Bloomberg

International Business Machines said it hasn’t disclosed client data to the US government under a National Security Agency surveillance program and would challenge any order to do so.

IBM said the government should deal directly with a client if it wants access to that client’s data, Robert Weber, IBM’s senior vice president for legal and regulatory affairs, wrote. If the US government were to impose a gag order prohibiting IBM from notifying a client of such a request, IBM would challenge the order, including taking legal action, he wrote.

“Technology often challenges us as a society,” Weber wrote. “Data is the next great natural resource, with the potential to improve lives and transform institutions for the better. However, establishing and maintaining the public’s trust in new technologies is essential.”

IBM also said it hasn’t given access to information stored on servers outside the US to the US government under a national security order. The company said it doesn’t build “backdoors” into its products for the NSA or any other government group.

Liberty Global, the cable company controlled by billionaire John Malone, plans to offer mobile phone services to customers throughout Europe, taking on carriers such as the UK’s Vodafone Group.

Liberty Global will put together a so-called mobile virtual network operator system, or MVNO, the name given to companies that use other carriers’ wireless infrastructure for their own mobile services, Senior Vice President Manuel Kohnstamm said.

“We’re working on a deep MVNO, and we don’t only do that in Austria but in the whole of Europe,” Kohnstamm said. “We’re constructing a pan-European MVNO platform.”

Former television executives Jeff Gaspin and Jon Klein are starting an online video service with backing from Discovery Communications and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.

Called Tapp, the service will feature long and short-form programs on channels tied to specific interests such as sports, politics and faith. Each channel will cost about $9.95 a month, with discounts for annual service, Gaspin, former chairman of NBCUniversal Television, and Klein, ex-US president of cable news network CNN, said in a joint interview.

The National Security Agency was blocked by a judge from carrying out plans to begin destroying phone records collected for surveillance after a privacy group argued they are relevant to lawsuits claiming the practice is unconstitutional.

US District Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco ordered the agency to retain the records and scheduled a hearing for March 19 on whether they can be destroyed. The NSA had planned to dispose of the records following a March 7 ruling by the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet privacy and civil liberties group based in San Francisco, asked White for a temporary restraining order, saying the records may be used as evidence in its lawsuits challenging NSA surveillance and are covered under preservation orders in those cases. NSA is prohibited from destroying “any telephone metadata or ‘call detail’ records,” White said. The surveillance court, in its ruling, barred the NSA from keeping the records for more than five years because the privacy rights of the people whose phone data was swept up in the agency’s database trump the need for the information in litigation.

[March 10]

SoftBank President Masayoshi Son said he’ll start a “massive price war” in the US if regulators let his Sprint purchase T-Mobile US.

The billionaire, who bought control of the third-largest wireless carrier in 2013, said combining with fourth-ranked T-Mobile would give him scale to compete against AT&T and Verizon Communications. Those operators collect most of the US mobile industry’s cash flow and don’t face “real competition,” Son said in an interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose.

[March 11]

Comcast’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable won’t be reviewed by the head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, Bill Baer, who is recused on the matter, the Department of Justice said.

The investigation of the Time Warner deal will be overseen by two senior officials at the antitrust division, Renata Hesse and David Gelfand. Baer’s recusal is due to work on a previous matter while in private practice, when he previously represented NBC Universal as a lawyer at law firm Arnold & Porter when Comcast merged with the network in 2011.

[March 7]

Netflix’s effort to secure a place for its video-subscription service on Time Warner Cable set-top boxes is on hold now that the cable operator is being sold, people with knowledge of the matter said.

The discussions are unlikely to progress before Time Warner Cable’s $45.2 billion acquisition by Comcast is completed, said the people, who asked not to be named because the matter is private. Comcast, which isn’t as far along in its own talks with Netflix, is focused on increasing film downloads and rentals with its new X1 set-top box platform, they said.

“They will not be in any kind of rush to let Netflix on their cable box and cannibalize their business,” said Arvind Bhatia, an analyst at Sterne Agee & Leach in Dallas who has a neutral rating on Netflix. A deal with Time Warner Cable would put pressure on other pay-TV providers to offer Netflix as well.

The video-streaming pioneer, with 44.4 million online subscribers, has pitched its Web-based trove of original shows, movies and older series as a must-have for pay-TV providers who increasingly poach each other’s viewers for growth. It has signed two European cable services and is trying to reach deals with smaller US outfits that use TiVo set-top boxes. Discussions have included the possibility of Netflix paying fees to pay-TV providers, Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings said in an interview in late January. While Netflix can continue to grow without such deals, access on cable TV systems would make viewing easier by eliminating the need to toggle between cable and Internet services, Hastings said.