Anthony Weiner Scandal: Do Twitter, Facebook Flirtations Constitute ‘Avatar …

After days of misinformation and false accusations of Twitter hacking run amok, Weinergate peaked Monday when Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) admitted to having sent revealing photographs of himself sporting boxer briefs and an erection to a 21-year-old woman via Twitter. While Weiner confessed to having had similar “communications” with six women over Facebook, Twitter and email for the past three years both before and during his marriage, he offered the caveat that the liaisons began and ended online.

This new breed of online extra-marital relationship — with erotic chat and online photo exchange but no physical contact whatsoever — has become an increasingly prevalent practice.

“The ‘avatar affair’ is all smoke no fire,” said Pamela Haag, author of the newly released book “Marriage Confidential: The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses Rebel Couples.”

“It happens online, totally in cyber-land, with the exchange of emails and images, and the lovers never meet and never touch,” Haag added.

At Monday’s press conference, Weiner clarified:

I never met these women and I know never really had much desire to, and to me it was almost a frivolous exchange among friends that I don’t think I made an important enough distinction about how hurtful it was and how inappropriate it was.

Although Weiner expressed feelings of remorse for his actions, according to a 1998 MSNBC survey addressing online “sexual relationships,” 64 percent of participants said that they were in a committed relationships while engaging in online erotic chat and 87 percent still said that they did not feel guilty about online flirting and chat and instead seeing it as a form of entertainment akin to reading Playboy.

With another public figure enmeshed in yet another political sex scandal, questions have circulated in the media as to whether sexts and online chats constitute cheating. When watching Weiner’s press conference on a slowed speed, it is evident the Congressman formed the word “relationship” before quickly changing his term for the nature of his interactions to “communications,” Slate reported. Weiner may have been trying to suggest his behavior constituted flirtation rather than hard-core infidelity, this emotional disconnect does not necessarily exist for the spouse of the person engaging with an avatar lover.

“It is very hurtful if you are in bed at night, waiting to make love to your partner and they are not interested because they have already spent themselves online,” said Dr. Jennifer Schneider, a sex addiction expert who has studied the emotion repercussions of affairs in the Internet age. “My studies show that for the spouse, an online affair is exactly like a “real life” affair except for not having the risk of sexually transmitted diseases.” Partners are still guilty of disconnecting from their spouses, keeping secrets and lying about behavior.

Schneider added that in some cases — not necessarily including Weiner’s — such online behavior could be indicative of a sexual addiction, which is conservatively estimated to be prevalent among 3 to 5 percent of the U.S. population.

“When this happens to a well known figure — and we have a lot of them these days — we ask what they were thinking,” Schneider said. “They weren’t. They were in an altered state, and it usually isn’t an isolated event; they’ve usually had a long history, and they got restless and got caught. This is usually just the tip of the iceberg. Six women? That’s just right now, this week.”

According to a 2010 survey of the 1600 members of the American Association of Matrimonial Lawyers, 81 percent of members had seen an increase during the past five years in the number of cases that use social networking evidence.

Linda Lea Viken, president of the American Academy of Marital Lawyers and a divorce attorney in South Dakota, has argued numerous cases in which evidence from Facebook or Twitter has undermined testimony in court proceedings.

“I have been quoted about [social media playing a significant role in divorce court] with numerous local papers and was worried that people would read it, take note and I’d lose great evidence in court,” Viken said. “But people are getting even worse. It doesn’t faze them.”

Viken said incriminating evidence ranges from pictures of husbands with 20-something-year-old women on boats with beer to men asking for full custody who have an online profile stating they are single without children. One man fighting accusations of an aggression problem’s online “about me” description read, Viken said: “If you have the balls to get in my face, I’ll kick your ass into submission.”

“One thing I always tell people of those kinds of social media, before you post it, before you send it, read it out loud and pretend you are in a courtroom reading it in front of a judge,” Viken said “If you don’t want to read it, don’t post it because it will be read in the courtroom.”

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Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/08/weiner-online-affair_n_873134.html

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Twitter Adding Automatic URL Shortening

We share a lot of pcmag.com links on Twitter, but one of the more annoying parts of that process is shortening those links beforehand to fit the 140-character limit.

All that’s about to change. The micro-blogging site announced Tuesday that it will provide automatic link shortening on Twitter.com.

“Sharing links on Twitter.com is now simple and instant. Plus, since we show a shortened version of the original link, people will know which site the link points to,” Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner wrote in a blog post. “This service also increases security. If users click links that are reported as malicious, we direct them to a page that warns them.”

To use, just paste a link into the tweet box. After you enter 13 characters of an URL, a pop-up alert will tell you that Twitter is going to shorten that link. When you post, Twitter will then shorten the URL to just 19 characters. Once it’s posted, the link will get a t.co link ID, but it will appear as a shortened version of the original URL so people know the site to which they are navigating.

Initially, Twitter will offer automatic link shortening to a “small percentage of users,” but all users should see it soon, the company said. Twitter stressed that those who want to continue using other link-shortening services like Bit.ly are free to do so.

Twitter first announced plans for automatic link shortening last year, when it said it would test t.co with employee accounts.

Also this week, Twitter added support for Brazilian Portuguese. “Brazilians have embraced Twitter as a way to keep up what’s happening both locally and globally,” Twitter said in a separate blog post, pointing to tweets about recent flooding and its last presidential election. In late April, it also added support for Russian and Turkish.

More recently, Twitter made headlines when it acquired third-party client TweetDeck. Apple also announced this week that Twitter will be built in to iOS 5.

For more from Chloe, follow her on Twitter @ChloeAlbanesius.

For the top stories in tech, follow us on Twitter at @PCMag.

Article source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2386591,00.asp

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Word of Mouth: ‘Super 8′ seeks an audience among the summer tent poles

Summer movies often have numerals in their title, though not the number 8. The season’s purported blockbusters also are peddled with all sorts of superlatives, but rarely just the word “super.” And it’s hard to think of a school’s-out release that is named after an obsolete film stock.

The challenges facing “Super 8,” which premieres in about 325 sneak previews Thursday before playing nationwide Friday, are hardly limited to the film’s name, however. While multiplexes are stuffed with sequels, spinoffs, book adaptations and television show remakes, writer-director J.J. Abrams and producer Steven Spielberg’s period sci-fi story not only represents the rare studio movie that is actually original — with no familiar names in starring roles — but also a summer release that requires the kind of special handling typically bestowed on an art-house endeavor.

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Even though the summer is still young, “Super 8″ may offer the season’s best test of the promise — and peril — of word of mouth.

The film follows a band of preadolescents growing up in a small town in 1979. Obsessed with making their own zombie movie (their cameras use Super 8 film), the kids witness a secret military train’s accident, soon followed by mysterious disappearances. Dogs run away, people vanish and large electrical components go missing.

Despite the elaborate derailment sequence and some special effects, Paramount Pictures said “Super 8″ cost just $50 million (although one person close to the production not authorized to speak for the studio said it was closer to $55 million) — less than a third of the budget of last weekend’s “X-Men: First Class.” That means “Super 8″ does not have to land a knockout punch in theaters this weekend to be on track to be profitable.

Indeed, given that the latest “X-Men” movie is sparking moderately steady traffic through the middle of the week, it’s altogether possible that “Super 8″ could trail the comic book prequel for first place on the box-office charts come Sunday.

Audience tracking surveys show that though older moviegoers, particularly men, are interested in seeing the picture, younger ticket buyers — historically, the drivers of summer smashes — so far have been slow to warm to the film. In other words, people who remember 1979 are more likely to want to see “Super 8″ than those for whom it’s ancient history.

There’s some evidence this week that moviegoers’ enthusiasm has ticked up, giving the studio hope that buzz is building in the last few days before release. But still, people who have analyzed the data say “Super 8″ likely will take in a little less than $30 million on its first weekend — a solid start given the film’s budget but a relative shrimp in the summer tent-pole season.

That means the real performance of “Super 8″ will be told between now and Independence Day, as the movie looks to sustain whatever momentum it generates this weekend. “When you have something fresh and original, you have the opportunity to play longer,” said Rob Moore, Paramount’s vice chairman.

He cited the performance of Universal’s “Bridesmaids,” which opened to good business of $26.2 million on May 13 but has grossed more than $110 million, as proof that summer movies need not open huge to yield big profits as long as audiences love the experience of watching the movie.

“The strength of ‘Super 8,’” Moore said, “is the movie’s heart.”

But Paramount first has to get people in to see the movie.

Abrams, who directed Paramount’s “Star Trek” reboot and “Mission: Impossible III,” and produced the studio’s alien invasion thriller “Cloverfield,” felt strongly that early “Super 8″ commercials and previews could not reveal one of the film’s central twists, according to the person close to the production, although the studio disagreed.

To accommodate the filmmaker, Paramount’s spots have emphasized “Super 8′s” wistful look at the life of young boys, which consequently tilted interest toward moviegoers who were roughly the characters’ same age in the 1970s. The studio’s sales effort was further influenced by the film’s DNA: no A-listers to chat up David Letterman or Jimmy Fallon, and a plot that’s hard to condense in a 30-second television spot.

As an alternative, Paramount is relying on Abrams’ limited but loyal fan base, a number of affirmative reviews and an unusual social media promotion to kick-start “Super 8′s” debut.

On Wednesday, the studio announced that a dozen movie sites dedicated to film geeks (including Atlanta’s Chud, Austin, Texas’ Ain’t It Cool News and Los Angeles’ Slashfilm) will host sneak peeks of the film Wednesday night. At those screenings, viewers will be encouraged by a title card before the film’s start to “Tweet from your seat” and share reactions to the film via Twitter.

Around the same time as those screenings, hundreds of Twitter employees will get an early look at the film near the company’s San Francisco headquarters in the hope that they too will start touting the movie to their followers.

“We believe the buzz will build right then,” said Amy Powell, Paramount’s executive vice president for interactive marketing strategies and film production.

The hope is that Abrams’ constituencies will climb on board.

“J.J. has fans from all demographics,” Powell said. “He has fans from ‘Alias.’ He has fans from ‘Star Trek.’ He has fans from ‘Lost.’”

Also on Wednesday, Paramount announced that “Super 8″ would arrive one day early on Thursday in about 325 locations, more than half of them Imax screens, covering about 100 cities. In Paramount’s thinking, it’s close enough to the film’s real premiere in about 3,000 locations Friday to spark ticket-buyer interest without unleashing a wave of plot spoilers.

“Word of mouth doesn’t take a week anymore,” Moore said. “It takes hours.”

And the clock is already ticking on “Super 8.”

john.horn@latimes.com

Times staff writer Ben Fritz contributed to this report.

Article source: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-word-20110609,0,6127059.story

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Woman Tattoos Her Facebook Friends On Her Arm

Looking for a creative tattoo idea and a way to show your friends how much they mean to you? Consider the “social tattoo” of a woman in the Netherlands. The Facebook profile photos of 152 of her closest friends are now a permanent fixture on her arm.

“Of course I gave it a lot of thought,” writes susyj87. “These are not all my friends. Just the people I care most about.”

That’s notable. She may have 1,000 Facebook friends (she doesn’t say), but just 152 of them count as real-worth-tattooing-on-my-arm type. As Liz Gannes notes at All Things D, 150 is Dunbar’s number, named for a British anthropologist who determined that to be “the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity [for] the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.” Susy did respect her friends’ privacy, checking in with them first before putting their faces on her arm.

“I got their permission and they were very proud to be on it,” she writes. “To me it represents who I am right now and the time we live in.”

Indeed, we are increasingly defined by who we associate with as we map those connections out on social networks. Data-mining companies say they can judge our credit-worthiness based on that of our friends. MIT students were able to determine people’s sexuality with the same data. (They called it “Project Gaydar.”) Thanks to Facebook, we’re digitally tattooed with the people we associate with, and the reputations they have. A physical tattoo is a nice reminder of that.

She documented the tattoo on YouTube. Here’s the video capturing the creation of her “armbook”:

Let’s hope none of these folks changes their profile photo anytime soon.

Article source: http://blogs.forbes.com/kashmirhill/2011/06/08/woman-tattoos-her-facebook-friends-on-her-arm/

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French Bloggers Decry Twitter, Facebook TV Ban

By Max Colchester

AFP/Getty Images
Sarkozy and Zuckerberg: France has banned mention of Facebook on T.V.

The news that French TV and radio presenters are banned from mentioning social networks, such as Facebook, unless directly related to the program or story being broadcast, has been met with derision  on the Web.

“‘French bureaucracy’ is shorthand for the worst imaginable Kafkaesque nightmare,” wrote Professor Matthew Fraser on his blog post about the French law which bans covert advertising on television. “What possibly could have possessed the French regulator to impose such a ridiculous rule is not entirely clear.”

French blogs have been damning about the ruling.

One blogger says news anchors can get round the issue quite easily by saying: “Find our coverage in real time via our stream on a platform which allows users to send messages with 140 characters.”

But those worried that French authorities are unfairly cracking down on these web sites should look no further than France’s political elite.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Facebook page is nothing but a glowing ad for the U.S social networking site.

Peruse the president’s pictures and you are greeted with a photo of Mr. Sarkozy holding up a black T-shirt with the word “Facebook” written in big white letters. Next to him stands a smiling Mark Zuckerberg. “Mark is a young entrepreneur who is highly intelligent and very nice,” Mr. Sarkozy explains.

An aide to the president said Mr. Sarkozy regularly checks his Facebook account to see how people react to his posts.

Meanwhile over at the French finance ministry Christine Lagarde recently began her twitter campaign to become the head of the International Monetary Fund.

Ms. Lagarde decision has sparked much media interest as she tours the globe firing out somewhat anodyne tweets. On Thursday Ms. Lagarde will hold a question and answer session on Twitter and Facebook. French political analysts are already applauding her tech savvy.

In a statement published last week, French broadcasting watchdog CSA reminded television and radio companies that under a 1992 law, which bans covert advertising, presenters should not “send viewers to the show’s social network home page” without giving a reason to do so. The reason being that it offers established social networking sites an unfair advantage over smaller competitors.

However it seems that the Conseil Superieur de l’Audiovisuel could take a page out of the French politicians’ book. The CSA’s Facebook page has three “likes.” Mr. Sarkozy’s has 436,214.

Article source: http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/06/08/french-bloggers-decry-twitter-facebook-t-v-ban/?mod=google_news_blog

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EU regulators scrutinize Facebook’s facial recognition feature

Facebook’s integration of face recognition technology into its photo tagging feature has EU regulators concerned over possible privacy violations. The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which advises national data protection agencies, suggests the feature “can bear a lot of risks for users.”

“Tags of people on pictures should only happen based on people’s prior consent and it can’t be activated by default,” Article 29 member Gerald Lommel told Bloomberg Businessweek. Article 29, along with Ireland’s national data protection agency, will examine the new feature to see if it violates any EU regulations.

The new feature, called “Tagging Suggestions,” has been in testing for the last several months, but was recently rolled out “in most countries,” according to Facebook. When photos are uploaded to Facebook, its servers use face recognition technology to automatically identify faces and suggest possible matches among your friends. The same basic technology is widely used in photo editing software from Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others.

The feature is active by default, though users can turn it off if they wish. It does not automatically tag anyone as Lommel suggests, however. Instead, it merely presents a suggested tag based on matches from previously uploaded and tagged photos; users can click an “x” to ignore any tagging suggestions. The feature also won’t suggest tags for people you aren’t friends with, and it won’t suggest your name if someone you’re not friends with uploads a picture of you.

Like Facebook’s regular tagging feature, though, users can tag images with their friends’ names without prior consent. Your friends can remove the tag however, and you can also limit who can see photos you are tagged in via Facebook’s privacy settings. Tagging friends in photos has worked this way ever since it was first added to Facebook several years ago, so it seems odd that this new feature should raise any new privacy concerns now.

Article source: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/06/eu-regulators-scrutinize-facebooks-facial-recognition-feature.ars

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Anthony Weiner in fight of life as details of his sexting with porn star …

BY Alison Gendar and Celeste Katz

DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Wednesday, June 8th 2011, 4:00 AM

Wave Goodbye, Weiner

Should Rep. Anthony Weiner resign over Twitter scandal?

Rep. Anthony Weiner battled for his political life Tuesday night after a porn star claimed he told her to lie to cover their X-rated tracks – and reports surfaced he considered meeting one of his Internet paramours.

“Do you need to talk to a professional PR type person to give u advice? I can have someone on my team call,” Weiner messaged to former porn star Ginger Lee on Thursday as he was denying all to the press.

“The key is to have a short, thought out statement,” Weiner told the star of “Legal At Last 4.” “Have a couple of iterations of: ‘This is silly.’”

He followed up with a suggested statement that read in part, “I have posted about my admiration for Rep. Weiner and his politics. All I can say about that is that I’m a fan of his.”

Lee turned over the emails to the gossip site TMZ.com.

Weiner’s critics said Lee’s coached denials sounded a lot like college student Gennette Cordova‘s statement that she had no contact with the congressman other than to follow him as a “fan.”

It was the crotch shot tweeted to Cordova that exposed Weiner’s sexting obsession. But in her May 29 statement to the Daily News, Cordova had said she was an unwitting victim.

The House ethics committee might be interested to know whether by “someone on my team” Weiner meant a taxpayer-paid congressional staffer.

The office of the Queens-Brooklyn congressman, who confessed Monday to sending explicit photos and messages to “about six” women he met via Twitter and Facebook and then lying about it, said in a statement, “No one in his official staff or anyone affiliated with Anthony in any way had any contact with Ms. Lee.”

Meanwhile, RadarOnline published transcripts of reams of dirty Facebook messages between Weiner and 40-year-old Las Vegas blackjack dealer Lisa Weiss.

Political banter about punchingHouse Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in the head mixed easily with dirty talk. “What’s up baby?” she asked on March 3. “Whoah, looks like I am. Wanna ride it?” he shot back. Starting last September, she begged him to meet her, and he sometimes promised he would.

“I want the real Anthony sex, not just FB sex,” she told him. Neither ever mentioned his wife.

When he mistakenly posted a snapshot of his bulging briefs to his public Twitter stream, Weiss sent him a message of commiseration.

“Who is the bitch who ratted u out? I am the only FB chick u can trust,” she wrote.

The continuing revelations of raunch kept raising the embarrassment level for the congressman and his party.

Time to scram, GOP says

The congressman, who is not required in Washington until Monday, stood alone in the storm he created. He spent some time in his Queens district office and then drove away in a gray Ford Hybrid Escape, refusing to roll down his windows as reporters and photographers swarmed the car.

Article source: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2011/06/08/2011-06-08_weiner_battles_for_political_life.html

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10 Things Hillary Clinton Could Teach Huma Abedin

After nearly a week of insisting that his Twitter account was hacked, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) came clean on Monday, admitting that the he did, in fact, send lewd photographs of himself to women he met online. Huma Abedin, Weiner’s wife of 11 months and Hillary Clinton’s close aide, was conspicuously absent during the congressman’s teary press conference, though Weiner did say that he and Abedin “have no intention of splitting up over this.”

As the frenzied “will they or won’t they” talk gets under way, we’re betting that Huma will turn to her boss and fellow spurned-wife Hillary Clinton for some much-needed advice (if she hasn’t already, that is). After all, if anyone knows the secret to salvaging a seemingly doomed marriage and coming out of on top, it’s Hillary Clinton. Click through for some tips we think Huma can take from Hillary.

Article source: http://powerwall.msnbc.msn.com/politics/10-things-hillary-clinton-could-teach-huma-abedin-10191.gallery

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Congressman Weiner: Did Twitter Make Sexting Too Easy?

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In the end, of course, New York Congressman Anthony Weiner said he did it to himself. He was the one who got in contact with women, he admits. He concedes he sent lewd pictures, and then lied about it.

“[I'm] deeply ashamed of my terrible judgment and actions,” Weiner said again and again. “This was a very dumb thing to do.”

But look at the channels he used. Twitter. Facebook. Choking back tears at his news conference, he said he panicked after he sent what he thought was a private tweet with an image attached — and then realized he had actually made it public, available to thousands of “followers.”

Analysts of online culture say that, this being 2011, he ought to have known better.

“This is the nature of social media,” said Michael Gartenberg, a research director at Gartner, a major technology consulting firm. “It’s easier than ever to broadcast yourself to the world.

“He didn’t realize everything he did was potentially public,” said Gartenberg. “On the Internet there’s no such thing as a retraction.”

It is especially true on Twitter, which Weiner said he used to send messages to women. One’s so-called tweets are so quick, and so short, that they discourage complete spelling — much less thought about the consequences of sending something.

Mike Moran, the chief strategist at Converseon, a social media marketing agency, said the Weiner case is a reminder of what ought to be old lessons by now, but aren’t.

“If you are doing something that would be embarrassing if found out, here is your big chance to stop,” he wrote in a blog post. “The bigger you are, the more successful you are, and the more famous you are, as a person or as a brand, the more likely that someone, someday is going to call you on this bad behavior. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.”

Twitter compounds the risk because messages on it are public unless you specify otherwise.

Moran elaborated in a telephone call. “I’ve seen people send private messages on Twitter that turned out not to be private at all,” he said. “Twitter has a lot of conventions. People might think they’re sending a private message, but instead it becomes a public message that mentions the person to whom they were trying to send it.”

Moran said it was quite possible for Weiner to have messed up just once — just a single private message to a woman that he accidentally posted publicly. After that, other women came forward, all with messages that are impossible to delete in the digital age.

“But people don’t think about this that much,” Moran said.

Rep. Weiner does have an official Twitter feed, filled mostly with cryptic political gibes (“On with Rachel tonight. Gonna talk about Trump eating pizza with a fork!”) and occasional asides (“my TiVo ate the hockey game!”). By Tuesday afternoon his number of followers had grown past 70,000, even though the feed has been silent since June 1.

Article source: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/congressman-anthony-weiner-twitter-social-media-make-sexting/story?id=13783677

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Microsoft, Facebook Back AT&T’s T-Mobile Deal; Google Remains Silent

Wireless giant ATT has friends in high places — and not just on Capitol Hill.

Several major technology companies including Microsoft, Yahoo, Oracle, Facebook and Research In Motion, which makes the BlackBerry line of devices, have thrown their weight behind ATT’s proposed $39 billion merger with T-Mobile. So have two of the most powerful venture capital firms in the country: Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers and Sequoia Partners.

The tech companies and VC firms expressed their support of the deal, which is being scrutinized by the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department, in letters filed with the FCC late Monday, The New York Times reported.

Their support constitutes a powerful endorsement from some of the heaviest hitters in Silicon Valley, and is no doubt warmly received by ATT public policy chief Jim Cicconi, who last week characterized support for the merger as, “perhaps the broadest, deepest range of public-interest support ever filed at the FCC in support of any transaction.”

Support for the merger is not unanimous in Silicon Valley, however. In fact, one extremely important Valley company is remaining conspicuously silent on the deal: Google. A spokesperson for the web search titan confirmed Tuesday that the company has not taken a position on the merger, but declined to comment further. Tech giant Apple, which did not return a request for comment, is also staying mum on the deal.

Critics of the merger, most notably Sprint, the number three wireless company, argue that reducing the number of nationwide mobile providers from four to three would concentrate too much market power in the hands of ATT and Verizon, which would control 80 percent of the market. The companies could use this market power to raise prices for consumers or muscle out smaller competitors, especially regional carriers.

Allowing the merger to proceed, critics say, would result in a return to a “1980’s-style” duopoly that would stifle innovation and competition in the wireless market.

For its part, ATT says that it needs to absorb T-Mobile in order to expand its network capacity and provide better service for its customers. The wild success of the Apple’s iPhone, which was only available on ATT for four years until this past January, caused service issues ATT customers are all-too-familiar with.

There is a general consensus that the proliferation of smartphones and explosion of data services will put increasing pressure on the nation’s spectrum capacity. (Wireless spectrum refers to the radio frequencies used for mobile networks, Wi-Fi, and even over-the-air television.) Some observers have suggested that any solution should include a national regulatory approach, from “incentive auctions,” (which would require Congressional approval), to re-allocating existing spectrum from over-the-air TV broadcasts.

Then there’s the issue of spectrum efficiency. Testifying before Congress last month, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said that ATT’s spectrum troubles were of its own making.

“If ATT invested a fraction of the $39 billion T-Mobile purchase price in its own network, it could alleviate its alleged capacity concerns, upgrade its network and deploy advanced wireless technologies, without harming wireless competition,” Hesse said.

In their letter backing the the deal, Microsoft, Facebook, and RIM echoed ATT’s “capacity constraints” rationale for the T-Mobile purchase. “Many policy-related efforts will not be able to quickly address near-term capacity needs,” the tech giants wrote. “The F.C.C. must seriously weigh the benefits of this merger and approve it.”

Given what’s a stake — no less than the future of the U.S. wireless market — it’s understandable that the tech giants would want to weigh in on ATT’s bid for T-Mobile. After all, many of the firms partner with ATT, including Microsoft which supplies its Windows mobile operating system for many of the company’s devices.

So why is Google staying silent? A spokesperson declined to comment beyond confirming that the company is taking no position now, but it’s not hard to imagine why Google would feel that staying out of this fight is in its best interest.

For one thing, thanks to its dominant search market position, Google is in the anti-trust cross-hairs on both sides of the Atlantic. If Google were to take a position on this deal — either for or against — it would naturally attract scrutiny of its own formidable market power.

For another, Google has traditionally sparred with ATT over a variety of issues, most notably the Google Voice web-calling application. It’s highly unlikely that Google would support a deal that would strengthen a company that has been a thorn in its side over the years. On the other hand, if Google were to publicly oppose the deal, it would invite a withering response from ATT and its allies. This is one battle, then, that Google may have decided to simply sit out.

When it comes to the ATT/T-Mobile deal, at least, Google appears to be following an axiom often attributed to American author and philosopher Napoleon Hill: “Wise men, when in doubt whether to speak or to keep quiet, give themselves the benefit of the doubt, and remain silent.”

Microsoft et al Letter Backing ATT-T-Mobile Deal

Image: John Abell/Wired.com

See Also:

Article source: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/microsoft-facebook-att/

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