Al Gore used his considerable lobbying and negotiating skills when he started Current TV in 2005, and he used them again last month in arranging the sale of the channel to Al Jazeera, Brian Stelter reports on Friday in The New York Times. He used persuasive legal arguments with cable and satellite providers to convince them that Al Jazeera, like Current, offered news content and that they were obligated to carry the new channel run by the Middle Eastern news organization. In the process, Mr. Gore, already estimated to be worth about $100 million, assured himself some $100 million more from the sale.
Google scored a major victory on Thursday when the Federal Trade Commission ruled that it had not violated antitrust statutes, Edward Wyatt reports. The commission had been looking into whether Google’s search results were arranged in a way that favored its own services — a complaint from competitors who feared that the Internet giant was abusing what amounted to a monopolistic position.
Barnes Noble delivered more sobering news on Thursday, releasing holiday sales figures that were sharply down from the same period a year earlier. Leslie Kaufman writes in The Times that the figures for the company’s Nook division were especially disappointing and showed how difficult it will be for the bookseller to shift to a digitally oriented business strategy.
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/breakfast-meeting-victories-for-gore-and-google-but-not-barnes-noble/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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