That’s the gist of Eric Schmidt’s latest comments on Google’s forthcoming facephone, whose launch the company is approaching with quite a bit of circumspection. Speaking at an event Thursday at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Schmidt said Glass requires a rethinking of social etiquette, and a heavy curative hand from Google with Glass app developers.

“There are obviously places where Google Glasses are inappropriate,” Schmidt said. “It’s so new, we decided to be more cautious.”

Seriously? Wearing Google Glass AT a urinal? That part of some off the books, scatological 20% project? OK Glass!

— John Paczkowski (@JohnPaczkowski) March 3, 2013

Wise move, and not just from a public relations standpoint, but from a regulatory one, as well. If Glass draws the same sort of scrutiny as Street View, even a single privacy misstep could very quickly turn into a grueling nightmare.

“We want to be very careful that this sort of new invention is not misused,” Schmidt said later. “It’s already been banned in Las Vegas casinos. They haven’t even seen it. I’m always concerned about premature regulation based on fear, as opposed to understanding what’s possible.”

Certainly a legitimate concern, given Google’s history.

In particular, the state’s attorney general took issue with the fact that T-Mobile forces those financing their phones to either continue service with the carrier until the device is paid for or to pay the full remaining cost of the phone when they want to cancel.

“Consumers who cancel their wireless service face an unanticipated balloon payment for the phone equipment — in some cases higher than termination fees for other wireless carriers depending on how early they cancel,” the Washington attorney general’s office said in a statement.

Under the agreement announced Thursday, T-Mobile consented to changes in how it markets the plans and to offer refunds to anyone who signed up with T-Mobile between March 26 and April 25.

“As America’s Un-carrier, our goal is to increase transparency with our customers, unleashing them from restrictive long-term service contracts — this kind of simple, straight forward approach is core to the new company we are building,” T-Mobile said in a statement. “While we believe our advertising was truthful and appropriate, we voluntarily agreed to this arrangement with the Washington AG in this spirit.”

Announced last month, T-Mobile’s new plans drop phone subsidies and two-year service commitments. Those who pay for their phone in full or bring their own device are free to cancel whenever.

Customers can also choose to finance their phone over two years; those who do find themselves in a situation that looks roughly similar to a contract.

After months of conversations with the EU competition watchdog, Google last week submitted a final package of concessions that will later be tested in the market, giving Google’s rivals a chance to comment on whether the changes made an impact. Google didn’t make public any details about its proposal.

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Reed Hastings found that out the hard way, after he shared some company user numbers to his Facebook page last fall. The Securities and Exchange Commission wasn’t cool with that, saying at the time that Hastings had disclosed material information to only a subset of his shareholders by not simultaneously filing a disclosure with the SEC. For his sharing, Hastings was slapped with a nice little SEC investigation.

Fortunately for Hastings — and other share-happy CEOs — the SEC came back with a ruling on Tuesday, essentially saying a Facebook disclosure is public enough for stockholders to learn about any material info.

“Most social media are perfectly suitable methods for communicating with investors, but not if the access is restricted or if investors don’t know that’s where they need to turn to get the latest news,” said George Canellos, Acting Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, in a statement.

So basically, it’s cool to share material info on a social network. As long as you disclose just which network you’re sharing said material on, the SEC stipulates.

In other words, go ahead, Reed! Share all the data points you want about Netflix on your social networks. Just remember to point out to your shareholders that you’re doing it on Facebook, not Twitter. Or vice versa.

The whole point of this kerfuffle is that all stockholders should be privy to the same info at the same time. And typically, the SEC’s official website was the best place to go for that (or at least, the default place — “best” is arguable).

“One set of shareholders should not be able to get a jump on other shareholders just because the company is selectively disclosing important information,” Canellos said.

But as I’ve argued in the past, and as the SEC seems to have recognized on Tuesday, social networks like Facebook and Twitter have massive reach, touching upward of 1.2 billion people on a monthly basis (if you combine the two networks). And in the tech community at least, PR email blasts and newswire releases are giving way to Facebook and Twitter blitzes, eschewing the traditional means of distributing information for other, arguably more effective methods.

(Dan Primack over at Fortune has some good thoughts on this as well, as he’s quite learned in the ways of Reg FD, the antiquated legislation that got Hastings in trouble in the first place.)

As for Hastings, he’ll be getting off scot-free, with the SEC dropping its investigation because of the novelty of social media and sharing practices.

I’m just waiting to see what happens when a CEO snaps an Instagram of their company’s 10-K.

So, time for an update. Which is pretty straightforward.

Just like it did in the dial-up era, the FTC would like you not to lie when you sell stuff. If you’re selling $50 pearl earrings, you have to tell people that they’re not really pearl earrings.

Easy enough!

But what about newfangled stuff that didn’t exist back in 2000, like Twitter and Facebook? The FTC is glad you asked, because it has extensive thoughts about how to peddle bogus diet pills on Twitter.*

For instance: If you’re going to peddle bogus diet pills on Twitter, you have to explain that you’re getting paid to do it, and that your claims aren’t true. Right away.

This version, for example, is no good because the disclosure tweet, at the top of the timeline, comes way too long after the initial fraudulent pitch, at the bottom. I even had to break up the screenshot into two parts!

Also: Don’t assume the people you are peddling bogus diet pills to can pick up on nuance. Because while it’s good that this Tweet explains that the pitch is bogus up front …

… it’s still not good enough. You may understand that “#spon” is short for “I am getting paid to peddle these bogus diet pills.” But not everyone is clever enough to pick up on that. “If a significant proportion of reasonable viewers would not, then the ad would be deceptive,” says the FTC.

Okay. So what if you stick “#spon” next to a link in the Tweet that brings you to a site where you sell bogus diet pills?

Nope, says the FTC. “Putting #spon directly after the link might confuse consumers.”

Alrighty, then. What if you just put all the disclosure stuff in the site you link to, where you’ll have more room to go into detail about the nature of the bogus diet pills and your relationship to the company that sells them?

Sorry, dude. That won’t work, because what if people don’t click on the link? “Moreover, if consumers can buy Fat-away in brick and mortar stores, at third-party online retailers, or in any way other than by clicking on the link, consumers who do not click on the link would be misled.” (Mostly excerpted that part because it’s fun to type “Fat-away.”)

Garr. What if you jam the word “disclosure” into the link itself? Would you people understand that there’s a disclosure about the bogus diet pills then?

Nuh-uh. “Consumers … would not necessarily understand what they will find at that website, or why they should click on that link.”

Ugh! This peddling bogus diet pills on Twitter thing is hard! Is there any way to do this with the FTC’s seal of approval?

Yes. Yes, there is. You say “Ad” before you start typing. And then you use the second half of the Tweet to explain that the first half of the Tweet is a lie.

Boom, as the kids say. Now wait for the dollars to start pouring in!**

This next bit isn’t safe for work, and I’ve posted it before, and it’s not 100 percent on topic. But I’m posting it again. You’re welcome!

*Apologies for the image quality on the originals — maybe a sequester thing?
**Disclosure: Dollars may not literally pour in if you use this technique to peddle bogus diet pills on Twitter.

Which of the following scenarios has regulators in Europe issuing hundreds of millions in new fines this week?

1) Google has released a laptop that consists of nothing more than its browser, thereby severely foreclosing opportunities for competition on any number of fronts.

2) Apple, which for years wouldn’t allow iOS apps to compete with its built-in programs, still won’t allow access to its fastest browsing engine, forcing rivals to use slower technology.

3) Microsoft, which used to have a dominant browser and operating system but has been losing share for years, has failed to live up to the terms of a deal over that fading monopoly.

If you guessed No. 3, you might have a job waiting for you at the European Commission.

While everyone else has turned their attention to mobile — an area where Microsoft trails badly — European regulators have remained doggedly focused on making sure consumers have plenty of choice of browsers when they bother to boot up their desktop.

The issue seemed passe when the EU revisited it back in 2009 and seems all the more so four years later.

Windows and Internet Explorer have continued to lose share over those four years on the desktop itself, and the real growth in the Internet is from billions of mobile devices.

To be fair, Microsoft did agree to offer European consumers the option of a ballot to choose which browser they wanted. Even Redmond admits it made a mistake.

“We take full responsibility for the technical error that caused this problem and have apologized for it,” Microsoft said in a statement. “We provided the (European) Commission with a complete and candid assessment of the situation, and we have taken steps to strengthen our software development and other processes to help avoid this mistake — or anything similar — in the future.”

But, at this point, might regulators want to turn their attention elsewhere?

Consumers certainly have. Even RealNetworks, Opera and the other outfits that initially complained about Windows have, too.

“Apple has [become] more flexible, paying more attention to everyone else, probably a little less arrogant than they used to be,” France Telecom-Orange CEO Stephane Richard said during a dinner with reporters in Barcelona on Monday. Characterizing today’s Apple with the same company under Steve Jobs, Richard said, “I think they are probably a little more under pressure, and it is quite nice.”

And while carriers are rooting for Mozilla, Microsoft, BlackBerry and mobile Linux to emerge as rivals to Android and the iPhone, there’s no way the market is large enough to support that many competitors.

“There is probably not room for everyone,” Richard said. “But all of us hope that among those initiatives, at least one will be able to emerge as a third ecosystem.”

It is observations like these, made during a media dinner on Monday night, that make Richard a popular interview among nearly all the journalists on the wireless beat.

Naturally, Richard reserved some of his most pointed commentary for bemoaning what he and other European wireless firms see as the over-regulation of the telecommunications industry on the continent.

He called one particular regulator “dumb” and said another, while holding a decent view of the marketplace, appears powerless to improve the situation.

Richard compared the near-monopolies of Facebook and Google and the Apple-Samsung duopoly to the highly competitive wireless carrier market in Europe, which he said features more than 100 companies. “We are living through incredible competition; they are not living through competition. That’s it,” he said. He implored regulators to prevent further companies from entering the crowded market.

At the same time, Richard acknowledged that this is a case he and other European operators have been making for years.

“It is a little tiring to sing the same song,” he said.

As for the ecosystem battle, Richard said that Windows Phone has a “very difficult” road to truly compete with iOS and Android. Richard said devices running the Microsoft-developed operating system are neither better designed nor cheaper, nor do they offer a better application experience than iOS or Android. Put simply, Windows Phone is good but lacks a “wow” factor, Richard said.

“The Nokia family in my opinion is nice, but there is no ‘wow’ effect,” Richard said. “When you have a market with very steady players like Apple and Samsung, you need to have a ‘wow’ effect.”

Making things worse, he said, hardware makers have generally been selling Windows Phones for the same price as the more popular devices.

BlackBerry, too, has a tough road, Richard said, though he praised the work of CEO Thorsten Heins and the new leadership there.

“He is doing a great job, but I am not sure they will be successful,” Richard said. “At least they have a basis of very faithful users, which is not the case of Nokia.”

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“You’ll have to email him, they’re very secretive. And take a seat.”

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Fleur Pellerin, France’s technology minister, said the government is looking at how existing telecommunication regulations could be harnessed to ensure Web giants help pay to roll out and maintain high-speed networks.

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The Taxi and Limousine Commission is expected to vote Thursday on rules that would allow the use of smartphone applications for hailing and paying for cab rides for the first time. But representatives for other for-hire vehicles have mounted a fierce behind-the-scenes lobbying effort to block them.

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If that’s the case, Uber is the current badge leader, racking up a citation from the California Public Utilities Commission and a class action lawsuit by San Francisco taxi drivers to add to its hefty pile of local disputes.

Ride-sharing services SideCar and Lyft confirmed they’d also been cited by the PUC yesterday to the tune of $20,000. Lyft COO John Zimmer said his company would appeal the citation and described it as a chance to accelerate a conversation about modernizing transportation laws. SideCar CEO Sunil Paul asked users to sign a petition supporting his company and urged them to “Ride on!”

While bigger online audiences and efficient shipping operations have enabled categories like pet food and diapers to become viable Web businesses, selling wine over the Internet remains thorny. Chief among the hurdles is a patchwork of U.S. and state regulations governing alcohol sales that makes shipping bottles directly to consumers’ doorsteps a mind-boggling proposition.

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What’s interesting is that the fine hasn’t even been levied yet, but the process has played out very much in public.

Literally every step of the process has been leaked. In March, The Wall Street Journal — which first brought the issue to light – reported that regulators were looking into the matter. In April, the San Jose Mercury News reported that Google was likely to be fined by the FTC. Then, in July, it came out that a settlement of $22.5 million was near. Yesterday, Reuters said members of the FTC had voted to approve the settlement, and it would come out in days.

While neither the FTC or Google is admitting to any leaks, Google seems to have gotten so fed up with the coverage that it has made the rather unusual move of commenting specifically on the ongoing case.

The company now tells any reporter who asks, “The FTC is focused on a 2009 help center page published more than two years before our consent decree, and a year before Apple changed its cookie-handling policy. We have now changed that page and taken steps to remove the ad cookies, which collected no personal information, from Apple’s browsers.”

Translation: The only issue they are pinning on us is that a help page was out of date. Please stop using scary words like “bypass” and “tracking.”

The FTC, meanwhile, says it does not comment on ongoing cases.

The “consent decree” Google is talking about is the agreement it made with the FTC over Google Buzz in 2011, in which it promised not to mislead users on privacy for 20 years, or else face consequences. So the FTC is upset that this outdated help page said one thing, while Google was doing something else (the specifics have to do with Google figuring out a trick to put little personalized “+1” buttons on ads).

The context for this is that Google faces all sorts of international regulatory scrutiny over various privacy incidents, some of them “inadvertent,” and some of them more complicated.

But as the Safari case moves behind (partially) closed doors to the court of public opinion, some stakes are very high and others are very low. While $22.5 million is small change in Google bucks, it would be the largest fine the FTC has exacted on a single company.

Plus, it doesn’t appear that Google will have to admit any wrongdoing. That might seem strange, but it’s actually standard practice. The Buzz agreement was the same way. The FTC has made a practice of securing no-fault settlements, something that has recently been contested in court for not being strong enough to defend consumers.

Given that Google won’t have to admit fault or pay a significant fine, the consistent press coverage of the company’s privacy slip-ups is probably the worst repercussion of the whole incident.

These privacy incursions are bound to keep happening, considering just how much data companies like Google have about all of us, and how complex their organizations have become.

So is this what the future of tech regulation looks like? Company gets in trouble, agrees to be audited but doesn’t admit fault, and then for years, regulators extract ticky-tacky fines over “inadvertent” errors? And then the cycle repeats itself.

“In a short period of time, T-Mobile has re-emerged as a vibrant competitor in the mobile marketplace,” an FCC representative told AllThingsD in an email. “Competition benefits all wireless consumers. The bottom line is that AT&T’s proposal to acquire a major competitor was unprecedented in scope and the company’s own confidential documents showed that the merger would have resulted in significant job losses.”

On Thursday, T-Mobile said it was closing seven call centers, in a move that will lead to the loss of at least 1,900 jobs.

AT&T, which had promised not to cut call-center jobs, held out T-Mobile’s plans as proof that the country would have been better off had the deal been approved, a notion the FCC quickly took issue with.

Cisco announced the appeal in a post to Cisco’s corporate blog by Cisco’s senior VP for video and collaboration, Marthin De Beer. In it, Cisco argues that the EU should reexamine the deal because Skype doesn’t work with other video and audio calling systems that use industry standard technologies, such as Cisco’s.

“Imagine how difficult it would be if you were limited to calling people who only use the same carrier or if your phone could only call certain brands and not others,” De Beer wrote. “Cisco wants to avoid this future for video communications,” and so has filed the appeal. Messagenet, a European IP calling service, joined Cisco in filing the appeal. Both had commented to the European Commmission during initial hearings on the deal before it was approved.

Cisco doesn’t want the merger rescinded, but rather wants the EC to impose some interoperability conditions on Microsoft. Part of Microsoft’s plan with Skype has been to combine it with its Lync video and voice calling software for businesses. Both Lync and Skype use their own proprietary calling technologies, and so aren’t compatible with other video and calling services.

Sources familiar with the matter say Cisco had sought to work with Microsoft to ensure that its videoconferencing gear would work with Skype, but was unsuccessful in reaching a deal.

Skype has about 700 million users worldwide, and before Microsoft acquired it, had sought to go public in April. For calendar year 2010, it reported revenue of $860 million and a net loss of about $7 million. Successful mainly with consumers who like its free service, the company had begun to work on a strategy meant to bring the service to enterprise users, but had suffered some service failures that gave its target corporate customers pause. The Microsoft acquisition, announced in May, happened at just the right moment.

When the deal was announced, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Skype would, in time, be integrated with other Microsoft products, including the Xbox gaming console, Windows Phone for smartphones, and even its Hotmail Web email service.

Cisco’s videoconferencing business is a force primarily among large companies. It has 50,000 companies who use its gear, but it struggled to create a consumer-focused service, and shuttered its Umi product last year amid a wider corporate restructuring.

Microsoft wasn’t immediately available for comment on Cisco’s move, but I’ll add anything I get from it as soon as I have it.

Update: And here’s the official response from Redmond: “The European Commission conducted a thorough investigation of the acquisition, in which Cisco actively participated, and approved the deal in a 36-page decision without any conditions. We’re confident the Commission’s decision will stand up on appeal.”

Here’s the full text of Cisco’s post announcing the appeal:

Video to Video Communications is the Future

In the past decade video communications has moved out of the realm of science fiction to become commonplace in our homes, at work, and on mobile devices. Yet we remain some distance from the goal of video calls being as easy and ubiquitous as phone calls are today – across any network and between all devices.

Imagine how difficult it would be if you were limited to calling people who only use the same carrier or if your phone could only call certain brands and not others. Cisco wants to avoid this future for video communications, and therefore today appealed the European Commission’s approval of the Microsoft/Skype merger to the General Court of the European Union. Messagenet, a European VoIP service provider, has joined us in the appeal.

We did not take this action lightly. We respect the European Commission, and value Microsoft as a customer, supplier, partner, and competitor. Cisco does not oppose the merger, but believes the European Commission should have placed conditions that would ensure greater standards-based interoperability, to avoid any one company from being able to seek to control the future of video communications.

This appeal is about one thing only: securing standards-based interoperability in the video calling space. Our goal is to make video calling as easy and seamless as email is today. Making a video-to-video call should be as easy as dialing a phone number. Today, however, you can’t make seamless video calls from one platform to another, much to the frustration of consumers and business users alike.

Cisco believes that the right approach for the industry is to rally around open standards. We believe standards-based interoperability will accelerate innovation, create economic value, and increase choice for users of video communications, entertainment, and services.

The video communications industry is at a critical tipping point with far reaching consequences. Just three years from now the world will be home to nearly 3 billion Internet users, the average fixed broadband speed will be 28 Mbps, and 1 million video minutes (the equivalent of 674 days) will traverse the internet every second. As video collaboration becomes increasingly mainstream, multiple vendors will have to work together to enable global scale and broad customer choice.

For the sake of customers, the industry recognizes the need for ubiquitous unified communications interoperability, particularly between Microsoft/Skype and Cisco products, as well as products from other unified communications innovators. Microsoft’s plans to integrate Skype exclusively with its Lync Enterprise Communications Platform could lock-in businesses who want to reach Skype’s 700 million account holders to a Microsoft-only platform.

At the heart of this opportunity is a question about the model for interoperability. One approach allows each vendor to decide how they will interoperate. Another approach aligns the industry around open standards defined by non-partisan governing bodies. The answer will be critical to whether and how quickly video calls become “the next voice.”

When vendors implement their own protocols and selectively interoperate, they push the burden of interoperability to the customer. We respectfully request that the General Court act on our concerns and for the European Commission to ensure the proper protections are put in place to encourage innovation and a competitive marketplace.

Some initial reactions to the proposal, which was pre-announced at the DLD conference in Munich and then published on Wednesday, were harshly critical.

Writer Jeff Jarvis was armed and ready to rebut European Commissioner Viviane Reding’s opening address on “the right to be forgotten” at DLD, having criticized her data protection stance in his new book “Public Parts.”

“I very much fear Reding’s ‘right to be forgotten’ and its impact [on] free speech and the right to know,” Jarvis wrote.

A European Microsoft executive was also quick with the skepticism. “We have been pushing for harmonisation of privacy laws for several years, but we are concerned that these proposals may be too prescriptive,” Ron Zink, who is Microsoft Europe’s chief operating officer and associate general counsel, told the Financial Times.

Analysts and industry groups called Reding’s ideas “draconian,” “prescriptive,” “onerous” and expensive.

But now that Reding has formally proposed her legislation, Web companies seemed more measured in their response. Though they didn’t endorse the bill, they seemed willing to work with it. Of course, they’d prefer to avoid walking into fines of up to two percent of their revenue.

In statements emailed to AllThingsD, Google asked for a “simple” solution, while Facebook continued to talk up its positive impact on European jobs.

Said Google: “We support simplifying privacy rules in Europe to both protect consumers online and stimulate economic growth. It is possible to have simple rules that do both. We look forward to debating the proposals over the coming months.”

A Google executive at a conference in Brussels further questioned how, exactly, third-party sites could be responsible for deleting all instances of data online after it had been posted.

Here’s Facebook’s extended statement:

The revision of Europe’s Data Protection framework is an important opportunity to develop regulation that both protects privacy and supports the creation and growth of modern services over the global Internet. We welcome the move towards more harmonization of Data Protection laws in the EU which will help create legal certainty and confidence for companies to operate.

We agree with the recent statements made by Commissioner Reding that the new regulation should foster growth and job creation. Services like Facebook already contribute significantly to economic activity in the EU and can be a major driver of growth and new jobs in the future.

We will continue to work closely with politicians and regulators in the EU in order to share our experience and expertise and contribute to achieving sound privacy regulation and a thriving digital sector.

Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik, whose company offers what could be seen as “the right to be forgotten” as a paid service to customers, said he didn’t necessarily support Reding’s proposal but he disapproved of industry hysteria around regulation of the Internet.

“I think that light regulation is often a stimulant to innovation,” Fertik said.

“Right now the absence of law supports the incumbents of the Internet, which are advertising businesses,” he added. “But what’s bad for Facebook today may be good for a thousand companies tomorrow. The biggest promise of the right to be forgotten is it’s going to enhance the trust of the Internet, which could be a boon to e-commerce.”

As for some other major Web companies in the business of identity and user-generated content, Twitter declined to comment on EU data protection policy, while Tumblr — which had been especially active in fighting SOPA — did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers on Thursday expressed concerns about Google’s new unified privacy policy.

But here’s the upshot: The cable guys, who had been noodling with the idea of getting into the wireless business, are going to let Verizon handle it instead. And Verizon, which has already committed a ton of money to get into the cable TV and broadband business, won’t spend any more.

Call it a virtual merger, or detente, or whatever you like — it’s both sides agreeing to work together by staying out of each other’s way. [UPDATE: Comcast doesn't love with my characterization of the deal. See below]

None of the players involved wants to come out and say that, perhaps with antitrust regulators in mind. And the agreements won’t explicitly prevent any of the companies from competing with each other.

Verizon’s FiOS, for instance, is already available to about 15 percent of Comcast’s TV/broadband subscribers, and Verizon won’t stop selling it there. But Verizon stopped expanding its FiOS footprint last year, after spending $23 billion. And while Verizon hasn’t said it won’t start up again, this tie-up makes it very unlikely.

Comcast, meanwhile, is sort of in the wireless business now. But only a handful of its subscribers — perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 — use its Xfinity Internet2go service. So it’s easy to stop marketing that immediately, and transition that group to Verizon’s services in the near-term.

Meanwhile the companies all agree to co-market each other’s services. And the cable guys have essentially given themselves an option to get back into the wireless business four years from now, where they could rent out Verizon’s spectrum and become “mobile virtual network operators.” But that seems more like an escape hatch/leverage, not a road map.

The deal seems like it has obvious upsides for both companies, but we’re very likely to hear consumer watchdogs tell us that the tie-up stifles competition for crucial communication services. Which is why Comcast is making sure to argue that the deal will “provide more choice, great new innovative products, and better experiences to consumers and small and medium-sized businesses.” It will be interesting to see what Washington thinks of this, especially in light of its AT&T/T-Mobile stance.

UPDATE: Comcast wants to get some of its points across. Fair enough. The following comes from PR rep Jen Khoury:

·SpectrumCo is selling, and Verizon Wireless is buying, 122 spectrum licenses. This helps Verizon Wireless by putting them ahead of the curve on meeting their future spectrum needs as they roll out 4G LTE

·The sales agreements are customary in the wireless industry – similar to DirecTV and AT&T’s agreement to market and sell each other’s services, and they don’t require regulatory approval.

·We’ll be like each other’s Best Buy – each selling the other’s products and services, essentially for a commission.

·Neither Comcast nor Verizon Wireless is acquiring an ownership interest in the other company, and the operations of the two companies will remain independent, and no customers are being transferred.

(Image credit: Shutterstock/Viroel Sima)

Google and prospective partners have held early-stage discussions but haven’t put together a formal proposal and Google may end up not pursuing a bid, this person said. It’s unclear which private-equity firms Google has talked to.

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Arriving at Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum, in the heart of the tech industry, with the leader of the free world talking jobs and digital, you might expect fantastic wireless access.

You might, but not so much if you are a “local” reporter and can’t jack into the extra-secret-special wireless link the national White House press corps apparently has reserved for itself. (They also get a lovely noshing buffet, whilst we tech reporters have been instructed not to touch the pineapple and scones or else!)

Famished for coffee and carbs, we’re left with glomming onto the museum’s slowish wireless service — there are lotsa geeks here today jamming up the lines — and every now and then getting some juice from Google. The search giant blankets the Mountain View, Calif. area near its HQ with free Wi-Fi, but it fades in and out.

I am now reconsidering the antitrust investigations that the Obama administration is conducting against Google, as long as its signal is good enough to check Twitter.

So this liveblog of President Barack Obama’s LinkedIn Town Hall — which will center on jobs and is titled, “Putting America Back to Work” — could be glacial with not much news, much like what I am expecting from the event itself.

I’d certainly like to work, as long as the wireless does! (Plus, limited power outlets in the room, so it’s every reporter for herself!)

But bygones, while we await the Prez!

10:18 am: One thing that made me flee Washington, D.C., when I worked for the Washington Post, was all the rigmarole that surrounded the appearance of and access to politicians.

I get it, the security and all, and am all for it on a general safety level. But, no matter how you slice it, it hinders any kind of movement or genuine interaction, like being stuck at a really dull opera. All the world’s a stage and we are all merely waiting in traffic.

In contrast, and one of the joys of Silicon Valley, is that anyone can get up right up into the grill of the various billionaire potentates littering the landscape, engage in a debate and get a possibly real answer.

Thus, I am hoping for a lot here from LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who is going to moderate the hour-long session with the President.

By the way, while he is busy running the business-focused social networking site, Weiner is looking good in a fancy suit, almost as if he could be Secretary of the Internet. I’d vote for him.

10:28 am: Some painless but hip music is playing now, as we wait, wait, wait for Obama, who is set to begin in 30 minutes.

I wonder if the President is ever early. Wouldn’t that freak the peeps out?

(Obviously, I am bored, so I shall now go monitor Twitter to catch up on the latest in the new bad-marriage-or-not cat fight between Brad Pitt and his ex, Jennifer Aniston — as if we need him to tell us Angelina Jolie is more interesting. Frankly, Angie’s midday snack is more interesting than Jen.)

There is now what appears to be a Secret Service dude next to me, giving me a hairy eyeball. If I am jailed over my wireless protest, please give generously to my defense fund.

Free the Internet! Free the Internet!

10:35 am: Finally, the production guy is up giving out the rules. Turn off the cellphones, no making noise.

The head Secret Service guy then takes the stage. No getting out of your seat. No sudden movements. And no crossing the blue line in the front row.

“All joking aside,” he says, he will take you down. He also notes that if the President moves toward you to shake your hand, “do not move toward him.”

I love Secret Service agents — especially when played by Clint Eastwood — and wish I had one to give a few people in tech a little smackadoo on my behalf. And not only if they moved toward me!

10:47 am: This little frisson of excitement is followed by more waiting, as the final seats are filled up in the room, which is an unusually (and welcome) multi-racial and gender-balanced crowd for Silicon Valley.

Various White House aides skitter back and forth like nervous ground squirrels — I would imagine their life is one big effort to avoid any gaffe — so the Prez must be near.

I am actually looking forward to seeing him, as I never have in person and am looking forward to seeing the famous Obama charm and techie cred.

Indeed, he is probably the most fast-forward tech president there has ever been. That said, buffeted by more serious issues facing the nation, his administration has delivered on few — by which I mean none — of its promises around the digitization of the U.S.

Our high-speed broadband, for example, is still woefully slow, inordinately expensive and not easily available nationwide.

And I will not even go into the need for increased focus on math and science education or the importance of our broken visa policies.

But the topic today is jobs, which is an arena where Silicon Valley and tech shines in the U.S., even as manufacturing of it has mostly moved overseas. How tech can help improve in the creation of jobs will be issue No. 1 here.

10:55 am: Total silence with five minutes to go. I need the President around to quiet my kids.

Now, LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman comes in, so the event is probably about to begin.

And, indeed, Weiner emerges to cheers, to give a little speech on “changing the way we work … and connecting talent to opportunity.”

11:01 am: Then, the session starts right on time with President Obama.

He begins with a rote speech on jobs, which is nonetheless the most important issue he faces going into next year’s election.

11:14 am: Ah, wireless glitch! Back!

President Obama is inexplicably in the middle of a Medicare question, which gives him an opportunity to talk about the need for the rich to pay more taxes.

And pass his American Jobs Act, of course.

11:17 am: More on proposing legislation for retraining workers, such as the questioner’s mom.

Now to a group of email questions. The first is about when small businesses are going to get a break from onerous regulations and taxes.

President Obama says since he has been in office, he has cut taxes 16 times for those who create a business.

But he is not going to apologize for some regulations, such as those for the financial industry over the mortgage crisis.

“There are some regulations that have outlived their usefulness,” he says, but others not so much.

11:24 am: The next question is from a Chicago IT employee. Except she is not employed.

She is asking a question about keeping her skills up and what programs are needed.

“The best thing we can do for you is that the unemployment rate goes down,” said President Obama, but also adds that making it easy to go to school while waiting on a job is also important.

“Just looking at you, I can tell you are going to do great,” he tells her in an awkward effort at reassurance.

Thanks, Barack, but she needs a job!

11:28 am: A veteran is asking a question about transitioning out of the military.

Obama launches into a story of a medical technician who faced all kinds of experiences, but had to start over again with new classes when out of the military. He suggests some level of credentialing based on experience.

11:33 am: Obama gets to pick out someone from the crowd and manages to pick out a dude who is a former Googler — although he only says that he works down the street — and is out of work by choice.

He asks: “Will you please raise my taxes?

A plant? I wish!

President Obama asks the name of the start-up. “A search engine,” says the ex-Googler-in-disguise, who is Doug Edwards, an early marketing exec there who actually wrote a book on being an ex-Googler.

“That worked out well for you,” kids President Obama.

Everyone likes a rich-guy joke!

He is soon onto the idea that we’re all dang lucky and declares he does not want it to turn the debate over taxes into a rich-poor war.

Bottom line, he notes that we have to raise taxes on the very wealthy. Frankly, if we raised taxes on a bunch of folks in this room, it would help a lot.

11:42 am: A teach-training question, especially math and science teachers.

President Obama is all for it.

He is meaning well here, but all he seems to offer is a lot of bromides about the importance of education and errant related anecdotes.

Like one from IBM, where the company hires the kids in the program at the end.

President Obama wants students to see a direct connection between learning and jobs.

Then, he kind of says it again. Gosh, he can talk. How does the well-fed and wirelessly connected White House press corp take it? Lotsa donuts, I would imagine.

President Obama also wants us to turn off the electronics and video games for kids, too, thereby instantly losing the votes of my two sons!

Another laid-off guy is up at the mic. He had 22 years in IT management and is disheartened.

He wants a statement of encouragement from the CEO of America.

President Obama assures him that his track record of success gives him a leg up, but that the problem is the economy and the global meltdown, too.

It’s systemic, apparently.

“The problem is not you, the problem is the economy as a whole,” says President Obama.

That was the last question. Weiner, who has been sitting quietly (I know it was hard, Jeff, but good job), thanks the President and tells him that this is a big issue.

President does his thanks, too, for being able to speak, although not really that much was actually said.

And then a genuine moment, finally, of clarity.

“Look, we’re going through a very tough time, but we have gone through tougher times before,” he says. “But the trajectory we are going on is one that is more open, more linked …”

He talks about the need for being ready to take advantage of that opportunity.

“Things have gotten so ideologically driven, putting party above country,” he adds, that nothing is getting done. That’s why the people, the voters, have to demand leadership from their elected officials.

Or, presumably, fire them and let them try to find another job, too.

It might turn out to be the best idea yet, if these pols don’t agree on something and quick.

In a surprisingly early and decisive move, the Department of Justice on Wednesday filed suit to block AT&T’s planned $39 billion purchase of T-Mobile USA. Justice Department attorneys said that they are concerned the deal will lessen competition, ultimately leading to higher prices for consumers.

Experts say the broad worry about the reduction in competition makes it tough to imagine what sort of sweeteners the companies could create to make the deal easier to swallow.

“Given the nature of the specific concerns articulated by the DOJ, those types of concerns are hard to address through concessions,” said Maury Mechanick, a telecommunications attorney with White & Case.

As a result, it would appear that AT&T and T-Mobile will have to weigh whether they are willing endure an all-out court fight to try to preserve the deal.

And oh, what a fight it would be. In order for the deal to go forward, AT&T would have to convince a federal court to see things its way as well as prevail on any appeals, a process that is uncertain, not to mention costly and time-consuming. Even if they ultimately prevail in court, the companies still need the approval of the Federal Communications Commission.

Both FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Commissioner Michael Copps issued statements on Wednesday saying that they, too, have concerns about the deal. While the FCC review is separate from the one being done by the Justice Department, the statements indicate the two agencies seem to be on the same page when it comes to the deal.

One FCC insider noted that the agency has never approved a deal that the Justice Department sued to block.

For now, both AT&T and T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom say they are willing to fight for the deal. AT&T has asked for an expedited hearing on the matter.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Department of Justice filed suit seeking to block the deal on the grounds it would harm competition. AT&T said it was surprised by the government’s move and vowed to fight in court.

In a statement to AllThingsD, the German telephone giant said the U.S. government is wrong to block the proposed $39 billion deal.

“Deutsche Telekom is very disappointed by the DOJ’s action, and will join AT&T in defending the contemplated merger against the complaint in court,” DT Executive Vice President Philipp Schindera said. “(The) DOJ failed to acknowledge the robust competition in the U.S. wireless telecommunications industry and the tremendous efficiencies associated with the proposed transaction, which would lead to significant customer, shareholder, and public benefits.”

Schindera did say he appreciated the apparent willingness of regulators to discuss possible remedies.

Unlike a carrier-favored approach, known as femtocells, signal boosters work with all flavors of cell signal as opposed to a single network. However, the industry says that improperly designed gear can lead to signal oscillation, which can cause interference.

In a statement, FCC Commisioner Mignon Clyburn said the devices can help address an important issue with regard to service gaps, while ensuring they don’t cause interference.

“These devices have demonstrated they can help address the coverage gaps that exist within the wireless service areas in both rural and urban environments,” Clyburn said.

Clyburn praised the commission for working with the cellular industry and the makers of the gear to come up with rules that should help minimize the chance of interference. Among the proposed rules is one that would require devices to shut themselves down if they are operating outside of technical guidelines.

However, the cell industry says it is still worried about interference.

“While we have yet to read the (proposed guidelines), we remain concerned that poorly manufactured or improperly installed boosters can do much more harm than good for both consumers and public safety officials,” Brian Josef, CTIA vice president of regulatory affairs, said in a statement. “The record is full of examples of such harm. One of the leading advocates for changes in the commission’s rules, who also happen to be one of the leading manufacturers of boosters, has marketed and sold devices that have caused significant harmful interference.”

Sellers of such gear, meanwhile, applauded the ruling.

“In short, the FCC is formalizing what most of us have known all along: cellular coverage is not good enough,” The Repeater Store said in a blog posting. “In the modern age we are ever more reliant on our phones for important calls and increasingly data services. The FCC recognizes that the task of providing this service cannot fall on the carriers alone and is moving to make cellular signal boosters part of the solution.”

Lloyd R. Meese, CEO of Wi-Ex, which makes such a booster, praised the move, noting his company’s gear already complies with the proposed regulations.

“We recognized from the beginning that oscillation could be an issue and developed patented technology as a solution to the problem,” Meese said in a statement.

In a blog post, AT&T expressed hope that the new proposal would at least clarify the rules and make it easier to go after offending equipment.

This action comes in addition to a separate move by the commission to require carriers to allow data roaming of rivals onto their networks at terms set by the commission. Verizon and AT&T had opposed that move, though Sprint praised the decision.

Often they’ll turn to public cloud providers like Amazon or Google or Microsoft. Those are the three names that usually get mentioned in the same breath whenever enterprise cloud services come up. But what about IT giant IBM? It turns out it’s a significant player in the cloud game, offering both public and private cloud services. Last week I sat down with Ric Telford, IBM’s VP of Cloud Services to talk about how Big Blue’s cloud business is going and what its priorities are in the year just started.

NewEnterprise: Ric, let’s start at the top. Tell me how IBM sees the cloud business right now?

Telford: Initially the cloud is all about doing more with less. Suddenly you could deliver the same IT services for less. Fast-forward to today, and it’s not all about saving money. People are realizing they can do things they never could before with the cloud. I was recently met with a small aircraft engineering company, and the guy running it described how he competes with much larger companies for defense contracts. It used to be that doing all the modeling and simulations he needed required buying hardware and software and running it all on premise. Now he can go out to the cloud, pay for what he uses and be done with it. He can now compete for contracts he wouldn’t have been able to go after before. And we’re seeing a lot of examples like that in industry after industry.

Someone said to me the other day that the cloud is going to have to have all the parts of the mainframe. Do you agree with that?

There’s a lot of parallels between the cloud and the mainframe. IBM’s view is that we have a single-reference architecture. It’s the same whether we’re delivering the service or if we build it for you. We did a deal recently with France Telecom where they are going to be a cloud services provider to their clients. They already have the network connections. But they’re not a cloud company. So they’re using IBM’s cloud architecture to give them all the pieces in one easy-to-consume bite. So we have that architecture and we use the same blueprint in all the various permutations of the cloud. For some people it’s confusing, but for us it’s all the same whether you want to have it inside your firewall or outside.

Which do your customers tend to prefer–a private cloud or a public cloud?

We do surveys every year and right now we’re seeing about a two-to-one preference for private versus public. About 60 to 70 percent of respondents say they’re working on a private cloud, and about 30 to 40 say they’re working on the public cloud. To us it’s all the same. We offer a core set of services from the IBM cloud–development, test, compute, storage, collaborations, desktop. But we can also build the same thing inside your firewall.

How big is your public cloud business?

I can’t give you a revenue figure because different business units take advantage of it to deliver different things. We just opened up a delivery center in Research Triangle Park. It’s probably one of the most advanced data centers in the world. And now we’re rolling out a model that we are cloning around the world. We just opened one in Germany and another in Canada. And then we’ll just keep adding them. We manage about eight million square feet of data centers around the world.

How does a company typically get started with the cloud?

Usually I suggest they start with their develop-and-test operations. It’s usually not mission-critical, and there’s usually a lot of hardware that’s not being used. Usually that’s the group that buys hardware long before it’s needed and it ends up sitting idle 90 percent of the time. At IBM we put our whole research division on the cloud because they were the worst hardware hoarders, putting servers under desks and whatnot. They knew that if they needed a new server it would take weeks to get it. Now they go out to the research and compute cloud, and the services they need are usually ready to use in minutes or at most an hour. It just makes a huge difference in people’s ability to get going.

So what you are your priorities for this year?

One of the big things we started seeing last year was an uptake of cloud delivery in industry-specific ways. We’re working not just on the generic things like email and collaboration, but on the specific applications that are used in various industries. Health care, banking and government are a few that have complicated regulatory needs that vary state by state and country by country, and we have the deep understanding required to work with them. We also built a private cloud to help the 29 countries involved in NATO share data on logistics and troop deployments. We also have an initiative with the consumer electronics industry. Utilities is another, and it gets tied in with our Smarter Planet initiatives.

Will IBM be making deals in the cloud this year?

IBM will make a few billion in acquisitions. Cloud is one of the four key growth areas we’re focused on. The others are Smarter Planet, analytics and the growth markets. We’ve said that in those four growth initiatives we’re going for $20 billion in additional revenue by 2014. Four initiatives, five years and $20 billion dollars. That’s certainly not all going to happen organically.

Here’s the tastiest part of an article in the New York Times yesterday about how Goldman Sachs essentially borked a deal to offer its rich clients in the U.S. private Facebook shares:

“However, over the last two weeks, the companies’ [Goldman and Facebook] relationship has grown increasingly tense, people involved in the offering said. Accusations about the news leak have flown back and forth, these people said.”

You can say that again, but –as leaky as the social networking giant has been over these many years in Silicon Valley–it seemed obvious that most of the intricate financial details about the offering were hand-delivered right from some of Wall Street’s hired guns to the DealBook scribes at the Times.

(Memo to myself: Start kissing up to those bankers, however appalling!)

Unfortunately for Facebook, it was those massive news leaks that drew the attention of government regulators to the deal. And with worries that it veered too close to the edge of violating securities regulations, the U.S. part of the offering had to be pulled.

Despite this particular mess, this kind of mishegas is only going to increase now that the banker bloviating is getting fired up a notch in 2011, as a spate of Web 2.0 Internet companies moves to public offerings.

Along with Facebook, that includes Zynga, LinkedIn and Groupon, as well as several others, all of which are just starting the banker bake-offs that used to be common in the Web space.

And that’s going to mean plenty of information to be found as some of those bankers inevitably drop a dime on the companies they are hired by.

Translated into more modern social terminology that these companies better understand: Bankers are really good at oversharing.

How do I know this? Because that is exactly what happened when the Web 1.0 bubble was in full froth.

Like Christmas in July, as bankers arrived to compete to win IPOs, the information flow suddenly became huge for reporters like me–I was at The Wall Street Journal at the time–covering it all.

It looks like more of the same for this round of stock sales likely to come. Already we know more about Facebook’s financials than we ever did.

And to that, I say: Loose lips may sink ships, but it will make for an awesome amount of news to come in 2011 about the Internet’s starring players.