Obama Fund-Raiser Is Likely Pick to Lead F.C.C.

Mr. Wheeler, who more than a decade ago led two telecommunications industry trade groups, has prompted concern in recent weeks by some consumer advocacy groups that anticipated his nomination and said they were troubled by his background investing in and lobbying for cable and wireless companies.

Many of them contended that the departing chairman, Julius Genachowski, refused to stand up to powerful telecommunications companies during his four-year tenure.

But on Tuesday, Mr. Wheeler received cautious approval from Public Knowledge, one of Mr. Genachowski’s harshest critics. Officials at Public Knowledge pointed out that when Mr. Wheeler lobbied for cable companies and the cellphone industry, they were upstarts or far less concentrated than they are today.

Gigi B. Sohn, president and chief executive of Public Knowledge, said Mr. Wheeler would be unlikely to elicit concern about the so-called revolving door between Washington and the private sector. Mr. Wheeler, she noted, is 67 and wealthy, meaning that he is unlikely to want a job in the telecommunications industry after a term as a regulator. “This is the capstone of his career,” she said. “Why take over an agency at that point in your life and guide it into irrelevancy?”

A White House official said that Mignon L. Clyburn, an F.C.C. commissioner since August 2009, would be appointed as acting chairwoman until Mr. Wheeler is confirmed and sworn in. Before joining the F.C.C., she served for 11 years on the South Carolina Public Service Commission, two of them as its chairwoman.

Mr. Wheeler is a managing director at Core Capital Partners, a Washington investment firm with $350 million under management. He has helped to oversee the firm’s investments in an array of start-ups and small- to mid-size technology companies, including GoMobo, Twisted Pair Solutions and Jacked. He also is a member of the board of EarthLink, an Internet service provider that competes aggressively with Verizon and AT&T.

In columns on his Web site, www.mobilemusings.net, Mr. Wheeler has expressed strong opinions about some of the issues that he would address at the F.C.C.

He has supported the voluntary incentive auctions that the F.C.C. has been planning. The agency is seeking to reclaim airwaves from television broadcasters and sell them to wireless phone companies for use in mobile broadband services.

In 2011, Mr. Wheeler criticized the broadcast industry for not moving more aggressively to use its airwaves for mobile digital television, or the broadcast of television signals to smartphones. At the same time, he said, broadcasters have been reluctant to let go of the part of the nation’s airwaves, or spectrum, that they do not fully use. The F.C.C., backed by Congress, is preparing to auction off many of those unused airwaves, potentially for billions of dollars.

“I’ve been mystified why broadcasters have declared jihad against the voluntary spectrum auction,” Mr. Wheeler wrote.

“Getting big dollars for an asset for which you paid nothing while still being able to run your traditional business over cable,” he added, “seems a pretty good business proposition — unless you really are serious about providing new and innovative services and need all that spectrum.”

The broadcasters association said that it had begun digital broadcasting to smartphones, with programming from more than 140 local television stations now available in 51 large cities. While Mr. Wheeler has gained some support, he will have to overcome critics.

Telecommunications industry watchers who have expressed misgivings about Mr. Wheeler’s work as a lobbyist point out that he oversaw the National Cable Television Association from 1979 to 1984. That could mean that he would look kindly on companies like Comcast, one of the largest cable and broadband service providers.

Free Press, a group that often opposes telecommunications industry proposals, said the F.C.C. needs as its chairman “someone who will use this powerful position to stand up to industry giants and protect the public interest.”

“On paper, Tom Wheeler does not appear to be that person, having headed not one but two major trade associations,” the group said. “But he now has the opportunity to prove his critics wrong.”

But others said Mr. Wheeler had promoted competition. He backed passage of the Cable Communications Act of 1984, which deregulated rates and let the industry compete more effectively with broadcasters.

From 1992 to 2004, Mr. Wheeler was chief executive of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association, the wireless industry group now known as CTIA — The Wireless Association. Mr. Wheeler’s wife, Carol, formerly worked in government affairs for the National Association of Broadcasters.

He co-founded SmartBrief, an online news service, and he served on the F.C.C.’s Technology Advisory Council and the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board. He recently was chairman of the State Department’s communications policy committee.

In March, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, a West Virginia Democrat, sent a letter signed by 37 senators to Mr. Obama recommending Jessica Rosenworcel, the other Democrat on the five-member commission and a former aide to Mr. Rockefeller, for the top job.

A group of Washington technology policy advisers later wrote to Mr. Obama saying that Mr. Wheeler should be the nominee. “He has consistently fought on the side of increasing competition,” the group wrote.

The Wall Street Journal Web site was the first to report that the president was expected to nominate Mr. Wheeler. Any nomination would be subject to Senate confirmation.

Europe Likely to Be Harder on Google Over Search

Few expect the European antitrust watchdog to be as lenient.

The Federal Trade Commission ruled on Thursday that Google had not broken antitrust laws, after a 19-month inquiry into how it operated its search engine. But the European Commission, which is pursuing claims that the company rigs results to favor its own businesses, operates under a different standard.

The agreement with the American authorities, analysts and competition lawyers say, is unlikely to alter the demands of European regulators, led by the competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia.

“We have taken note of the F.T.C. decision, but we don’t see that it has any direct implications for our investigation, for our discussions with Google, which are ongoing,” said Michael Jennings, a spokesman for the European Commission in Brussels.

Faced with nearly $4 billion in possible penalties and restrictions on its business in Europe, Google submitted proposals in July to remedy the concerns of the European Commission, which covered four areas. In its deal with the F.T.C., Google made concessions in two of those areas but was not required to do so in the rest.

A Google spokesman, Al Verney, declined to comment on the content of the company’s proposals to Mr. Almunia but said the company would “continue to work cooperatively with the European Commission.”

The Google case underscores a basic difference between the approaches to monopoly power in Europe and the United States. American antitrust regulators tend to focus on whether a company’s dominance harms consumers; the European system seeks to keep competitors in the market. Mr. Almunia has vowed to restore competition to the Internet search business in Europe.

“History shows that competition law is applied to monopoly power more stringently in the E.U. than in the U.S.,” said Jacques Lafitte, head of the competition practice at Avisa Partners, a consultancy in Brussels, who brought one of the original complaints against Google. “Whether the E.U. is right or not is a different question.”

Mr. Lafitte has some expertise in the matter. He is the former head of corporate affairs at Microsoft Europe and watched as that company did battle with regulators over its dominant computer operating system. Microsoft won a lenient settlement with the Justice Department in October 2001, he said, only to be slapped with nearly 1.6 billion euros, or $2.1 billion, in fines and penalties from the European Union from 2004 to 2008.

Google learned from Microsoft’s mistakes. It worked with authorities in both the United States and Europe to reach a deal rather than fight a desperate legal action. That approach appears to have paid off: last month, after a meeting with Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, Mr. Almunia said that the sides had “substantially reduced our differences.”

In its deal with the F.T.C., Google agreed to make concessions in two areas that concerned European regulators. In one, it will allow rivals to opt out of allowing Google to “scrape,” or copy, text from their sites. Google will probably offer the same concession to European authorities.

But in a second area of European concern — whether Google deliberately favors its own content in search results — the F.T.C. did not require changes.

Mr. Almunia has also demanded that Google put fewer restrictions on advertising distribution deals, an area his American counterparts did not explore.

The company will make a detailed set of proposed remedies in January. The European Commission will then allow the complainants to review them in a period of what is known as “market testing.” Antitrust lawyers say a final denouement could arrive by spring, depending on how hostile Google’s rivals are to the proposed remedies.

FairSearch, an alliance of Google rivals, accused the F.T.C. of rushing its decision. It said in a statement that closing the F.T.C. investigation “with only voluntary commitments from Google is disappointing and premature.”

The outcome in Europe may also be affected by Google’s dominance there. Google’s share of the United States search market was 67 percent in November, according to comScore, a digital analytics company, while its share in Europe was 83 percent that month.

Bits Blog: Facebook Likely to End Experiment With Democracy

Karen Bleier/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Facebook is proposing to end this system of direct voting for policy changes.

A half-million Facebook users have told the social network they do not want the company to change its privacy policy. Sounds impressive, right? Well, the only way that crowd will get its way and the status quo remain intact is if an additional 300 million people vote thumbs down before Monday. Odds of that happening? About zero.

Facebook says the changes to the policy are minor and beneficial for users. One concerns the integration of Instagram data with Facebook; another changes the filters for managing incoming messages. Privacy watchdogs disagree. So do those who bothered to vote: Shortly before noon Pacific time on Friday, 476,718 were against the proposed changes. A mere 68,884 were in favor.

But the really interesting change is that Facebook is proposing to end this system of direct voting, which was implemented in early 2009 after a major privacy flap. “If we are trying to move the world to being more open and transparent and to get people to share more information, having an open process around this is ultimately the only way to do that,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, said at the time in a conference call.

The problem was that more than 30 percent of all Facebook users had to vote against a proposal for it to be binding. In the last vote, in June, the no’s outweighed the yeses by a ratio of six to one, but the total votes were less than one half of 1 percent of the users. That made the vote simply advisory. And so Facebook went ahead and implemented the changes anyway.

There has been relatively little commentary, much less outrage, about the new changes. One notable exception was Michael Phillips, who wrote a much-quoted piece in BuzzFeed, “The End of the Facebook Democracy”: “By repealing Facebook Suffrage, Facebook abandons a fundamental norm — that its users are citizens in a community, and not simply datapoints on an advertising algorithm. The vote may be quixotic, but if Facebook remains the indispensable social network, you’ll want to be able to tell your grandchildren you fought for Facebook freedom.”

Some users are trying to take their privacy into their own hands. They are reproducing the following text as a status update:

“In response to the new Facebook guidelines, I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to all of my personal details, status updates, messages, photos, videos and all other personal content that I post or have posted, online, as a result of the Berne Convention, on my personal profile page, or anyone else’s page, For commercial use of the above, MY WRITTEN CONSENT IS NEEDED AT ALL TIMES WITH NO EXCEPTION.”

Perhaps this makes them feel better. But in reality, it has no legal standing at all.

Bits Blog: Apple Likely to Introduce Smaller iPad in October Event

People are still having trouble finding Apple’s new iPhone, which is selling out in stores, but the company is already planning to introduce another new product in an event later this month: a smaller, lighter version of the iPad.

The event, which has not yet been announced, will be held Oct. 23, according to a person briefed on the company’s plans, who did not want to be identified talking about products that had not been announced yet. The location of the event has not been confirmed, but Apple typically hosts its product events either in San Francisco or on its campus in Cupertino, Calif.

All Things D, the tech news blog, earlier reported the October event date. Whispers about a smaller iPad began in July.

The event will take place just two days before Microsoft holds an event to release Windows 8, its new desktop and tablet operating system.

Tech and Media Executives Are Likely to Debate Piracy

But lately some of the highest-paid executives at the world’s largest media companies have talked a lot about the lessons they learned from a failed industrywide attempt to pass antipiracy legislation six months ago.

In January, the technology industry led by Google, Facebook and Wikipedia revolted against two bills called SOPA and PIPA — short for Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act. The legislation, largely the product of media companies to protect movies, television shows, video games and music against online theft from rogue foreign Web sites, sparked a reaction that quickly shifted from an arcane policy debate to an online consumer rebellion.

Wikipedia went black to protest SOPA and more than seven million people signed online petitions, many of which said the bills would “break the Internet.” Congress, overwhelmed by the popular opposition, quickly backpedaled, leaving the legislation to die.

“They tsunamied the conversation with rhetoric, and we were unprepared to fight back,” Tom Dooley, chief operating officer at Viacom, said of the technology industry. “We’re going to have to find a solution that works better for everyone.”

On Tuesday, the titans of both media and technology will convene in Sun Valley, Idaho, for an exclusive annual conference sponsored by the boutique investment firm Allen & Company. It will be the first time since the piracy debate went viral that top technology and entertainment executives will assemble en masse on neutral ground to discuss major issues affecting both industries.

“There’s an agreement on both sides that there should be some period of time when everyone steps back and reassesses,” said Michael O’Leary, a senior executive vice president for the Motion Picture Association of America.

The Sun Valley conference, known as “summer camp for moguls,” is off limits to reporters (though dozens still turn out) and famously private. In between bike rides, hikes and cocktail parties, the executives will hold meetings, listen to a variety of speakers and attend panel discussions with luminaries from sports to politics.

A preliminary list of attendees at this year’s conference includes Rupert Murdoch and Chase Carey, the chief executive and chief operating officer of News Corporation; Philippe Dauman, chief of Viacom; Jeffrey L. Bewkes, chief of Time Warner; and Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook. Tim Cook, chief of Apple, and Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin are also expected to attend.

In the months since the SOPA debates, media executives have discussed piracy with obvious shell shock.

“I think we didn’t help ourselves down in Southern California by trying to jam something in Congress; we screwed that up,” Ari Emanuel, co-chief executive of the William Morris Endeavor talent agency, said at the All Things D conference in May. He added: “When SOPA died, a lot of conversations died. But they’ll start up again.”

In the aftermath, Hollywood has increased its efforts to get online payment companies, cloud services and Internet service providers to voluntarily help curtail pirated movies, TV and music, particularly from foreign Web sites.

Months before the debates erupted in January, American Express, Discover, MasterCard, PayPal and Visa agreed on a set of best practices to reduce the sale of counterfeited pirated goods. In 2010, Yahoo, PayPal, GoDaddy, Google and others formed a nonprofit intended to combat the sale of illegal pharmaceuticals online, one issue SOPA and PIPA were initially meant to address.

The Sun Valley conference could provide a tranquil backdrop for the continued construction of a fence between media and technology.

“We thought about what’s in the long-term interest of the Internet ecosystem. And that’s a set of best practices that people feel comfortable with,” said Cary Sherman, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America.

Tech and Media Executives Are Likely to Debate Piracy

But lately some of the highest-paid executives at the world’s largest media companies have talked a lot about the lessons they learned from a failed industrywide attempt to pass antipiracy legislation six months ago.

In January, the technology industry led by Google, Facebook and Wikipedia revolted against two bills called SOPA and PIPA — short for Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act. The legislation, largely the product of media companies to protect movies, television shows, video games and music against online theft from rogue foreign Web sites, sparked a reaction that quickly shifted from an arcane policy debate to an online consumer rebellion.

Wikipedia went black to protest SOPA and more than seven million people signed online petitions, many of which said the bills would “break the Internet.” Congress, overwhelmed by the popular opposition, quickly backpedaled, leaving the legislation to die.

“They tsunamied the conversation with rhetoric, and we were unprepared to fight back,” Tom Dooley, chief operating officer at Viacom, said of the technology industry. “We’re going to have to find a solution that works better for everyone.”

On Tuesday, the titans of both media and technology will convene in Sun Valley, Idaho, for an exclusive annual conference sponsored by the boutique investment firm Allen & Company. It will be the first time since the piracy debate went viral that top technology and entertainment executives will assemble en masse on neutral ground to discuss major issues affecting both industries.

“There’s an agreement on both sides that there should be some period of time when everyone steps back and reassesses,” said Michael O’Leary, a senior executive vice president for the Motion Picture Association of America.

The Sun Valley conference, known as “summer camp for moguls,” is off limits to reporters (though dozens still turn out) and famously private. In between bike rides, hikes and cocktail parties, the executives will hold meetings, listen to a variety of speakers and attend panel discussions with luminaries from sports to politics.

A preliminary list of attendees at this year’s conference includes Rupert Murdoch and Chase Carey, the chief executive and chief operating officer of News Corporation; Philippe Dauman, chief of Viacom; Jeffrey L. Bewkes, chief of Time Warner; and Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook. Tim Cook, chief of Apple, and Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin are also expected to attend.

In the months since the SOPA debates, media executives have discussed piracy with obvious shell shock.

“I think we didn’t help ourselves down in Southern California by trying to jam something in Congress; we screwed that up,” Ari Emanuel, co-chief executive of the William Morris Endeavor talent agency, said at the All Things D conference in May. He added: “When SOPA died, a lot of conversations died. But they’ll start up again.”

In the aftermath, Hollywood has increased its efforts to get online payment companies, cloud services and Internet service providers to voluntarily help curtail pirated movies, TV and music, particularly from foreign Web sites.

Months before the debates erupted in January, American Express, Discover, MasterCard, PayPal and Visa agreed on a set of best practices to reduce the sale of counterfeited pirated goods. In 2010, Yahoo, PayPal, GoDaddy, Google and others formed a nonprofit intended to combat the sale of illegal pharmaceuticals online, one issue SOPA and PIPA were initially meant to address.

The Sun Valley conference could provide a tranquil backdrop for the continued construction of a fence between media and technology.

“We thought about what’s in the long-term interest of the Internet ecosystem. And that’s a set of best practices that people feel comfortable with,” said Cary Sherman, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America.