Pc News

[Rasputin]

Microsoft's Ad Service Called Into Question

WASHINGTON -- Two consumer advocacy groups have filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, saying Microsoft and other Web-based companies are using "unfair and deceptive" business practices to collect data about their customers.

The complaint by The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), filed today, asks the FTC to investigate Microsoft's use of customer data collection in its Web advertising service, called adCenter. The adCenter service targets customers with contextual advertising based on their Web habits.

But CDD and US PIRG said Microsoft's tracking of Web user habits goes too far. "Microsoft has embarked on a wide-ranging data collection and targeting scheme that is deceptive and unfair to millions of users," the groups said in their complaint to the FTC.

CDD Executive Director Jeff Chester called on the FTC to shut down new forms of online data collection until consumer safeguards are in place. "Consumers have the right to have the option to opt in [to data collection]," he said. "What is wrong with letting the consumers make decision about how their data is used?"

Microsoft's Privacy Policy
Microsoft, in a statement, said it is committed to protecting customer privacy. The company offers customers a "clear, understandable" privacy policy, and customer control is important to Microsoft, the statement said.

"From what we have read, they have got it all wrong," Mike Hintze, Microsoft's senior attorney for privacy, said in the statement. "We are very open with consumers about our privacy policies and practices across all of our online services and all of our advertising products. We would be happy to brief the Center for Digital Democracy and others about how adCenter works."

But customers don't have an easy way to opt out of data collection, Chester said. Even when customer Web habits aren't linked with a name, they often can be identified by their Web searches or other Web habits, he added. After AOL in August released private search results of thousands of its subscribers, news organizations were able to identify individual users, even though their names weren't released by AOL.

Chester called online data collection "pervasive and ubiquitous" and said the two groups focused first on Microsoft because it has told potential advertisers its data collection techniques are better than those used by rivals such as Google and Yahoo.

The FTC next week is hosting a three-day forum on protecting consumers online, called "Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade," but the agency needs to go beyond a series of presentations by Web companies and take a hard look at data collection, Chester said.

"The time for show and tell is long past," he said. "There's increasingly sophisticated ways of tracking people's information online, and there are no safeguards."

[Rasputin]

Pressure Forces Microsoft to Change Vista Licensing

Customer concerns over changes to Windows Vista licensing that would limit a transfer of the license to only one machine have moved Microsoft to revise the operating system licensing policy.

Microsoft said today it has changed the retail license terms for Vista so that customers now may uninstall the OS from one machine and install it on another as many times as they want. The new terms do away with limitations on the number of new devices to which the license can be transferred.

However, to continue the discouragement of piracy, Microsoft has worded the license so that it is clear that users cannot "share this license between devices."

Background
When the new licensing was disclosed several weeks ago, power users who rebuild their computers with new components several times a year or who plan to upgrade their computers more than once in the lifetime of the OS raised a fuss. They demanded clarification from the vendor about how scenarios like these would play out under the new licensing. PC World readers were among those who really sounded off.

According to Shanen Boettcher, a Windows general manager at Microsoft, the company thinks it has come up with an answer to placate those users without encouraging software piracy, which the original change was designed to thwart.

"We think this clarification strikes the right balance," he says. Boettcher says the piracy problem has nothing to do with "the enthusiast community that was sending me e-mails," but with people who install one licensed copy of Windows on many machines and then sell those to other users.

"This is a definite improvement over the original licensing terms, and I'm glad Microsoft has relented," says Don Smutny, a Windows user and software developer for a large IT company in the midwestern United States. However, he still is not convinced there aren't other hidden complications within Vista's license that will have to be addressed later.

The change in policy will not affect consumers who purchase their Windows license preinstalled on a PC from a hardware manufacturer. No license transfers are allowed in those cases.

Information about license changes for any Microsoft product is available on Microsoft's site, though Vista details may not be available right away.

[Rasputin]

Second Minor Firefox 2.0 Bug Found

A second minor bug found in the Firefox 2.0 Web browser will be fixed, but users shouldn't encounter much of a problem in the mean time, a Mozilla official said today.

The browser will crash if it visits a Web page that been intentionally coded with JavaScript in such a way as to target the bug, said Tristan Nitot, director of European operations for Mozilla.

"It's very unlikely that anyone would have put a similar page on any ordinary Web site," so users shouldn't be affected, Nitot said.

The problem can't be used to steal data from a computer, he added.

It's the second bug that's been found in Firefox 2.0 since its release on Oct. 24. The first bug also causes the browser to hang or crash when a very large document is loaded into an iframe--an HTML element--using JavaScript.

The new bug will eventually be fixed. "We will fix it because we need reliability," Nitot said, adding no timetable has been set.

Browsers Under Fire
Firefox 2.0 and Microsoft's rival Web browser Internet Explorer 7, both of which debuted within a week of one another, are under close scrutiny by security analysts.

Both vendors have contested experts' claims of flaws. Mozilla said one reported problem with Firefox 2.0 was fixed in a previous version, while a second report of an exploitable vulnerability couldn't be replicated.

Microsoft charged a behavior cited as a vulnerability in IE7--where a pop-up window can display content from a different, untrusted Web site--isn't a bug, but a feature after the behavior was reported by vendor Secunia.

[Rasputin]

Symantec CEO Encouraged by Microsoft Statements

The head of Symantec said today that he is encouraged by recent statements from Microsoft that it plans to work with security software companies and provide them with more access to the Windows Vista operating system.

Symantec and other security companies have been complaining recently that steps being taken by Microsoft in the name of security would actually hamper their ability to compete with Microsoft's recently launched antivirus software.

"The fact that they have made very positive moves is an encouragement," Symantec CEO John Thompson told reporters at a briefing in Tokyo. "But we have to see them follow through on the statements that they have made."

Security Companies' Complaints
The chief target among the complaints is PatchGuard, a kernel protection technology in the 64-bit version of Windows Vista. PatchGuard would stop modification of the kernel by third parties--including security vendors like Symantec. The security companies say it would put them at a disadvantage because they would not be able to offer certain technologies for virus detection and intrusion prevention that require modifications made to the kernel.

The security vendors also want the ability to switch off alerts from Windows Security Center because they fear they would duplicate those from their own software and confuse users.

"Innovation around the Windows platform has required that security companies have unfettered access to the kernel and when [Microsoft] delivers the 64-bit version of Vista we want to make sure that we have similar access, principally because we believe innovation requires that. And innovation is necessary in the security world if we are going to stay one step ahead of the bad guys," Thompson said.

"Unfettered access" was the same phrase used by George Samenuk, the chairman and CEO of McAfee, in a full-page newspaper ad headlined "Microsoft increasing security risk with Vista" that the company ran last month in the Financial Times.

Microsoft's Response
In the last couple of weeks Microsoft has begun responding by providing APIs (application programming interfaces) to allow security vendors to turn off certain features and has also held meetings on the issue of kernel access. The company acquiesced in part after pressure from the European Commission to level the playing field in the security market.

Thompson said Symantec had been contacted by the European Union and other antitrust regulators.

"We have been in communications with E.U., the Fair Trade Commission here in Japan, and the fair trade commissions in other countries, who are interested the behavior of Microsoft, specifically as it relates to security technologies," he said.

He said Symantec is "certainly not going to rule out any possibility at this point" regarding the filing of a complaint against Microsoft, but that recent moves by Microsoft are welcome.

[Rasputin]

Wi-Fi Is Hot--But Manufacturers Are Cautious

We love our Wi-Fi, but we aren't going to be seeing it built into a broad range of consumer electronics anytime soon.

Those are the conclusions of a couple of recent studies about the increasingly ubiquitous wireless ethernet networking technology. One, a public opinion survey backed by the obviously partisan Wi-Fi Alliance trade group, found that people would rather forgo Starbucks for a year or see their local sports team lose badly than give up Wi-Fi.

However, a study by the research firm In-Stat found that integration of Wi-Fi into consumer electronics was "hit or miss," In-Stat analyst Gemma Tedesco says.

"Handheld games and gaming consoles are really the only categories that are embracing embedded Wi-Fi on a large scale," Tedesco adds.

She pointed out that the high-end version of Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii, both slated to ship later this month, will have embedded 802.11b/g Wi-Fi. Microsoft didn't built Wi-Fi into its Xbox 360, but offers an 802.11a/b/g USB adapter as a $100 option. Sony's PlayStation Portable and Nintendo's DS also have built-in Wi-Fi.

A Waste of Wi-Fi?
However,Tedesco said she found that in other consumer electronics categories, from media players and digital cameras to set-top boxes and digital TVs, embedded Wi-Fi was not widely present--and where it was, she said, it wasn't always very useful.

"Some of the vendors have added it without enabling a large amount of functionality," Tedesco said.

She noted that some consumer electronics vendors are using Wi-Fi to replace cables--for example, to enable cable-free image transfers from digital cameras to PCs or printers. But other technologies such as wireless USB may prove more efficient for this purpose.

Tedesco said that she expected Wi-Fi to be a useful feature for portable media players. "But we didn't find too many devices in that space with Wi-Fi," she said. Vendors cited digital rights management and quality-of-service issues as the reason for not including Wi-Fi in media players.

Interest in built-in Wi-Fi may increase once the 802.11n standard for fast Wi-Fi is adopted, she said. "For set-top boxes and digital TVs, vendors would love to have the speed that [802.11]n is hoping for."

We Want Our Wi-Fi
While consumer electronics devices are holding off on wireless, the general public is increasingly enamored of it, the Wi-Fi Alliance's survey found.

The survey of 549 adults aged 18 and over from homes with broadband Internet access found that nearly nine out of ten would rather go without Starbucks for a year than give up their Wi-Fi connection. (The survey report didn't specify what was being connected.) Similarly, the survey found eight out of ten would rather see their home team suffer a big loss than go without Wi-Fi for a week.

"The survey shows the cultural affinity that Americans have for Wi-Fi," says Karen Hanley, senior director of marketing and membership for the Wi-Fi Alliance.

Hanley too believes that 802.11n's superior bandwidth will drive Wi-Fi's inclusion in living-room devices. The standard is still in development, but the Wi-Fi Alliance has said it will begin performing interoperability testing for pre-802.11n devices based on the next draft of the standard, which is expected to appear in January. However, it will likely be late spring before the Alliance can certify the first products based on the next draft.

[Rasputin]

Google Launching Mobile App for Gmail

Google plans to improve access to Gmail via cell phones with an application that enhances its performance and interface in mobile devices.

Today Google is launching a new downloadable application for Java-enabled mobile devices that acts as a client for Gmail, letting users read, create, delete, search, send and receive e-mail messages.

Improves Functionality, Adds Features
People have been able to tap into their Gmail accounts from mobile browsers for months, but this new application will provide faster access to messages and a more intuitive and feature-rich user interface, Google officials said.

The move is the latest by a major provider of online services to enhance its offerings in mobile devices, considered one of the next big Internet frontiers. With improvements in handset technology and mobile data access, companies like Google are trying to move fast to replicate the popularity of their desktop-based services in cell phones and other similar devices.

The Gmail application will also allow users to open attached files like photos and documents in a way that is properly formatted for the mobile display.

All actions users take in the mobile application are synchronized with the server, so that when users access Gmail via a PC, the changes are reflected.

Ad-Free E-Mail, No IM
Unlike the PC Gmail version, this application displays no ads along with the messages and isn't integrated with the Google Talk instant messaging service.

For now, the application is available in English for the U.S. market, but there are plans to launch it abroad soon. To download the free application from a mobile browser, go to Google's mobile page.

[Rasputin]

Vista, Office 2007 Coming Later This Month

After years of waiting, U.S. business customers will finally have a chance to get their hands on Windows Vista and Office 2007 when Microsoft launches the products on November 30 at an event in New York City.

The company sent e-mail invitations to a launch event, which is called Microsoft New Day for Business, on Wednesday. According to the e-mail, the event "will mark the business availability of three major releases from Microsoft" In addition to Vista and Office 2007, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 also will be released to business customers at the event.

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Steve Ballmer will be on hand for the event, along with Microsoft partners and customers, according to the invitation. The event will be held at the Nasdaq Stock Market in midtown Manhattan and the Marriott Marquis in Times Square.

Coming Sooner?
Microsoft will launch the products in Canada slightly earlier than in the U.S., the IDG News Service previously reported. According to the MSDN Canada site, Microsoft will hold New Day for Business events throughout Canada starting in Edmonton, Alberta, on November 23.

Following the Edmonton event, which will be held at the Shaw Conference Centre, Microsoft will hold events in Toronto on December 5, Montreal on December 7, Ottawa on December 12, and other cities throughout the country through January 2007.

Even though Vista and Office 2007 will be available to business customers later this month, many business customers have said they likely will not upgrade to Vista right away but will hold off until they do hardware upgrades or can justify the cost of the new OS. Microsoft is hoping customers will deploy Vista and Office 2007 together, and is planning press interviews in New York on Monday to discuss specifically the benefits of doing so.

The general release of Vista and Office 2007 is still on track for January 2007.

[Rasputin]

Hands On: Apple iPod Shuffle

No question about it: Apple's new iPod Shuffle is minuscule: It's smaller than a matchbook, slimmer than a microcassette, and light enough that you could clip it on your shirt and not even stretch the fabric. In my first hands-on experience with the updated Shuffle, I found it a worthy player for the price--provided that you'll be happy with limited controls and capacity.

Big Package, Tiny Player
I bought the 1GB iPod Shuffle for $79 this morning at the San Francisco Apple Store. This is the only price and capacity Apple is selling, and it's a better deal than the original iPod Shuffle, which cost $149 for 1GB and $99 for 512MB.

The new Shuffle comes in a clear, hard-shell plastic package, about the size of a blackboard eraser; the package opens to reveal the player, its headphones, and a dock. Unlike its white, gum-pack-size, plasticized predecessor, the new Shuffle has a matte-anodized aluminum finish, which my grimy fingers didn't smudge during use. The spring clip on the back attaches firmly to clothing and makes up half the thickness.

The USB 2.0 dock included in the box is a nice addition. However, unlike the original Shuffle, which had a USB 2.0 connector integrated into the player, the new iPod Shuffle requires this USB 2.0 dock for charging and syncing the player. The dock is tiny, but its weight and the grippy nonslip pad underneath will help it stay in place on your desk.

The player fits into the dock snugly, attaching at both the dock connector and the headphone jack. I found the 3-foot, 3.25-inch cable long enough to reach around to the USB ports on the back of my PC while the dock was balanced on the computer. You can buy a $29 USB adapter to charge the Shuffle without the dock, which makes charging easier when you're not near your computer. Currently, the Apple Store doesn't offer the option to buy a second USB dock.

Minimalist Controls
Like the original version, the new Shuffle lacks a display. A switch on the bottom for playing songs toggles between sequential and random order. In addition to the four-way navigation dial, the new Shuffle has an extremely small (think pinhole) LED that lights green, orange, or red to indicate battery status (Apple claims up to 12 hours of battery life), and green or orange to indicate play and volume status. The bundled quick-start card and booklet explain what all the blinking means, but I found in practice that the LED was too small and too subtle to be useful.

Plugging the Shuffle into my monitor's low-powered USB port launched iTunes and a message that I needed iTunes 7.0.2 or later. Once I updated my software, iTunes automatically recognized the device and chose 164 songs (964MB) from my iTunes music library to upload to the player, since my library was bigger than the 1GB capacity of the device. (Apple says the device holds up to 240 songs.) The algorithm the software uses seemed to upload my recently played and top-rated songs, but strangely, it didn't upload the last album that I had purchased from the iTunes Music Store. If you have a large iTunes library, you may want to manually pick the songs you upload.

Audio quality through the included earbuds was loud and full. No complaints there.

The bottom line: I like Apple's new iPod Shuffle. Given that 1GB of capacity is no big shakes these days, the lack of a screen seems less deplorable than during our last Shuffle review. If you're on a budget and you want a good, albeit minimalist, audio player, get the Shuffle.

[Rasputin]

Microsoft Unwraps Zune Site, Makes Changes To MSN Music

Microsoft unveiled a new Web site that describes features of the upcoming Zune music store and also revealed that MSN Music won't continue to sell digital songs.

The new site outlines details of the Zune player as well as the Zune marketplace, where customers can buy songs individually or subscribe to a monthly music download service.

The site already features a few bands and offers downloads of images and videos of Zune advertisements.

Zune Add-Ons


It also features accessories that will be available from third-party manufactures. A docking station will let users play music directly over speakers, a wireless remote will enable control from across the room while the Zune sits in a dock and cables will allow users to connect the Zune to their car stereos. Other accessories include leather cases and premium headphones.

Microsoft is pointing to the new Zune.net site from MSN Music, an online store that offers articles about artists as well as music sales. Now, the customer service page of the MSN Music store says that starting Nov. 14, the launch date for Zune, customers will notice that the current "buy" button near songs for sale will change to links that connect to Zune and to RealNetworks' Rhapsody service. As part of a previous legal settlement with rival Real, Microsoft has agreed to promote Real's music service.

ComingZune
The new Zune.net site joins two others that Microsoft has made available since revealing that it was developing the music player and store. Zune.com features a short animation and simply says that zune.com is coming. Comingzune.com used to feature short animations with songs but now redirects to a site that contains Zune artwork and animations.

In late September, Microsoft revealed pricing for the Zune player and said it would launch the player and music store Nov. 14. Since its introduction of Zune, Microsoft hasn't said much about what would happen to its existing MSN Music store or how the Zune store might affect its relationships with customers like MTV Networks, which have worked closely with Microsoft to launch their own music stores.

[Rasputin]

BenQ Unveils Vista-Approved LCD Monitors

BenQ unveiled some new flat-panel monitors Thursday that have been qualified to work with Microsoft's upcoming Windows Vista operating system.

Two of the monitors, due out in early December, have received Microsoft's Works with Windows Vista logo. A third, due out by the end of this month, is expected to be awarded Windows Vista Premium Certification, BenQ said.

New Graphical Interface
The Works with Windows logo indicates that a product will work smoothly with Windows Vista, although it won't necessarily offer the full Vista experience. The premium certification indicates that a product will take advantage of all of Vista's new capabilities, which include a new graphical interface.

The Works with Vista products, called the FP93GX and FP93GS, were designed with video in mind. BenQ said it achieved a crisp moving-image quality by reducing response time across color scales.

Specifications
The FP93GX is a 19-inch monitor with a 700:1 contrast ratio and 2 millisecond response time. It will be launched in the U.S., Europe and China in early December at a suggested retail price of $299. The FP93GS is also 19 inches across but slightly less expensive, at US$260. It will be launched in Europe, Japan, and China in early December.

The third screen, expected to get the "premium" certification, is a 24-inch monitor called the FP241VW. It's set to hit stores in the U.S., Japan, China and Taiwan by the end of November at a suggested retail price of $1,299.

[Rasputin]

Pressure Forces Microsoft to Change Vista Licensing

Customer concerns over changes to Windows Vista licensing that would limit a transfer of the license to only one machine have moved Microsoft to revise the operating system licensing policy.

Microsoft said today it has changed the retail license terms for Vista so that customers now may uninstall the OS from one machine and install it on another as many times as they want. The new terms do away with limitations on the number of new devices to which the license can be transferred.

However, to continue the discouragement of piracy, Microsoft has worded the license so that it is clear that users cannot "share this license between devices."

Background
When the new licensing was disclosed several weeks ago, power users who rebuild their computers with new components several times a year or who plan to upgrade their computers more than once in the lifetime of the OS raised a fuss. They demanded clarification from the vendor about how scenarios like these would play out under the new licensing. PC World readers were among those who really sounded off.

According to Shanen Boettcher, a Windows general manager at Microsoft, the company thinks it has come up with an answer to placate those users without encouraging software piracy, which the original change was designed to thwart.

"We think this clarification strikes the right balance," he says. Boettcher says the piracy problem has nothing to do with "the enthusiast community that was sending me e-mails," but with people who install one licensed copy of Windows on many machines and then sell those to other users.

"This is a definite improvement over the original licensing terms, and I'm glad Microsoft has relented," says Don Smutny, a Windows user and software developer for a large IT company in the midwestern United States. However, he still is not convinced there aren't other hidden complications within Vista's license that will have to be addressed later.

The change in policy will not affect consumers who purchase their Windows license preinstalled on a PC from a hardware manufacturer. No license transfers are allowed in those cases.

Information about license changes for any Microsoft product is available on Microsoft's site, though Vista details may not be available right away.

[Rasputin]

Second Minor Firefox 2.0 Bug Found

A second minor bug found in the Firefox 2.0 Web browser will be fixed, but users shouldn't encounter much of a problem in the mean time, a Mozilla official said today.

The browser will crash if it visits a Web page that been intentionally coded with JavaScript in such a way as to target the bug, said Tristan Nitot, director of European operations for Mozilla.

"It's very unlikely that anyone would have put a similar page on any ordinary Web site," so users shouldn't be affected, Nitot said.

The problem can't be used to steal data from a computer, he added.

It's the second bug that's been found in Firefox 2.0 since its release on Oct. 24. The first bug also causes the browser to hang or crash when a very large document is loaded into an iframe--an HTML element--using JavaScript.

The new bug will eventually be fixed. "We will fix it because we need reliability," Nitot said, adding no timetable has been set.

Browsers Under Fire
Firefox 2.0 and Microsoft's rival Web browser Internet Explorer 7, both of which debuted within a week of one another, are under close scrutiny by security analysts.

Both vendors have contested experts' claims of flaws. Mozilla said one reported problem with Firefox 2.0 was fixed in a previous version, while a second report of an exploitable vulnerability couldn't be replicated.

Microsoft charged a behavior cited as a vulnerability in IE7--where a pop-up window can display content from a different, untrusted Web site--isn't a bug, but a feature after the behavior was reported by vendor Secunia.

[Rasputin]

First $100 Laptops Due This Year

The first $100 laptop PCs for the One Laptop Per Child program will roll off production lines by the end of this year, and mass production will start in the first quarter of 2007, manufacturer Quanta Computer says.

The Taiwanese company, the largest contract notebook PC manufacturer in the world, had previously estimated it would begin mass production of the low-cost laptops in the second quarter of next year.

The company expects to ship 5 million to 10 million of the laptops next year, and said orders to Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, and Thailand have already been confirmed.

Joining Forces
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative is aimed at ensuring school children in developing countries keep up with their peers in modern nations by putting a laptop PC able to wirelessly access the Internet into their hands. The founders of the OLPC group hope the program keeps people in poor nations from being left behind in the digital age. The $100 laptop PC concept has also prompted companies, including Intel, to start creating lower cost notebooks for developing countries.

A number of academic and industry groups worked together on the $100 laptop design. The leader of the OLPC group, Nicholas Negroponte, is also a cofounder of the MIT Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The group plans to offer the low-cost laptops to governments and organizations worldwide as an educational tool.

The $100 machine will run the Linux OS on a 500MHz microprocessor from Advanced Micro Devices, will be wireless broadband-ready, and contain 128MB of DRAM and 500MB of flash memory for storage. The only major component missing will be a big hard disk, according to the group.

[Rasputin]

E-Voting: No Fix Yet

In 2004, when touch-screen voting machines were widely deployed for the first time in a national election, concerns about the security and reliability of the machines--and therefore, the integrity of election results--abounded. Since then, some election officials have adopted voter-verified paper audit trails (VVPATs) to improve the reliability of election results. Security holes continue to be discovered, however; and of the 32 states that use touch-screen machines, only 17 require that the machines produce paper trails.

Moreover, the paper trails themselves pose new and unexpected problems, says David Dill, a Stanford University computer science professor and the founder of VerifiedVoting.org, one of the leading proponents of mandatory paper trails for e-voting machines. Paper-trail systems may fail for mechanical reasons or through human error, as they did in Ohio this year.

[Rasputin]

FCC Delays Decision On AT&T-Bellsouth Merger Again

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has once again delayed its decision on AT&T's proposed acquisition of BellSouth.

The agency was scheduled to consider the acquisition today, but on Thursday it deleted the agenda item regarding the acquisition from its Friday schedule.

Competitors and Consumers
The U.S. Department of Justice already approved the acquisition in October but the FCC is split. Two commissioners have said that they're concerned about whether the deal will serve the public interest because it will reduce competition in the market. They're also responding to lobbying efforts from competitive carriers and consumer groups that have asked the commission to block the deal.

The commission had planned to make a decision on the acquisition in mid-October but pushed it back to today. At the time of that delay, commissioners said that they had just received new proposals for conditions that the commission could place on the acquisition that might address some of their and competitors' concerns. They said they wanted more time to consider the ideas and to hear public comment on the proposed conditions.

Possible Network Sales
A group of telecommunications providers in June suggested some possible conditions that the FCC could set, including that it require AT&T to continue to sell access to the AT&T and BellSouth networks at current prices. That would ensure that competitors could continue to offer services under similar conditions as they do now.

They also suggested that the FCC require the companies sell off some overlapping networks and sell the broadband wireless licenses that BellSouth owns.

After the delay in mid-October, AT&T said that it is open to discussing possible conditions but that it believes that no conditions are necessary for the merger to benefit the public.

AT&T and BellSouth announced the deal in March. They require FCC approval before it can become final.