VENTURE CAPITAL POST

Alaska Air Got U.S. Antitrust Approval For Virgin Deal But With Conditions.

Cellcom Israel Ltd on Tuesday announced that regulators opposed its merger plan with Golan. However, Antitrust Authority will invite the companies representative to discuss the deal before making final decision.

European Union antitrust regulator resumed its review on the takeover of Baker Hughes by Halliburton. European Commission plan to reach decision in August whether to approve or veto the deal.

General Electric Co. terminated the agreed $3.3 billion acquisition of Sweden's Electrolux AB on its appliance business. According to The Wall Street Journal, GE was under pressure by the U.S. Justice Department, which was blocking the sale due to antitrust issues.

Ruling out North America's claim that European antitrust authority is going in an anti-US bias in dealing with Google and Apple, the European Competition Commissioner (ECC) Margrethe Vestager has termed it as a misleading notion of the world's largest economy. Vestager has been criticized in the US media for her role in opening multiple cases against the US corporate giants Google, Apple, Amazon and Starbucks during the past one year. Vestager has become the target of the US media as European regulators are protecting EU companies from the US competition.

U.S. International Trade Commission terminates the patent infringement case filed by the InterDigital Inc. against Microsoft Corporation. ITC is breaking off the import ban of Microsoft handsets.

When EU politicians call for the break-up of Google, it can sound like sour grapes, the anti-American backlash of an aging Europe envious, and fearful, of the wealth and growing power of young U.S. tech giants.

The European Parliament is preparing a non-binding resolution that proposes splitting Google Inc's (GOOGL.O) search engine operations in Europe from the rest of its business as one possible option to rein in the Internet company’s dominance in the search market.

IBM (IBM.N) has won an outsourcing contract from Germany's Lufthansa (LHAG.DE) worth 1 billion euros ($1.25 billion) that will see the U.S. company take over the airline's information technology infrastructure services division and staff.

Swiss drugmaker Novartis AG (NOVN.VX) said three members of its executive committee would leave the company following the completion of transactions with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK.L) and Eli Lilly (LLY.N) to divest three units.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission said on Friday it paused its "shot-clock" on the review of the proposed $45 billion merger between the two largest U.S. cable providers, Comcast Corp and Time Warner Cable Inc.

Microsoft Corp chief executive Satya Nadella promised to cooperate fully with Chinese authorities in their antitrust investigation into his company during a meeting with a top regulator in Beijing, the Chinese government said.

Qualcomm Inc executives showed off robots made with smartphone technology at an annual developer conference on Thursday, but they steered clear of talking about China, a key growth market where the chipmaker is entangled in an antitrust investigation.

Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) internet browser and media player are being targeted in a Chinese antitrust probe, raising the prospect of China revisiting the software bundling issue at the heart of past antitrust complaints against the firm in the West.

As share values jumped, the bigger issues for the Applied Materials-Tokyo Electron merger would be the regulatory approvals from three countries and the length of time for those approvals to be obtained.