“We can reach an agreement after the summer break. We can envisage this as a possible deadline,” European Commission head of competition Joaquin Almunia said today at a conference, according to Reuters.

Marilyn Volan/Shutterstock

The slow turnaround comes as a bit of a surprise after Almunia had put pressure on Google to submit its proposed remedies to concerns about anticompetitive actions in search and advertising by the end of January — which the company did.

But it’s really not that shocking after repeated lags in the European antitrust investigation of the company, which started way back in 2010.

Critics of tech industry regulation charge that the pace of government moves much slower than that of innovation. The Google case is now becoming a textbook example — especially as search transitions to mobile, which was a consideration but not the focus of the antitrust investigation.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission already settled with and declined to bring charges against Google, under the leadership of Chairman Jon Leibowitz, who is stepping down.

As we’ve reported, it’s likely that in Europe Google will agree to better labeling of its own properties in search results, as a concession to the claims of competing vertical search engines. That would make it a stricter deal than in the U.S., but it wouldn’t radically alter how Google does its business.

Under the conditions of the settlement, Path will also be required to submit to privacy audits every other year for the next two decades.

The allegations stem from a period in early 2012, when Path had discovered approximately 3,000 underage users on the social networking service, which collects birthdate information during the signup process — a clear violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

“This settlement with Path shows that no matter what new technologies emerge, the agency will continue to safeguard the privacy of Americans,” said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz in a statement.

The relatively small Path joins the growing ranks of Internet companies which have faced federal privacy charges, including tech titans such as Facebook and Google. Late last year, Facebook also reached a settlement with the FTC in which the company agreed to many of the same terms as Path, including ongoing privacy audits for the next 20 years. Google, too, agreed early last year to settle with the FTC over privacy violations related to Gmail and its failed product, Google Buzz.

The settlement with Path comes as a last grand act for departing FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz, who, during his four-year tenure, took a particularly hard-line stance on consumer privacy protections, though he has been criticized by some for letting Facebook off the hook in its settlement. Leibowitz and his office also released a set of best privacy practices for mobile application developers on Friday morning, attempting to curb the incidence of future violations, accidental or otherwise.

According to the FTC, Path did not “spell out its collection, use and disclosure policy for children’s personal information,” it didn’t disclose that collection process to parents, and it didn’t obtain “verifiable parental consent before collecting children’s personal information.”

Path CEO Dave Morin

Path had already discovered the underage accounts before the FTC began its investigation, but the fallout from the address-book saga caused the FTC to scrutinize all of the startup’s past actions.

Path responded to the settlement in a statement posted to the company’s blog on Friday morning:

“We want to share our experience and learnings in the hope that others in our industry are reminded of the importance of making sure services are in full compliance with rules like COPPA. From a developer’s perspective, we understand the tendency to focus all attention on the process of building amazing new things. It wasn’t until we gave our account verification system a second look that we realized there was a problem. We hope our experience can help others as a reminder to be cautious and diligent.”

According to the FTC, the settlement also requires Path to delete any and all information collected on said underage children, which the startup has already done.

“Under facts we found, all five of us, from liberal Democrat to conservative Republican, agreed that the evidence militated against an antitrust case,” Leibowitz told Talking Points Memo. “The fact that we managed to have both Google and Google’s rivals unhappy, in an odd way that’s maybe unique to Washington, that puts us in the right place substantively.”

And, despite the implications of critics, the efforts of lobbyists did nothing to steer the agency to that place. “My sense is that the lobbying makes the companies feel good and lobbyists feel good,” Leibowitz said. “At the end of the day, whether you want to say lobbying had any influence, or canceled itself out because there was lobbying on both sides, if you’re going to do what lobbyists want you to do in a regulatory agency, you’re not doing your job.”

Instead, the FTC said today that the company had agreed to two settlements, one a consent agreement over licensing patents, and the other a resolution to stop scraping content from competitors and to give advertisers more flexibility to manage their campaigns.

Starting in Europe (where settlement talks are still open), and later in the U.S., competition agencies spent the last two years looking into complaints about Google manipulating its search results to bias its own properties, scraping vertical search engine information to show directly on its results pages, and requiring exclusivity and blocking portability in search advertising.

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said today at a press conference that his agency “exhaustively” reviewed nine million pages of documents related to the case, and conducted many interviews, but “the evidence does not support a claim that Google’s prominent display of its own content on its general search page was undertaken without legitimate justification.” The commission voted unanimously to clear Google of search bias claims.

“Google’s primary reason for changing the look and feel of its search results to highlight its own products was to improve the user experience,” Leibowitz said.

Google, of course, concurred. Chief Legal Officer David Drummond wrote in a blog post today, “The conclusion is clear: Google’s services are good for users and good for competition.”

A large concern about the search deal has been the fact that it is not a standard consent decree; however, Leibowitz emphasized that the settlement includes “monitoring obligations” and is “legally enforceable and binding.”

The FTC’s search investigation was eagerly participated in by competitors such as Microsoft, Yelp and TripAdvisor, and basically everyone in technology who had anything against how Google conducts business (so, everyone in technology). But because the search resolution isn’t a formal FTC complaint, there won’t be any period for competitors to formally comment now.

Over the past 19 months, the FTC started looking into other aspects of Google, like search on Android and other mobile platforms, as well as the recently pressing issue of how to handle the patents that cover the basic shared technology for smartphones.

The FTC today led with the standards-essential patent decision, which was an important issue, but a late and somewhat awkward addition to the case, given that it is totally different. Google had walked into smartphone patent licensing because it purchased Motorola. It has now agreed to a consent order that prohibits it from seeking injunctions against willing licensees.

Independent of whether you think Google was being a big, bad, anticompetitive bully, the FTC investigation was hampered by a couple things: First, U.S. antitrust laws would have to stretch to cover cases in which it’s not clear that consumers are harmed; and second, Leibowitz, who was driving the case, would like to step down from his position soon, and so won’t be around to see a lengthy legal battle through.

Leibowitz had been trying to wrap up the case by the end of 2012, and narrowly missed that window. But the past couple weeks did not significantly change the agreement that’s been voted on, despite some people’s hopes inside and outside the FTC that the agency would wait to see what happens in Europe.

At the press conference today, Leibowitz paid tribute to the political nature of the case. He was a bit prickly about the “antitrust spin zone” driven by Google’s competition, and their charges that his agency has been weak compared to the European Commission.

“Anyone that is in the business of being the chairman of the antitrust enforcement agency, you know, would like to bring ‘the big case,’” Leibowitz said. “That’s something you want to do. More important than that is to faithfully execute the law.”

The FTC had seemed ready to agree to a non-binding settlement with Google in late December, but it pushed back a decision after it seemed that the European Commission was still in the fight for a stricter deal.

Now, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz is behind a charge for the FTC’s five commissioners to vote on the same issue this week.

What’s changed? Well, the Senate confirmed George Mason law professor Joshua Wright late Tuesday to replace Commissioner Thomas Rosch. Rosch’s last day is Friday. Due to a previous relationship with Google, Wright will recuse himself from the case.

But then again, Rosch was not expected to vote against Google, especially given that he said last month that the company’s competitors should take their antitrust claims to court rather than “free-ride on the government.” So the number of votes needed hasn’t really changed at all.

The other thing that’s evolved in the past month is that after descriptions of the Google-FTC settlement leaked, it was perceived as weak compared to what Europe was still negotiating.

The proposed U.S. settlement includes a resolution about scraping content for use in Google’s search “snippets,” a requirement for AdWords data to be portable onto other platforms and restrictions about when injunctions can be sought over standards-essential patents.

These so-called “voluntary commitments” seemed markedly weaker than the “binding” and later to be “market-tested” agreement that EC competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia said in a public statement he was still hoping to get from Google before the end of January.

Not wanting to hurt its leverage in future cases, the FTC took a step back to think about how this was being perceived, sources said.

But if a vote were to come this week, it would most likely be on the same deal as was proposed before the holidays.

The anti-Google contingent continues to be upset with Leibowitz, saying the decision comes back to him losing leverage because he let it be known he wants to leave public office himself soon.

“People at all levels of the agency, senior staff and management, believe that FTC has every reason to wait and see what’s offered up in Europe,” said a person familiar with the negotiations.

“The chairman and the chairman alone controls timing, and he seems to be determined to cram this down their throats. There’s an opportunity for consensus but nobody can convince him to push the pause button.”

But another way to view the case is that the FTC had a “weak hand” all along, as one legal expert put it, especially compared to competition laws in the European Union. Because Google doesn’t charge consumers for search, and there are alternatives, it would be hard for the FTC to prove that Google’s search practices actually hurt consumers.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, one of the biggest critics of Google, continues to complain about ways it feels it’s getting shafted by the search giant. Today, one of the company’s senior lawyers charged that Google executives have blocked the company’s YouTube unit from providing the support necessary to build a full-featured YouTube app for Windows Phone.

The FTC will likely push its deliberation on Google’s competitive practices into next year so it can continue to study the matter, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are reporting, and we have confirmed independently.

That news follows a statement today from the European Commission that it was also working to settle with Google, but for a firmer agreement than what the FTC was reportedly getting.

After meeting today with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt in Brussels, EC competition chief Joaquin Almunia had said he expected Google to submit a “detailed commitment text” in January. He said he hoped the process would lead to a binding decision that was “market-tested” and would include remedies for the alleged bias in Google’s search results toward its own offerings.

The FTC, which had let it be known it wanted the matter finished before the end of the year, was getting none of those concessions.

The FTC’s would-be settlement was widely reported to have been a) voluntary and non-binding, b) not available for a public comment period as it would have been with a consent decree and c) over different issues than search bias, which is the most crucial and controversial topic.

A bad situation for the FTC was made to look worse when Europe claimed it was extracting bigger concessions from Google. Plus, sources said, the state attorneys general in the U.S. were none too happy about being cut out of the proposed deal.

Google declined to comment on the matter, as did the FTC.

At least according to close observers of the case, public attention to the matter seems to have been a significant factor in the decision to reopen it. “The last thing you want to do is call attention to a weak settlement,” said one source.

So now it’s back to the drawing board for the FTC, which had imposed on itself an urgency in the case that seems to have hurt its ability to negotiate.

But the clock is still ticking on the FTC for a couple of reasons. New FTC commissioner nominee Joshua Wright, who is waiting to be confirmed to replace Thomas Rosch, has already said he will recuse himself from Google-related cases for two years because some of his research has been funded indirectly by the company. In addition, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, who has led the charge against Google — but weakened his case by making it known he expected to leave office soon — still probably wants to leave office soon, but hopefully with his legacy a bit more intact.

So even if the FTC has given itself a reprieve to negotiate further, it’s unlikely to be a very long one.

Image credit: jcsmilly/Shutterstock

On both sides of the Atlantic, the government agencies that have conducted antitrust examinations of Google over the past two years seem to have trouble keeping their own timetables.

The funny thing is that all of this is entirely self-imposed. Almunia, for instance, said in May that Google had just “a matter of weeks” to offer remedies. It’s clearly more than a few weeks later.

The latest news from Europe is a vague push-back on that timing. Almunia said today, “On our side, this process of conversations with Google to try to reach a settlement agreement … we are not yet there but we work quite intensively. So one day, I don’t know when, I will come here to tell you how these conversations have been concluded.”

In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission is less public and press-conferency about its demands, but there have also been widely reported timing ultimatums.

The FTC would like to close the investigation before the end of the year, and the time crunch is quite obvious because one commissioner’s replacement has already been nominated and Chairman Jon Leibowitz has widely known plans to step down himself. In November, Leibowitz had also given Google a couple weeks to respond with a settlement offer before calling for a vote on a formal complaint. That deadline has passed, too.

One question is whether the FTC and the EC will stumble their way into a jointly coordinated timeline. Almunia and Leibowitz met on Monday to discuss that. Almunia said today, “Our services are working in very good coordination.”

As for Google, it’s getting very used to saying the same thing. A spokesperson for the company today reiterated, “We continue to work cooperatively with the European Commission and are happy to answer any questions they may have.”

When everyone gets back from this week’s Thanksgiving break, many observers are expecting there to be some progress on the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s investigation of Google’s alleged anti-competitive activities.

The crucial issue right now is whether the FTC decides to legally challenge Google on “search manipulation” — that is, whether Google manipulates its search rankings to give preference to its own sites, while also pushing down competitors’ rankings.

But, according to people intimately involved in the case, the FTC is hesitating on whether it is willing to go to bat on that particular and critical point, as Google has persuasively argued to some of the FTC commissioners — specifically Tom Rosch — that search is shifting from delivering text links to other Web sites to delivering robust and helpful information on the spot.

For example, when someone searches for an address, instead of providing a list of links to pages on various mapping sites, such as for AOL’s MapQuest, Google surfaces a clickable image of the map itself from its own mapping service.

The company is asserting that this is a better experience for consumers, even if it disadvantages other sites. The center of its argument is that it is doing what’s best for users — and it just so happens that it’s also good for Google properties.

While that might be selfish, it might not be illegal, and it is a difficult legal task for the FTC to prove otherwise, especially since damages to consumers are not clear.

What’s clear is that competitors from a wide range of companies are upset that they don’t get more prominence, but the question centers on whether Google — under antitrust law — might not be compelled to help them.

Said one lawyer close to the situation: “Coca-Cola does not have to carry Pepsi in its gas-station coolers.”

Therefore, the FTC would need solid proof that Google specifically tried to hurt a competitor who had better information in order to push its own properties.

And while there are other issues in play, too — such as advertising data portability, exclusive search agreements on sites and phones and perhaps even issues involving standards essential patents — evidence of abuse of search dominance is at the dead center of the potential battle.

Without it, the FTC might be stymied.

Bloomberg reported the same thing earlier today, saying the FTC is unsure it has enough evidence to prove that Google’s activities harmed consumers. That’s a major change from a series of previous leaks to Washington reporters in recent months that indicated the FTC was proceeding with a strong case.

As one source familiar with the negotiations told me: “There’s a sense the FTC has been outmaneuvered by Google once again.”

After a highly publicized investigation of Google, if the FTC were to drop the search ranking aspect of the case, it could still be taken up by the Department of Justice, which had originally wanted purview over the issue. (Please note: That’s actually what happened a decade ago with the Microsoft antitrust case.)

But to drop the search part of the case would be a massive blink by the FTC that would have implications for further government regulation of technology companies. “They’ll never bring for many years a case against a high-tech company if they don’t bring it here,” said another D.C. insider today.

That doesn’t mean tech companies would all be happy about Google effectively winning. For Google to go unchallenged on antitrust violations could be seen as a green light for the company to pursue whatever form of competition it wants.

Take FairSearch, a coalition of companies including Microsoft, Expedia and TripAdvisor, that is squaring off against Google with a list of demands.

Spokesperson Ben Hammer said via email today: “The members of FairSearch would view any resolution to the antitrust investigations of Google, whether through litigation or a settlement, as incomplete if it does not end Google’s preferencing of its own products ahead of natural search results.”

The FTC had previously given Google a couple of weeks to talk about a settlement before its five commissioners voted on a formal complaint. But sources said Google is trying to call the FTC’s bluff, and it may be working.

Google is in negotiations with the tougher European Commission over antitrust as well, where search manipulation has been at the center of the case, so a timid move by the FTC would also look weak by comparison to the EC — which, in fact, is nothing new.

The background for all this is whether the FTC under Chairman Jon Leibowitz — who is expected to leave soon after serving eight years at the agency — has seemingly been “outmaneuvered” by Google in recent years.

First, the agency let Google’s controversial AdMob acquisition through, with the shaky reasoning that Apple’s purchase of rival Quattro made the mobile search ad market balanced.

Then it dropped its investigation of Google’s Wi-Fi spying. And, most recently, after it got Google to agree to a privacy consent decree over Google Buzz, the company promptly broke it with its Safari cookie workaround — and was fined a piddling $22.5 million (which was just upheld last week).

So, borking this case, which many consider to be the one true shot at restraining Google’s power, would really not look good.

U.S. Reps. Anna Eshoo and Zoe Lofgren

Anna Eshoo, who represents Palo Alto and the surrounding areas, and Zoe Lofgren, who represents San Jose, said they didn’t approve of leaks that the FTC may try to expand its power to show the search giant used unfair methods of competition.

Eshoo and Lofgren have a couple of problems with the situation:

• One, that the leaks are happening, given that the FTC has yet to vote on a complaint against Google and settlement talks are ongoing.
• And two, that broadening the FTC’s power under what’s known as “Section 5” of antitrust law could stifle growth in the relatively economically healthy area of online services.

Senator Jim DeMint had sent a similar letter to Leibowitz last Thursday, expressing concern about the use of antitrust authority on the tech industry.

What’s the Section 5 stuff about? It’s possible that the FTC would need an expansion of its jurisdiction to prove its case against Google. That’s in part because Google’s actions to secure its lead in search and search advertising have perhaps been more harmful to competitors than they were to consumers.

Section 5 keeps cropping up because Chairman Leibowitz has publicly expressed his interest in setting a precedent on this exact issue.

Those who believe the FTC has a weak case are inclined to think Leibowitz et al need to expand their role to prove it.

Those who believe the FTC has a strong case — or that it will opportunistically pursue a case that it can win — think the Section 5 stuff is less relevant.

But part of this battle is how it plays out in public. If people start thinking of the Google antitrust case as an effort by the government to hurt a shining star of job creation and innovation, that plays a lot differently than a big bad monopolist going after its competition. And the Eshoo/Lofgren letter shows that some of the folks in Washington — at least the ones who hail from Silicon Valley — are quite aware of that.

For more background on the case, see my overview from my time in Washington last week.

And here’s the full Eshoo/Lofgren letter:

Eshoo-Lofgren Letter to Chairman Leibowitz

It’s much less difficult in Washington.

In fact, as one D.C. person familiar with the ongoing FTC probe aimed at slapping Google for its worrisome dominance of search and other markets put it most colorfully:

“There’s now blood in the water. All these people who have wanted to kill Google, this is their chance. They will never have a better opportunity than the next 30 days.”

And that’s why I’m in the nation’s capital for the next few days, sussing out the current status of the impending potential battle between Google and regulators.

The timing is tight. While there might have been a pause while the election played out, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz’s desire to step down and get back to the private sector is widely known.

There is also the increasing pressure for him to act soon, especially since Leibowitz pushed hard to get the case in an intra-governmental tussle with the Department of Justice.

Still, until now, it’s been a funny pace of sprinting fast and jogging slow, following a more than 18-month-long investigation of Google’s search business, in order to file a formal complaint for what would surely be a battle over a much longer time frame.

After FTC staffers recommended that the agency had enough material from interviews and internal documents for a case, commissioners have over the last two months been talking to the players themselves.

Google has been engaged in ongoing talks to settle with the FTC, although as Bloomberg reported, the company is now facing an ultimatum after failing to propose a reasonable remedy.

That appears to be the case: Leibowitz told Google on Friday that he planned to call for a vote within the next couple of weeks, sources said.

Thus, the clock is now clearly ticking for what some people are describing as Google’s “Microsoft moment,” referring to the devastating antitrust trial from the 1990s in which the government was able to label the software giant as a “monopolist.”

Such an outcome could be equally damaging to Google, of course, if the case moves forward.

At that point, once a complaint is filed, the spotlight would move to a top litigator, Beth Wilkinson, whom the FTC brought on in April.

The well-respected attorney, who is a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, is also a former prosecutor for the Justice Department. Hired on a part-time contract for one year, Wilkinson is best known for her work on the Oklahoma City bombing case against Timothy McVeigh.

The Google case is nowhere as dramatic or tragic, but Wilkinson’s involvement shows the seriousness of the matter. Seen through a Google-tinted lens, that’s the point — to make the threat of litigation seem very serious indeed.

There are many added complications to the basic case, including how U.S. regulators will line up with their equivalents in the European Commission, which has also been investigating Google’s business practices. And, no surprise, there’s also the likelihood that some publicity-seeking state attorneys general will want to pile on — oops — participate.

In Washington, lawyers and lobbyists like to talk about what section of antitrust law the FTC will use to charge Google. Leibowitz has indicated he might want to push on a less-used power to regulate businesses for “unfair methods of competition.” There’s also the question of whether it’s better for the FTC to file in an administrative court or a federal court, both now and for later appeals.

If a majority of commissioners do approve moving the case forward, most expect that Google will likely face multiple areas of inquiry.

They include:

• Search entry points, around Google’s history of exclusive search syndication deals with Web portals and publications, in browsers and on phones
• Google’s policies of exclusivity in search advertising APIs, where customers and competitors are inhibited from sharing data between various advertising options from different companies
• Various issues related to discrimination and scraping of vertical search competitors, as Google became more involved in areas such as travel and local
• Possibly, policies around its Android mobile operating system that give Google search exclusivity on partner phones

So, what can Google do to prevent the legal onslaught? It could agree to accept various behavioral changes such as opening up its search advertising APIs. It could be subject to more structural changes, including separating its advertising out from other products, and vertical search out from core search. It could give up exclusivity on its search deals.

What seems clear at this point is that better labeling and transparency — which Google would prefer as a remedy — won’t be enough to satisfy regulators and competitors.

More to the point, the foes of Google now include a panoply of companies across a wide range of industries — this is now not just a Microsoft-fueled effort — many of whom are expecting some sort of legal challenge.

So why should Silicon Valley care?

While many in the tech industry love to hate on Google these days, it is still very unclear if its search dominance has really reached Microsoft operating system proportions of days past. In addition, there is the question of whether regulators should be cracking down on technology that is now changing more quickly than ever.

Still, as one insider put it: “They should care because an uncontained Google is bad for all of them.”

Stay tuned to see if the FTC can actually prove just how bad that is.

The story doesn’t identify which four of the commission’s five members have concluded, after a year of investigation, that Google used its overwhelming command of the Internet search market to hurt rivals in the travel, shopping and entertainment sectors, and to benefit itself. They’re also concerned about Google’s handling of certain patents related to smartphones.

Meanwhile, FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz, pictured from his June appearance at D: All Things Digital, has said he wants to see a decision by the commission before the end of the year.

If the FTC brings the case, Google has two fundamental courses of action: Settle or fight. If it settles, the result will be a negotiated order that applies to Google, and Google only. The same will happen at the end of a lawsuit, assuming the FTC wins, which isn’t exactly certain.

There is another course of action the FTC could take, and has been known to take before: Issue guidelines. During the week, I talked with David Balto, a former FTC litigator during the Clinton Administration who has long been my go-to guy on antitrust law. He says enforcement actions can be messy, and even when they’re successful they only apply to the target, not to anyone else.

“Antitrust law is a really narrow tool,” he told me. “It doesn’t really fit in a lot of situations.”

The commission issued guidelines in 2002 in relation to Internet search companies, in an attempt to address practices that many companies were engaging in. Obviously, things have changed a lot in 10 years, so these guidelines would necessarily have to be updated substantially, and probably adjusted again within another two or three years.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Google opts not to settle, but to fight. The result, Balto says, will be a complicated lawsuit that could take years, cost both sides million, and in the end, the FTC could lose. It has happened before. In 2003, the commission brought an enforcement action against chip interface designers Rambus. The FTC argued that Rambus had played fast and loose with the rules of an industry body that set standards for the memory chip industry when after leaving that body it tried to enforce patents against several memory companies.

After almost seven years of costly litigation, an appeals court sided with Rambus, saying that the commission hadn’t proved a violation had occurred in the first place. After all that, the FTC has started to hold hearings on the process of setting standards.

Guidelines would apply to everyone and would set ground rules for every participant in the market, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and whoever else might be affected. And all parties would benefit from participating in the dialogue leading up to the crafting of the guidelines: In the end, there would be a more informed consensus, and everyone involved will know the rules of the road.

It would be more complex and would take longer than it did 10 years ago, Balto says, but in the end, the FTC’s mission is to protect consumer welfare, not bring big and costly lawsuits.

Google is in trouble because it told users of the Safari browser, via a help page, that they did not have to worry about being tracked because Safari blocks cookies by default, while at the same time bypassing Safari settings to allow tracking cookies. Google has since deleted those cookies, and says it never collected personal information.

This is the largest FTC penalty ever for violation of one of its orders — though in tech terms, it’s just a generous Series B funding round or so.

It was decided by a vote of 4-1, with Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch dissenting on the grounds that the FTC should not have accepted Google’s denial of liability.

Rosch, instead, believes that Google is in contempt of the 2011 agreement. “This is Google’s second bite at the apple,” he wrote.

If Google is being fined $22.5 million, Rosch argues, the company should not be permitted to deny liability.

The other commissioners replied, “With a company of Google’s size, almost any penalty can be dismissed as insufficient.” But because the issue didn’t exist for very long, and Google didn’t make money from it, a penalty serves as sufficient warning, they argued.

The most interesting sideshow of the case was that the fact that the FTC was planning to fine Google had been leaked out in bits and pieces over the past five months. So, even though the FTC is not extracting an enormous fine, the fire over the issue has been stoked in the press continuously.

The FTC also posted today a more technical description of what Google did to bypass Safari’s settings.

Here’s what happened: Despite having that help page up saying that Safari wasn’t tracking users, “for several months in 2011 and 2012,” Google circumvented Safari settings to place a temporary cookie from DoubleClick. This was in part to set up those little +1 social advertising buttons on its ads for users.

And here’s the crux: “Because of the particular operation of the Safari browser, that initial temporary cookie opened the door to all cookies from the DoubleClick domain, including the Google advertising tracking cookie that Google had represented would be blocked from Safari browsers.”

But that’s not actually the crux, because the specific issue that the FTC is mad about is that Google had up the incorrect help page the whole time. This misrepresentation is exactly what Google promised it wouldn’t do in 2011.

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said the penalty is meant to send a message that “No matter how big or small, all companies must abide by FTC orders against them and keep their privacy promises to consumers, or they will end up paying many times what it would have cost to comply in the first place.”

It’s clear — especially from this interview with Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz at the 10th D: All Things Digital conference — that the federal government is going to spend more time scrutinizing Internet companies and their behavior.

“The more protection these consumers have, the more they trust it, and the more commerce they do,” Leibowitz said in a wide-ranging interview that focused a lot on “privacy by design” and transparency in the face of ever-growing power by digital-data-sucking companies like Facebook and Google.

Leibowitz could not say much about an ongoing antitrust investigation of Google, except to note that he had just hired his own outside big legal gun to keep up with the search giant’s, in case of, well, you know.

Here’s the video of the full interview with Walt Mossberg:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120627/ftcs-jon-leibowitz-takes-your-privacy-very-seriously-the-full-d10-interview-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120602/backstage-with-aaron-sorkin-reid-hoffman-and-sean-parker-the-katiecam-highlight-reel/ http://allthingsd.com/20120602/backstage-with-aaron-sorkin-reid-hoffman-and-sean-parker-the-katiecam-highlight-reel/#comments Sat, 02 Jun 2012 13:44:36 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://allthingsd.com/?p=215862 After three days of in-depth interviews at the D10 conference, you might think you know all about the speakers and demonstrators who graced the stage. But what are these people like when they’re not in public?

I caught up with 15 D10 guests and asked them. The results: Aaron Sorkin told me about the music he listens to when he writes, Nathan Myhrvold talked about cooking with a centrifuge, and Sean Parker told me about the book he’s reading.

Susan Wojcicki and Sundar Pichai

Tony Bates

Jon Leibowitz

John Hennessy

Quri

Ed Catmull

Jeff Weiner and Reid Hoffman

Aaron Sorkin

Nathan Myhrvold

True and Co.

Daniel Ek and Sean Parker

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120602/backstage-with-aaron-sorkin-reid-hoffman-and-sean-parker-the-katiecam-highlight-reel/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120531/ftc-chairman-jon-leibowitz-backstage-with-katie-boehret/ http://allthingsd.com/20120531/ftc-chairman-jon-leibowitz-backstage-with-katie-boehret/#comments Thu, 31 May 2012 21:30:05 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=215486 Self-described Washington bureaucrat Jon Leibowitz spent some time talking with Walt Mossberg on the D conference stage about privacy and digital property. Once he stepped off the stage, though, he shared a different kind of scoop with Katie Boehret — what are his can’t-miss stops on a visit to Washington, D.C.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120531/ftc-chairman-jon-leibowitz-backstage-with-katie-boehret/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120531/ftc-chairman-jon-leibowitz-on-privacy-do-not-track-facebook-and-google-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120531/ftc-chairman-jon-leibowitz-on-privacy-do-not-track-facebook-and-google-video/#comments Thu, 31 May 2012 19:38:29 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=213722 The Federal Trade Commission currently lacks the authority to assess penalties for transgressions against online privacy. Is the agency really up to the challenge of enforcing our privacy rights?

Onstage at D10 Thursday, FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz argued that it is, and that its broad prohibition against “unfair and deceptive acts or practices” gives it a decent enough paddle with which to smack Google, Facebook and other companies that need to be reminded that our personal information is also our property. Also top of mind during today’s interview: Fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) patent-licensing obligations, and whether a Do Not Track policy for third-party cookies is good for business or not.

Below, video highlights from the session:

Full D10 Conference Coverage

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120531/ftc-chairman-jon-leibowitz-on-privacy-do-not-track-facebook-and-google-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120531/in-an-age-of-digital-identity-ftc-chairman-jon-leibowitz-calls-for-privacy-by-design/ http://allthingsd.com/20120531/in-an-age-of-digital-identity-ftc-chairman-jon-leibowitz-calls-for-privacy-by-design/#comments Thu, 31 May 2012 17:31:33 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=213591

Jon Leibowitz is no newcomer to Washington. He has been at the Federal Trade Commission since 2004, dealing with antitrust issues at a national level.

But his job looks much different today than it did eight years ago. Facebook and Google have grown into juggernauts of the Internet — Facebook holds your years of status updates, location data and photos; Google has your trove of Google account data, including years of search queries. They’re two of a few Silicon Valley giants who have singularly formed the concept of identity in the digital age. And it’s Leibowitz’s job to make sure these big boys are playing by the rules.

Leibowitz discussed a few of his organization’s stances on privacy, market competition and other topics in conversation with Walt Mossberg at our D: All Things Digital conference on Thursday.

There’s the good news: Leibowitz says that inside the Beltway, issues surrounding privacy aren’t divided between the red and the blue. “The FTC is about as bipartisan as you can get,” he said. “It happens to be a small oasis of bipartisanship in Washington.”

And, for the most part, the FTC under Leibowitz has made it clear at a high level what privacy norms it expects from Internet companies: Transparency, easily digestable privacy statements and general product design that takes privacy into account from the get-go.

Take EULAs and privacy policies, for instance. They’ve got to get better, less bogged down with pages upon pages of legalese, and more pointed in their stance. “They should be sort of like a nutrition guide on the side of a cereal box at the supermarket,” Leibowitz said.

There’s also privacy by design, which includes a better, more upfront position from companies on “do not track” — the feature that allows users to opt out of allowing companies to track their information across Web sites. As the FTC called for this feature in a recent report, and more online movements from organizations like the Electronic Freedom Foundation support the notion, it is gaining some traction — Microsoft, Mozilla and Google have all reconfigured their browsers to support the DNT header. And companies like Twitter are trumpeting their own participation in the DNT initiatives.

Leibowitz argues that this isn’t something that the private sector should be worried about — it may even strengthen the online economy. “The more protection these consumers have, the more they trust it, and the more commerce they do,” Leibowitz said.

But there’s a rub for these Internet companies: “There’s a feeling of ‘I want to do the right thing but don’t want to be at a competitive disadvantage,’” Leibowitz said.

Leibowitz also touched on the other half of his job — policing the Valley giants on anticompetitive actions — though he danced around some of the more sensitive, timely issues. The FTC’s ongoing investigation of Google was an untouchable topic, as the agency is in a quiet period. But, as an audience member noted, the FTC’s recent high-profile hire of star litigator Beth Wilkinson could signal impending legal action against Google.

“It just means that we have very competent counsel that can go toe to toe with their very competent counsel,” Leibowitz said.

Full D10 Conference Coverage

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120531/in-an-age-of-digital-identity-ftc-chairman-jon-leibowitz-calls-for-privacy-by-design/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120529/atd10-kicks-off-with-apples-tim-cook-also-adding-online-education-to-mix-with-kahn-and-hennessy/ http://allthingsd.com/20120529/atd10-kicks-off-with-apples-tim-cook-also-adding-online-education-to-mix-with-kahn-and-hennessy/#comments Tue, 29 May 2012 18:24:04 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=213185

The All Things Digital team is all set down in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., under sunny skies and with a lineup of tech and media speakers that are even more stunning than the spectacular view here.

We begin tonight with the first major interview that Apple CEO Tim Cook has given since he took over at the iconic tech powerhouse last year.

There will be lots to talk to him about in the session of more than an hour onstage in front of a long-sold-out crowd — from Apple’s next products to the situation in China to patent wars to his take on what it is like to run the world’s most valuable and influential tech company.

Before taking over from the late and very great Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Cook ran vast and critical swaths of the company already, so it will be interesting to hear about the state of the company under his leadership.

Along with Cook, other speakers over the three-day event include Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Zynga’s founder and CEO Mark Pincus, Kleiner Perkins Mary Meeker, Hollywood phenom Aaron Sorkin and many more. We also have many killer demos of new products.

Plus, we just added what Walt Mossberg and I consider a critical session on online education, with Stanford President John Hennessy and the Khan Academy’s founder and executive director Salman Khan.

In addition to running one of the most influential educational institutions around and a Silicon Valley powerhouse, Hennessy wrote the book on computer architecture design.

Literally. First as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford and later as an administrator, Hennessy has brought Silicon Valley and the university closer than ever. Even as president of Stanford, his research continues to push out the boundaries around the architecture of high performance computers.

“Each one, teach one” is a laudable goal, but it led Khan to tutor his young cousin in math, even though the two of them were not in the same town. So, he devised video tutorials that went viral on YouTube, and now Khan’s eponymous Khan Academy has each one teaching thousands every day.

Since launching three years ago, the Khan Academy has provided 150 million lessons over the Internet and is the most-used library of videos on the Web. According to its Web site, the lessons are open to all, even “a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology.”

We have one more big speaker to add for our primo second night slot, so watch this space.

Full D10 Conference Coverage

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120529/atd10-kicks-off-with-apples-tim-cook-also-adding-online-education-to-mix-with-kahn-and-hennessy/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120423/you-can-handle-the-truth-aaron-sorkin-to-appear-onstage-at-d10/ http://allthingsd.com/20120423/you-can-handle-the-truth-aaron-sorkin-to-appear-onstage-at-d10/#comments Mon, 23 Apr 2012 17:30:44 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=198654

Add another speaker to the stellar list for the 10th D: All Things Digital conference, which is taking place in a little more than a month: Aaron Sorkin.

For those who have followed the long and award-filled career of the well-known playwright and Hollywood writer, it’s an astonishing litany of success — from “A Few Good Men” to “The West Wing” to “Moneyball” — filled with more unusually clever lines than anyone has ever penned.

But, most famously for tech, Sorkin also wrote the screenplay (and also won an Academy Award) for “The Social Network,” about the rise of Facebook and its unusual co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The film caused a lot of controversy in Silicon Valley over its depiction of Zuckerberg as an evil genius of sorts, of course, but few can argue that it was not a corker of a movie.

We are excited to talk to Sorkin about that experience, as well as his take on the state of entertainment in the digital age. He’s about to debut a new HBO show in June called “The Newsroom,” set behind the scenes at a cable news show. It deals with the massive changes roiling through the media industry and it begins, natch, with a viral video.

Sorkin is also set to make his Broadway debut as a librettist for the upcoming musical “Houdini.” And he’s also working on another new movie, based on a book about the downfall of Sen. John Edwards, which he’ll adapt, produce and direct.

Sorkin will be joined at D10 — which will be held in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., just south of Los Angeles, at the end of May — by a litany of major players in tech and media, including: Apple CEO Tim Cook, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz and many more.

And we still have more speakers to come, but until then, here’s the famous line from “The Social Network” — something about a billion dollars:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120423/you-can-handle-the-truth-aaron-sorkin-to-appear-onstage-at-d10/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120410/apple-ceo-tim-cook-to-appear-as-opening-speaker-at-the-d10-conference/ http://allthingsd.com/20120410/apple-ceo-tim-cook-to-appear-as-opening-speaker-at-the-d10-conference/#comments Tue, 10 Apr 2012 16:00:52 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=194743

Walt Mossberg and I could not be more thrilled to announce that Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, will be the opening-night speaker at our 10th D: All Things Digital conference.

It will be Cook’s first appearance at D, as well as his first time being onstage at an event not run by Apple or for investors since he was named CEO last August.

Since then, Cook has increased the enormous progress made under the late Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs, with the iconic Silicon Valley giant putting out a number of new and innovative products and also becoming one of the most valuable companies on earth.

(Of course, Jobs had made a half-dozen always memorable visits to our stage over the last decade, the last of which was in 2010 at D8.)

So we are looking forward to hearing Cook’s perspective on where the industry and Apple is going, and perhaps to get a glimpse into what makes its new leader — who is also a longtime Apple vet — tick.

And Cook knows a lot, to be sure.

Before he was named CEO, Cook played a critical role as COO at Apple, responsible for worldwide sales and operations from its supply chain to sales activities to service and support globally. Cook also ran Apple’s Macintosh unit.

Before Apple, he worked at Compaq, Intelligent Electronics, and even spent a dozen years at IBM.

Cook joins a D10 speaker list that is full of major players in tech and media, including: New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz, as well as many more.

(And we still have more speakers to come.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120410/apple-ceo-tim-cook-to-appear-as-opening-speaker-at-the-d10-conference/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120409/more-d10-speakers-ellison-meeker-myhrvold-along-with-pixar-and-visa/ http://allthingsd.com/20120409/more-d10-speakers-ellison-meeker-myhrvold-along-with-pixar-and-visa/#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2012 21:49:26 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=193639

A month ago, I posted an initial list of speakers for the 10th D: All Things Digital conference.

After a decade, the event — which is held in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., just south of Los Angeles, at the end of May — has attracted another amazing group of speakers, including: 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 the social business site’s CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

Now, here’s another group of stellar speakers we’ve added to the programming lineup (and there are still even more big names to come in the weeks ahead): Oracle CEO Larry Ellison; former tech analyst superstar and now VC Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins; Intellectual Ventures’ Nathan Myhrvold; Pixar co-founder and Disney animation head Dr. Ed Catmull; and Visa President John Partridge.

Larry Ellison, CEO and founder of the enterprise giant Oracle, needs little introduction, as one of tech’s highest profile figures and a true Silicon Valley icon. Frankly, I think the short bio that’s on Oracle’s Web site says it all: “Larry Ellison has been CEO of Oracle Corporation since he founded the company in 1977. He also races sailboats, flies planes, and plays tennis and guitar.” There will be a lot to talk about with the voluble and always entertaining exec — who appeared at the D conference once before many years ago — from the current state of the tech industry to insights to where it’s all going. (In addition, Ellison has agreed to appear on a panel we are doing as a tribute to his close friend, Apple’s former CEO Steve Jobs.)

Another well-known tech figure is Meeker, who is now a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, having joined the storied venture capital firm in early 2011. She focuses there on investments in its digital practice and via KP’s Digital Growth Fund, working with companies such as Spotify, Jawbone and One King’s Lane. But Meeker is perhaps best known for her long stint — 1991 to 2010 — as a star Internet research analyst at Morgan Stanley, where she brought many of the Internet’s great companies to the attention of Wall Street and beyond. She also wrote a series of groundbreaking reports on the landscape. That includes her annual “State of the Internet,” which Meeker will debut this year at the conference in an extended demo of her always riveting Internet trends presentation.

Nathan Myhrvold is also a tech legend, having worked for 14 years as chief strategist and CTO of Microsoft. But, instead of retiring, the avid inventor decided to focus on patents, founding and leading a controversial company called Intellectual Ventures, which buys them up and licenses them out (or sues if it doesn’t sell). With all the mishegas around patents right now, it’s a good time to have Myhrvold back to explain it all and perhaps to take some of the blame for the explosion in intellectual property lawsuits. (Myhrvold also co-authored a cookbook, “Modernist Cuisine,” so we hope we will also get some sort of futuristic cooking demo. Perhaps, Patently Delicious Flan?)

Speaking of tasty, the animation from Pixar over the years has been just that and it’s been one of Disney’s greatest acquisitions. Given how much Pixar has contributed to animation technology, we are glad to finally get Dr. Ed Catmull onstage. As co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, he will discuss where entertainment and technology are intersecting and where they are not. Catmull is a geek’s geek in the industry — having also founded the computer graphics laboratory at the New York Institute of Technology, the computer division of Lucasfilm, as well as Pixar, which he did with chief creative officer John Lasseter. Get ready to talk about image compositing, motion blur, subdivision surfaces, cloth simulation and rendering techniques, texture mapping and the z-buffer. Also, Catmull’s five Academy Awards.

Lastly, it is perfect timing for bringing on John Partridge, president of Visa. With swirling issues around online identity theft, digital privacy, the future of money and the rise of upstart competitors such as Square, Partridge has his hands full at the credit card giant. One of the most neglected arenas in tech, the way we manage payments is perhaps the biggest story of the next era, especially as it relates to mobile and the rise of smartphones as all-purpose devices.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120409/more-d10-speakers-ellison-meeker-myhrvold-along-with-pixar-and-visa/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120326/qa-ftc-chairman-on-how-web-start-ups-should-handle-privacy/ http://allthingsd.com/20120326/qa-ftc-chairman-on-how-web-start-ups-should-handle-privacy/#comments Mon, 26 Mar 2012 21:43:41 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=190170 Following the FTC’s release today of a massive online privacy policy framework, I had a few minutes to chat with FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. I asked him about the implications for Web and social media companies that use personal data.

credit: Win McNamee, Getty Images News

For context, the conversation started with me asking about opt-in versus opt-out product releases — which means, do you first ask your customers whether they want to use something new, or do you give it to them and let them decide if it’s useful or not. Opt-out has been the preferred choice of many companies, perhaps most notably Facebook, because it cuts out the friction of requiring additional permission.

Liz Gannes: What do you anticipate being the FTC stance around opt-in going forward? Is it reasonable to interpret the framework as pushing the industry towards opt-in policies?

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz: We’ve laid out some areas where we think opt-in is more appropriate. With financial information, in healthcare, when dealing with vulnerable populations like children. And if cable or phone companies want to do something analogous to deep-packet inspection, there should be opt-in.

I think we’re pretty balanced. You want to have better privacy notices, give consumers more choice, and give opt-out on tracking. When you’re talking about more sensitive populations, you might want to flip that and make it an opt-in.

We also think when you engage in best practices, what we hear from companies is consumers trust the Internet more, and they want to do more commerce.

How do you expect newer companies, for instance growing social media players like Tumblr or Pinterest, to interface with the FTC? How can they proactively avoid investigations and settlements like what you had with Google and Facebook?

We think our report strikes the right balance between privacy and innovation. I think if you’re a new company, make sure you’ve seen our cases. A large number are about making privacy commitments and not honoring them. So if you commit to something, follow through.

Leibowitz, by the way, will be appearing at our D10 conference in May.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120326/qa-ftc-chairman-on-how-web-start-ups-should-handle-privacy/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120326/ftc-calls-for-privacy-by-design/ http://allthingsd.com/20120326/ftc-calls-for-privacy-by-design/#comments Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:09:57 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=190043 The U.S. Federal Trade Commission today released a set of recommendations for businesses and Congress about the collection and use of consumers’ personal data.

This framework (PDF) has been in the works for years, and in the meantime there has been considerable progress on many of its final recommendations, both proactively by businesses themselves and through privacy investigations and settlements the FTC had with companies like Google and Facebook.

Screengrab from the FTC's diagram of the personal data ecosystem

The FTC calls for “privacy by design,” simplified choices and greater transparency.

The report includes indications that the FTC is concerned about comprehensive tracking — the sort of stuff that companies like Google and Facebook are moving toward — though that’s one of the less-developed recommendations. FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz had previously called Google’s new unified privacy policy “a fairly binary and somewhat brutal choice” for consumers to make.

The FTC passed the report 3-1, with Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch dissenting for a few reasons, one of which was concern that the FTC is effectively mandating that Internet services will become “opt in” by design, even when that’s impractical or unnecessary. Again, that’s an important one for Google, Facebook and other Internet companies that seek to evolve along with the personal data they collect.

There are five main action items in the framework:

• Do Not Track: This is probably the furthest along. Browser vendors are now offering do-not-track options for consumers to limit data collection, the Digital Advertising Alliance is committed to respecting them, and standards bodies are working to standardize.
• Mobile: The FTC wants to make mobile privacy protections “short, effective and accessible to consumers on small screens.”
• Data Brokers: This is a bigger one. The FTC wants a centralized Web site where data brokers identify themselves and disclose how they collect data. It also supports Congress’s efforts to give consumers access to data about them held by brokers.
• Comprehensive Tracking: The FTC is concerned about ISPs, operating systems, browsers and social networks comprehensively tracking users’ online activities, but it won’t address this until a public workshop in the second half of this year.
• Enforcing Self-Regulatory Codes: The FTC said it will help enforce industry-specific codes of conduct.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120326/ftc-calls-for-privacy-by-design/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120309/here-come-the-first-d10-speakers-new-york-mayor-michael-bloomberg-entrepreneur-sean-parker-zyngas-mark-pincus-and-more-on-the-red-hot-seat/ http://allthingsd.com/20120309/here-come-the-first-d10-speakers-new-york-mayor-michael-bloomberg-entrepreneur-sean-parker-zyngas-mark-pincus-and-more-on-the-red-hot-seat/#comments Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:40:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=182153 Even though our D: All Things Digital conference always sells out well in advance every year without our announcing even one single speaker (like this one, too), it’s the action on stage that truly matters.

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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120309/here-come-the-first-d10-speakers-new-york-mayor-michael-bloomberg-entrepreneur-sean-parker-zyngas-mark-pincus-and-more-on-the-red-hot-seat/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120228/ftc-chairman-new-google-privacy-plan-forces-consumers-to-make-a-brutal-choice/ http://allthingsd.com/20120228/ftc-chairman-new-google-privacy-plan-forces-consumers-to-make-a-brutal-choice/#comments Tue, 28 Feb 2012 11:43:51 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=178590 It’s just a few days now until Google’s new privacy policy goes into effect. And lawmakers and regulators continue to raise eyebrows over the agreement, which will grant the company greater license to share user account information between a number of services. The latest to do so: Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz.

Asked about Google’s new policy, which goes into effect on March 1, during an episode of C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers,” Leibowitz offered this assessment:

“It’s a fairly binary and somewhat brutal choice that they are giving consumers. I think I can’t say much more. But we’re aware.”

A brutal choice.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of these new privacy settings that Google contends are in everyone’s best interests.

And while Leibowitz concedes that Google is offering consumers a clear disclosure on its plans, his characterization of it suggests some discomfort with its implementation.

That’s something that concerns others, as well. Last week, an alliance of 36 state attorneys general sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page, demanding assurances that the policy doesn’t jeopardize consumer privacy. Prior to that, some House lawmakers criticized the company for failing to answer some important questions about how easy or difficult it is for users to protect their privacy and control how their personal information is shared across Google’s services.

“Our updated Privacy Policy will make our privacy practices easier to understand, and it reflects our desire to create a seamless experience for our signed-in users,” Google said in a statement to AllThingsD. “We’ve undertaken the most extensive notification effort in Google’s history, and we’re continuing to offer choice and control over how people use our services.The privacy policy change mainly affects users with a Google Account, and you can continue to use many of our services — including Search, Maps and YouTube — when you are logged out.”

Here’s the video of Leibowitz’s appearance in full:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120228/ftc-chairman-new-google-privacy-plan-forces-consumers-to-make-a-brutal-choice/feed/ 0