to three were the deal approved.

“T-Mobile makes its presence felt competing head to head with AT&T and other carriers for a number of accounts, winning business in some cases and often pushing prices lower when it does not,” the DOJ’s complaint reads. “The merger’s elimination of T-Mobile as an aggressive competitor would likely result in fewer choices and higher prices for enterprise and government customers.”

And while the DOJ has drawn its legal line in the sand, it’s not the only agency yet to be heard from. The Federal Communications Commission would also have to sign off on the deal for it to be approved. Its chairman, Julius Genachowski, issued a carefully worded statement that gives a strong hint that it will ultimately oppose the merger. “Competition is an essential component of the FCC’s statutory public interest analysis, and although our process is not complete, the record before this agency also raises serious concerns about the impact of the proposed transaction on competition,” Genachowski said.

In a conference call with reporters today, Harold Feld, the legal director of PublicKnowledge, a telecom advocacy group that has opposed the merger, speculated that the FCC will likely send the matter to an administrative law hearing, which he called “the kiss of death” for mergers. “By the time that procedure would be finished, T-Mobile would have taken its breakup fee and gone and built an entirely new network,” he said.

So on what legal basis might AT&T and T-Mobile fight the case? The DOJ is using some new market analysis techniques that haven’t been used in antitrust cases before, says Barclays’s Ratcliffe. “Traditionally, the DOJ has used regional impact analysis to study the impact of wireless mergers, and it does so here again,” he writes. “In addition, however, the DOJ is also viewing the market as being national, a comparatively new approach, which might be more open to challenge in the courts.”

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has promised to fight it, and continued to argue that the deal will bring real benefits to spectrum management nationwide, and create jobs. Deutsche Telekom said it will join the fight, too.

Justice-ATT-TMobile-Complaint

Andy Miller (pictured here), the high-profile VP of mobile advertising at Apple, is planning on leaving the company, according to sources close to the situation.

Sources said Miller — who sold Quattro Wireless, the mobile advertising company he co-founded in 2006, to Apple in early 2010 for $275 million — will become a general partner at Highland Capital, the Boston-based venture firm that had funded Quattro.

Apple will search for a replacement for Miller, whose staff was told of the impending departure today.

Since Miller got to Apple, he has reported directly to its CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs, who noted after the acquisition:

“We tried to buy a company named AdMob, but Google came in and snatched them from us. So we bought Quattro, and they are teaching us. We are making ads that are different than anything I’ve ever seen.”

But Apple’s ad aspirations have been a bit of a bumpy road, as the company has tried to fine-tune the offering, even as competition — from Google, Facebook and a range of start-ups — has increased in the fast-growing space.

Not surprisingly, Apple shut down Quattro in favor of its much ballyhooed iAd platform a year ago. Via iAd, Apple has promised to serve up interactive rich-media ads on iPhone and iPod touch apps.

Some marketers balked at Apple’s tight control over iAds and their high prices, but recently the company has tried to give Madison Avenue more flexibility.

That’s because, while still small, mobile advertising will be a huge market. As The Wall Street Journal recently reported: “Marketers spent just $743.1 million on mobile ads in the U.S. in 2010, up 79% from $416 million in 2009, according to research firm eMarketer.”

At Highland, Miller will be working on a range of digital investments from its Silicon Valley office, sources said, and not just in the mobile space.

He has a varied background: Miller worked for mobile content company m-Qube and also WatchPoint Media, an interactive television start-up.

I have contacted Apple PR for a comment, but have not yet heard back.

Last Thursday, both Facebook and Google seemed to suddenly have gaming announcements at the exact same time. Due to the scheduling snafu, much was made of the ongoing war between the pair of Silicon Valley giants.

Some had speculated that Facebook moved up its developers-only event in order to screw up the news that Google+ was adding games to the social network. Others surmised that Google had rushed its plans in order to steal Facebook’s thunder about its improvements.

Not so on either side, as it turns out, especially since these kinds of complex events — and with so many varied partners — are a little like herding cats. In other words, you need to do a lot of planning.

According to sources, Google had long planned to announce its offerings this week. And, as you can see from the email below, Facebook had its invites out a while back.

Thus, although it makes for a gripping narrative, we can put away the cutlasses at dawn.

For now.

Because the real substance of the competition — each trying to draw more users to its games, which has been big business on Facebook — remains in effect, as the pair continue to make moves into each others’ businesses going forward.

Also impacted by Google+ games: Apple.

As Tricia Duryee noted:

“Google’s move into videogames today should scare both Facebook and Apple, the two leading next-generation game platforms. In particular, what should be frightening is that Google is attempting to break today’s 30 percent cut that has become standard across both Facebook and Apple.”

That’s scary, for sure. But, at least when it comes to scheduling, sometimes an event is just an event.

Here’s the Facebook invite: