New York Times

German book publishers have formally accused Amazon of violating the country’s competition laws and have asked the antitrust authorities to investigate.

The formal complaint comes nearly two months after Amazon stopped shipping books from a leading German publisher, the Bonnier Media Group, amid a dispute over dividing revenue from e-book sales.

The German Publishers and Booksellers Association said it had submitted its complaint to the Bundeskartellamt, the federal antitrust authority, laying out what it viewed as Amazon’s abuse of its market-dominant position in Germany and urging the officials to take action against the Seattle-based company.

China introduced new restrictions on what the government has called “critical” news articles and barred Chinese journalists from doing work outside their beats or regions, putting further restraints on reporters in one of the world’s most controlled news media environments.

Reporters in China must now seek permission from their employers before undertaking “critical reports” and are barred from setting up their own websites, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television announced in new rules. The state agency said on its website that the rules came after a series of cases involving misconduct by journalists, including extortion.

But journalists and rights activists said the rules could have a chilling effect on reporting in China, a country already ranked 173rd out of 179 countries on the press freedom index published by Reporters Without Borders.

T-Mobile US, the fourth-largest American phone carrier, has spent the last year and a half introducing aggressive new offerings to lure customers. Most recently, the company said it would add to those offerings with unlimited streaming music and the ability to test-drive an iPhone.

The company’s moves have helped attract millions of people to T-Mobile. And they have also impressed federal antitrust regulators, who have publicly patted themselves on the back for resisting a potential merger between T-Mobile and AT&T in 2011.

Now, T-Mobile is in talks with Sprint, the third-largest carrier, for a $32 billion merger. A deal could be announced this summer.

William Baer, the chief of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, noted that the effect of regulators blocking the AT&T and T-Mobile merger was “driving enormous benefits in the direction of the American consumer.”

But John Legere, T-Mobile’s chief executive, said that innovation and competition would only intensify with a merger.

T-Mobile said that it had teamed up with popular streaming music services including Pandora, Slacker Radio, Spotify, Rhapsody and Apple’s iTunes Radio. Music streamed from those services will not be counted against a user’s data plan.

All T-Mobile customers subscribed to its current plans, called Simple Choice, will be eligible for the free streaming.

T-Mobile also said that it would introduce UnRadio, a new online radio service with Rhapsody. Unlike many traditional Internet radio services, UnRadio will be an ad-free service that allows people to listen to specific songs and skip others as much as they want. It will be free for customers subscribed to T-Mobile’s unlimited data plans and $4 a month for other T-Mobile customers.

A Q&A with with Jeffrey Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, about their new Fire phone and Amazon’s goals in the smartphone business.

Asked why he arrived late into the phone market, Bezos answered: “I think in the whole evolution of this, we’re still pretty early. I don’t want to judge before all the facts are in, but I think this wireless thing is going to be big.”

He added: “If we go back in time just five, six, seven years, we’re talking about different players -- Nokia, Blackberry and others. Things change very rapidly in this area.”

Your right to be forgotten on the Internet is almost here. Google will start to remove links to online content in Europe by the end of the month to comply with a recent landmark European court ruling intended to protect individuals’ privacy, according to sources with direct knowledge of the issue, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

This step follows a month-long effort by Google to comply with the European Court of Justice’s decision, which requires all search providers operating in Europe to consider people’s requests to remove links that they say violate their online privacy.

Google has already received more than 50,000 submissions from people asking the company to remove links. That includes more than 12,000 requests within the first 24 hours of the form’s being made available, according to one of the people with direct knowledge of the matter.

While the company will start to remove links by the end of June, the process is expected to take several weeks before it is fully operational. Google’s engineering teams -- both in Europe and further afield -- have been tweaking the company’s search infrastructure since the ruling was made in May.

Defining the scope of a problem is the first step toward solving it. Yet when it comes to the persistent lack of diversity in their work forces, Silicon Valley companies are quick with excuses and slow -- very slow -- to disclose even the barest data about the problem, even though they have been collecting and reporting the information to the federal government for decades.

Yahoo became one of the few companies to share basic demographic information on the diversity of its work force. Globally, about 37 percent of the Internet company’s more than 12,000 workers are women, and just 23 percent of the senior managers are women, Yahoo wrote. (The company declined to give a gender breakdown for the United States.)

Yahoo, which is one of the few tech companies run by a woman, Marissa Mayer, also provided data on the ethnicity of its United States work force, saying that 50 percent of its workers are white, 39 percent Asian, 4 percent Hispanic, 2 percent black and 4 percent undisclosed or more than one race. Asians make up 57 percent of Yahoo’s tech workers, compared with the 35 percent of the tech work force that is white. Yet when it came to leading technology teams, nearly four out of five of the bosses were white and less than a fifth were Asian.

Whites also dominated the nontechnical management jobs, although to a lesser extent. Yahoo’s disclosure, which came without commentary on causes or solutions, came in response to Google’s disclosure of its own diversity data at the end of May, which prompted some self-reflection at other Silicon Valley firms.

When Facebook ended negotiations to buy Snapchat in 2013, that did not mean the company stopped thinking about the disappearing photo messages that have made Snapchat so popular for casual conversations, especially among younger users.

Now Facebook, the world’s largest social network, is rolling out Slingshot, its own service for sending self-destructing selfies to friends.

The new app, which will be available in the Apple and Android mobile app stores in the United States and later in other countries, aims to create a sense of community by encouraging users to send a photo or video to a group of friends. Its unique twist is that the recipients are required to share a visual moment of their own before they can see what was sent to them.

Getting directions on the road from Google Maps and other smartphone apps is a popular alternative to the expensive navigation aids included in some cars.

The apps are also a gray area when it comes to laws banning the use of cellphones or texting while driving.

The Transportation Department wants to enter the argument. The department is intensifying its battle against distracted driving by seeking explicit authority from Congress to regulate navigation aids of all types, including apps on smartphones. The measure, included in the Obama Administration’s proposed transportation bill, would specify that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has the authority to set restrictions on the apps and later order changes if they are deemed dangerous, much the way it currently regulates mechanical features of cars.

The measure has the support of automakers, which already mostly comply with voluntary guidelines for built-in navigation systems, but it has run into stiff opposition from technology companies, which say that any such law would be impractical and impossible to enforce. It’s another example, they say, of federal regulators trying vainly to keep up with a rapidly changing industry.

Amazon is expected to introduce a smartphone at an event in Seattle, a long-rumored project that aims to close any remaining gap between the impulse to buy and the completed act, David Streitfeld reports.

Amazon has spent the last several years furiously investing billions of dollars on multiple fronts: constructing warehouses all over the country to deliver goods as fast as possible, building devices as varied as tablets and set-top boxes, and creating and licensing entertainment to stock those devices. It all adds up to a wildly ambitious venture without precedent in modern merchandising.

Wall Street has generally cheered as competitors — an ever growing group that now includes businesses like Walmart, eBay, Apple and Google -- regard these activities with increasing unease. Customers, meanwhile, are propelling Amazon toward the rarefied ranks of companies with revenue of $100 billion.

Public television officials are raising the concern that the Federal Communications Commission’s planned spectrum incentive auction, intended to free airwaves for use by wireless broadband companies could leave parts of the country without over-the-air public television access.

The incentive auction, promising the possibility of millions of dollars to broadcast stations that give back some or all of their six megahertz of spectrum or move to another spot on the dial, will be open to commercial stations, as well. But the money could prove particularly enticing to public stations, many of which have tight budgets.

Public broadcasting officials worry that universities and states, including New Jersey, that hold public station licenses but are not primarily broadcasters may decide to give up some or all of their spectrum and use the proceeds for other needs, such as unfunded pension liabilities.