Is Google Abusing Its Market Power? Former Legal Allies Disagree

Left: Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Right: Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Susan Creighton is now in Google's corner while Gary Reback represents several companies that  have complained to the government about Google.

In the digital economy, 14 years is an eternity. Fast-shifting technology means that companies, once feared and seemingly invincible, fade, while new powers rise to dominance, raising fresh sets of concerns.

Exhibit A: In the spring of 1998, the federal government and 20 states filed a landmark antitrust suit against Microsoft. A few months later, Google was founded.

Now Google is the subject of major antitrust investigations in the United States and Europe.  In the United States, regulators are expected to announce a decision within days to sue or settle, and under what terms. The European decision will come soon as well.

Much has changed over the years, but two lawyers who helped build the case against Microsoft are playing important roles once again. But this time, Gary L. Reback and Susan A. Creighton are on opposite sides.

The two lawyers, and the positions they have taken, point to some striking similarities yet also significant differences between the two high-stakes investigations — and why the pursuit of Google has proved challenging for antitrust officials.

In 1996, Mr. Reback and Ms. Creighton were partners, representing Netscape, the pioneering Web browser company. They wrote a 222-page “white paper,” laying out Microsoft’s campaign to use its dominance of personal computer software to stifle competition from Netscape, the Internet insurgent. After Netscape sent their report to the Justice Department, the head of the antitrust division ordered an investigation.

Mr. Reback is now an attorney at Carr & Ferrell in Silicon Valley, where he represents several companies that have complained to the government about Google. He does not represent Microsoft, though that company is a born-again champion of antitrust action, against its rival Google.

In Google, Mr. Reback sees a familiar pattern — a giant company trying to hinder competition and attack new markets. Google, he says, is unfairly using its dominant search engine to favor the company’s offerings in online shopping, travel and local listings and thus stifle competition from Web sites that rely on Google search for traffic.

“From my perspective, it’s an instant replay of the Microsoft case,” Mr. Reback said in a recent interview, though he would not comment for this article. “It’s the same playbook.”

Not to Ms. Creighton, a partner in the Washington office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, who is in Google’s corner. She has testified before Congress on Google’s behalf and negotiated with the Federal Trade Commission, the agency conducting the antitrust investigation, and where she was a senior official during the Bush administration.

“Google’s conduct is pro-competitive,” Ms. Creighton declared in her Senate testimony last year. “Far from threatening competition, Google has consistently enhanced consumer welfare by increasing the services available to consumers.”

Ms. Creighton hits two main themes in Google’s defense. The first is the consumer benefit of all Google’s free services. The second is that the cost to consumers of switching to Internet alternatives like Microsoft’s Bing search engine, the Expedia travel site or Yelp local listings is “zero,” she said. Or, as Google repeatedly says, competition is “just a click away.”

In the late 1990s, Microsoft had its version of both arguments. Microsoft bundled a free Web browser into its Windows operating system — an added feature at no cost, surely a consumer benefit. In its trial testimony, Microsoft showed that millions of people had downloaded the competing Netscape browser onto Windows — a rival product just a double-click away.

But in the trial, the evidence taken as a whole portrayed a wide-ranging effort by Microsoft to crush Netscape. It is not an antitrust violation for a powerful company to gain a dominant share of one market and then expand into other markets. The legal issue is the tactics the dominant company employs to expand its empire.

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Doctor and Patient: Tackling the Problem of Medical Student Debt

Thursday’s announcement from the University of California, Los Angeles, of a $100 million medical student scholarship fund should inspire all of us to question the fact that medical education in the United States is paid for largely by student debt.

The new merit-based scholarships, established by entertainment executive David Geffen, will cover all educational, living and even some travel expenses for a fifth of next year’s entering medical school class, some 33 students. Mr. Geffen and school officials hope that eventually the school will be able to pay for all medical students and free them from the obligation to take out student loans.

“The cost of a world-class medical education should not deter our future innovators, doctors and scientists from the path they hope to pursue,” Mr. Geffen said in a statement. “I hope in doing this that others will be inspired to do the same.”

The cost Mr. Geffen refers to has skyrocketed over the last 25 years. The median annual tuition, or yearly cost for attending classes, is now more than $32,000 at public medical schools, and more than $50,000 at private institutions. And medical students must also pay for textbooks, equipment, room, board and travel expenses, adding $20,000 to $30,000 to each year’s expenses and pushing the total four-year cost of attending medical school to more than $200,000 at public institutions and close to $300,000 at private schools.

Some medical students commit to military service or to practice in a medically underserved area to reduce costs. But the vast majority end up borrowing money from federal or private loan programs, or from family if they are fortunate enough. The median debt for medical students upon graduation is more than $160,000, with almost a third of students owing more than $200,000. And those figures do not include interest costs over payback periods of 25 to 30 years.

There are several reasons for the runaway costs. One is that the academic medical centers that house medical schools have become increasingly complex and expensive to run, and administrators have relied on tuition hikes to support research and clinical resources that may have only an indirect impact on medical student education.

An equally important contributor to the problem has been our society’s placid acceptance of educational debt as the norm, a prerequisite to becoming a doctor. Obtaining a medical education is like purchasing a house, a car or any other big-ticket item, the thinking goes; going into debt and then paying over time with interest is just the way the world works. And, say many observers, newly minted doctors will earn big salaries, allowing them easily to reimburse their loans.

While it is true that most doctors can pay off their debt over time, those insouciant observers fail to consider how loan burdens can weigh heavily on a young person’s idealism and career decisions.

For example, financial considerations have been shown to be a major deterrent for undergraduate students considering a career in medicine, particularly for students from diverse backgrounds. And even the most committed students who do make it to med school may eschew research or specialties like geriatrics, family medicine and pediatrics in favor of a more lucrative career in dermatology or ophthalmology.

These choices have enormous social repercussions. Despite the well-studied benefits of a diverse physician workforce, more than half of all medical students currently come from families with household incomes in the top quintile of the nation. Even more worrisome, student concerns about debt are exacerbating the nation’s physician shortage. By the end of this decade, we will be short nearly 50,000 primary care physicians and an additional 50,000 doctors of any kind.

Educators and groups like the Association of American Medical Colleges have been trying to address the problem of medical student debt for more than a decade. Some have suggested simply freezing costs or prorating debt according to the earning potential of a student’s chosen area of specialty.

But the most durable solutions thus far seem to be scholarships made possible by philanthropic donations like Mr. Geffen’s. The University of Central Florida’s new medical school, for example, was able to offer its charter class in 2009, consisting of 40 students, a four-year scholarship that covered tuition and living expenses thanks to several gifts. And the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, established with a $100 million gift from philanthropists Al and Norma Lerner, has been able to educate a small cadre of future physician-scientists while granting all of them scholarships to cover tuition costs.

Mr. Geffen’s fund represents the first sustained scholarship to cover all expenses, not just tuition, for a sizable portion of students at a single medical school. Combined with his unrestricted gift of $200 million that led to naming the medical school in his honor a decade ago, Mr. Geffen’s contributions represent the University of California system’s largest donation ever from a single individual.

But the real importance of Mr. Geffen’s donation for the rest of us lies in not its historic largesse, nor its hopeful vision. Rather, it is in the dramatic impact one individual can make when he makes medical education a priority, and the inevitable question such a gesture raises: Why has our society been so slow to do the same?

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Doctor and Patient: Tackling the Problem of Medical Student Debt

Thursday’s announcement from the University of California, Los Angeles, of a $100 million medical student scholarship fund should inspire all of us to question the fact that medical education in the United States is paid for largely by student debt.

The new merit-based scholarships, established by entertainment executive David Geffen, will cover all educational, living and even some travel expenses for a fifth of next year’s entering medical school class, some 33 students. Mr. Geffen and school officials hope that eventually the school will be able to pay for all medical students and free them from the obligation to take out student loans.

“The cost of a world-class medical education should not deter our future innovators, doctors and scientists from the path they hope to pursue,” Mr. Geffen said in a statement. “I hope in doing this that others will be inspired to do the same.”

The cost Mr. Geffen refers to has skyrocketed over the last 25 years. The median annual tuition, or yearly cost for attending classes, is now more than $32,000 at public medical schools, and more than $50,000 at private institutions. And medical students must also pay for textbooks, equipment, room, board and travel expenses, adding $20,000 to $30,000 to each year’s expenses and pushing the total four-year cost of attending medical school to more than $200,000 at public institutions and close to $300,000 at private schools.

Some medical students commit to military service or to practice in a medically underserved area to reduce costs. But the vast majority end up borrowing money from federal or private loan programs, or from family if they are fortunate enough. The median debt for medical students upon graduation is more than $160,000, with almost a third of students owing more than $200,000. And those figures do not include interest costs over payback periods of 25 to 30 years.

There are several reasons for the runaway costs. One is that the academic medical centers that house medical schools have become increasingly complex and expensive to run, and administrators have relied on tuition hikes to support research and clinical resources that may have only an indirect impact on medical student education.

An equally important contributor to the problem has been our society’s placid acceptance of educational debt as the norm, a prerequisite to becoming a doctor. Obtaining a medical education is like purchasing a house, a car or any other big-ticket item, the thinking goes; going into debt and then paying over time with interest is just the way the world works. And, say many observers, newly minted doctors will earn big salaries, allowing them easily to reimburse their loans.

While it is true that most doctors can pay off their debt over time, those insouciant observers fail to consider how loan burdens can weigh heavily on a young person’s idealism and career decisions.

For example, financial considerations have been shown to be a major deterrent for undergraduate students considering a career in medicine, particularly for students from diverse backgrounds. And even the most committed students who do make it to med school may eschew research or specialties like geriatrics, family medicine and pediatrics in favor of a more lucrative career in dermatology or ophthalmology.

These choices have enormous social repercussions. Despite the well-studied benefits of a diverse physician workforce, more than half of all medical students currently come from families with household incomes in the top quintile of the nation. Even more worrisome, student concerns about debt are exacerbating the nation’s physician shortage. By the end of this decade, we will be short nearly 50,000 primary care physicians and an additional 50,000 doctors of any kind.

Educators and groups like the Association of American Medical Colleges have been trying to address the problem of medical student debt for more than a decade. Some have suggested simply freezing costs or prorating debt according to the earning potential of a student’s chosen area of specialty.

But the most durable solutions thus far seem to be scholarships made possible by philanthropic donations like Mr. Geffen’s. The University of Central Florida’s new medical school, for example, was able to offer its charter class in 2009, consisting of 40 students, a four-year scholarship that covered tuition and living expenses thanks to several gifts. And the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, established with a $100 million gift from philanthropists Al and Norma Lerner, has been able to educate a small cadre of future physician-scientists while granting all of them scholarships to cover tuition costs.

Mr. Geffen’s fund represents the first sustained scholarship to cover all expenses, not just tuition, for a sizable portion of students at a single medical school. Combined with his unrestricted gift of $200 million that led to naming the medical school in his honor a decade ago, Mr. Geffen’s contributions represent the University of California system’s largest donation ever from a single individual.

But the real importance of Mr. Geffen’s donation for the rest of us lies in not its historic largesse, nor its hopeful vision. Rather, it is in the dramatic impact one individual can make when he makes medical education a priority, and the inevitable question such a gesture raises: Why has our society been so slow to do the same?

Read More..

Nickelodeon and PBS Pursue Preschool Apps Alongside TV Shows

In 2014, the preschool cable network Nick Jr. plans to introduce a television show featuring a little boy, his miniature pet dragon and a magic stick.

But the show, “Wallykazam,” will not be new to users of smartphones and tablets. Educational applications built around it will start appearing in app stores late next year, making “Wallykazam” Nickelodeon’s first major show to be introduced as a mobile product first, said Steve Youngwood, Nickelodeon’s executive vice president and general manager for digital media.

Driving the change, at Nickelodeon and other preschool television brands, are parents who are increasingly putting mobile devices into preschoolers’ hands and laps.

According to new research commissioned by Sesame Workshop, producer of PBS’s “Sesame Street,” mobile device ownership is booming as TV set ownership declines. Eighty-eight percent of the parents surveyed said they owned a television, down from 95 percent in 2010.

Twenty-one percent said their children first interacted with “Sesame Street” someplace other than television, with YouTube and PBS.org the top alternative sources. (PBS said separately that its free PBS Kids Video app, which has been downloaded 2.4 million times, reached 120 million streams of PBS Kids shows in November, surpassing 100 million for the first time.)

“On-air does still drive digital,” said Diana Polvere, Sesame Workshop’s vice president for market research, citing the 79 percent of viewers who still come to television first. But given the rapid changes, she said, Sesame’s research will now be conducted every six months instead of every two years.

Nickelodeon’s research, done in April and updated in October, shows striking growth in educational app use. In October, 27 percent of United States households with children ages 3 to 5 had an iPad, up from 22 percent in April. In those households, 40 percent of preschoolers used the iPad for educational apps, up from 27 percent in April.

The study also found that Apple device users were willing to pay 15 to 23 percent more for educational apps than for general apps.

“Parents want to feel good about what they are purchasing and downloading for their kids,” said Scott Chambers, Sesame Workshop’s senior vice president for digital worldwide distribution. Adding an educational element to an entertaining app, he said, “makes everybody feel better.”

Parents’ feelings aside, apps are strong educational tools, said Lesli Rotenberg, who oversees PBS’s children’s programming, including its more than two dozen apps.

While television “is somewhat of a passive experience” for children, she said, interactive apps give them immediate feedback and tailored experiences that become more difficult as they gain skills.

Though numerous producers are entering the app business, three of the top 10 paid educational apps in the iTunes store last week were Nickelodeon’s. They included the $1.99 Bubble Guppies: Animal School Day, already profitable six weeks after its introduction, Nickelodeon said. A Team Umizoomi math app was still in the top 10 after a year on the market.

Originally scheduled for August release, the Bubble Guppies app, filled with the same silly jokes as the show, was revised after focus group testing with preschoolers showed, among other things, that their small fingers had a hard time maneuvering a virtual latch and that the children wanted more control over their exploration.

“We were hearing kids say in testing: ‘I want to play with the dolphin. I want to play with the penguin,’ ” said Jordana Drell, Nickelodeon’s senior director of preschool games.

Nickelodeon’s educational apps normally take six to eight months to create and, even with lush graphics like the shimmery underwater background in Bubble Guppies, cost about half as much as a single episode of one of the company’s preschool shows, officials said.

The Bubble Guppies creators, Jonny Belt and Robert Scull, said they approached the app as they would a television episode, reading the 90-page game document aloud, technical material and all. “That really brings it to life, and you know what you’re getting,” Mr. Scull said.

A Nickelodeon rival, Disney Junior, has taken a less integrated approach to apps, developing television shows first and apps later to expand on the content, said Albert Cheng, executive vice president for digital media at the Disney/ABC Television Group.

The free Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Road Rally Appisode, released in May, is a repurposed version of an episode of the “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” television program, reconfigured to be highly interactive.

It proved so popular that “we definitely feel there’s something here we want to invest in,” Mr. Cheng said.

Although the app had educational elements, it was not intended as such. The sprawling Walt Disney Company has published educational apps through other units, however.

Since releasing its first app three years ago, Sesame Workshop has added more than three dozen, including Elmo Loves 123s, which was introduced Dec. 10 and draws on new research for developers and parents that Sesame plans to release this week. App users, Mr. Chambers said, tend to come back regularly, a loyalty that executives have noted as they consider future expansion in the category.

The rush to apps is changing the development process for PBS, which will no longer develop television-only shows, Ms. Rotenberg said. PBS’s newest property, “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood,” came out as an app — already the company’s third best-selling — the day of the television premiere in September.

Ms. Rotenberg said her team had “sent away” a number of producers who came to PBS with ideas for television shows with no thought-out mobile component, telling them, “ ‘Come back when you have a plan.’ ”

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Blast Kills 10 Girls in Eastern Afghanistan; Car Bomber Targets Kabul

Parwiz/Reuters

Afghan villagers gathered around the bodies of girls who were killed by an explosion on Monday.

KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide bomber driving a car packed with explosives targeted the compound of a private military contractor on the eastern outskirts of Kabul on Monday, killing at least one person and injuring at least 15 others, including foreigners, the police said.

In a separate episode, 10 girls were killed in a rural district of eastern Afghanistan on Monday when a roadside bomb exploded while they were collecting firewood, the Afghan police said. The office of the governor of Nangarhar Province said the girls were all between 9 and 11 years old. The Ministry of Education said some were as young as 6.

The Kabul explosion sent a large plume of smoke above the capital on the Jalalabad road, a main thoroughfare leading east out of the city lined with shops, yards and industrial units.

The target was a company called Contrack International, said Gen. Mohammed Dawood Amin, Kabul’s deputy chief of police. Officials said Contrack was a construction maintenance company that provided logistics services for the Afghan Army and police and NATO coalition bases.

“There was a blast, a boom and a wall fell down,” said Roheen Fedai, 19, who said he worked in the company’s call center. Shortly after the blast, he was wandering close to the compound with his hand in a bandage and blood on his face from an eye injury.

The car exploded in a small lane between the company and another compound housing a carton-making factory, blasting down walls and destroying a two-story office.

Barialyia, a security official for Contrack, said the company’s country director was wounded in the explosion. He said five American and South African citizens were among the injured.

Mr. Fedai said Contrack was an American-owned supplier to the Afghan military. Officials here also said the company was American-owned, but the company could not be reached to confirm this or other details about the attack. Its Web site says its headquarters are in McLean, Va., and shows that it has provided services for the United States military in the past.

The compound is close to a NATO base, Camp Phoenix, and other NATO installations. The Taliban claimed responsibility, but a coalition spokesman in Kabul, Lt. Col. Hagen Messer, said that the attack did not affect the NATO bases, and that there were no coalition casualties.

In the blast in eastern Afghanistan, Hazarat Hussain Masharaqiwal, a spokesman for the police chief of Nangarhar Province, said that the children discovered the unexploded bomb near their village, and that it went off when they hit it with an ax. The explosion also wounded a boy who was with them.

The local police said the bomb probably dated from the civil war or even the Soviet occupation of the country.

The United States-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan said the explosion was caused by the accidental triggering of an old land mine, quoting the governor of Chaparhar District in Nangarhar Province.

In a statement, Gen. John R. Allen, the commander of American and international forces in Afghanistan, said he was saddened by the girls’ deaths. “Over three decades of conflict, Afghanistan became one of the most heavily mined countries on earth,” he said.

Sharifullah Sahak contributed reporting from Kabul, and Khalid Alokozai from Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan.

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The Media Equation: Buffeted by the Web, but Now Riding It

When the consumer Web exploded in the mid-1990s, part of the promise was that it would transform careers and the concept of work. Remember the signs on telephone poles and banners all over the Internet? “Work at home and turn your computer into a cash register! Ask me how.” The next generation of Americans would be able to work on their own terms.

It didn’t turn out that way. If anything, digital technology has overwhelmed those who sought to master it. The Web may be a technological marvel, but to most people who use it for work, it functions like an old-fashioned hamster wheel, except at Internet speed.

Brian Lam was both a prince and a casualty of that realm. After interning at Wired, he became a blogger for Gizmodo, Gawker Media’s gadget blog. A trained Thai boxer, he focused his aggression on cranking out enough copy to increase the site’s traffic, to 180 million page views from 13 million in the six years he was there.

He broke news, sent shrapnel into many subject areas with provocative, opinionated copy and was part of the notorious pilfered iPhone 4 story that had law enforcement officials breaking down doors on Apple’s behalf. I saw Mr. Lam on occasional trips to San Francisco, and he crackled with jumpy digital energy.

And then, he burned out at age 34. He loved the ocean, but his frantic digital existence meant his surfboard was gathering cobwebs. “I came to hate the Web, hated chasing the next post or rewriting other people’s posts just for the traffic,” he told me. “People shouldn’t live like robots.”

So he quit Gizmodo, and though he had several lucrative offers, he decided to do exactly nothing. He sold his car, rented out his house and eventually moved to Hawaii to chase surf and ponder the next thing.

This is the point in the story where we generally find out that the techie is now a wood carver, or an oboe player.

But leopards don’t change their spots, and they certainly don’t turn into unicorns. An accomplished technologist and writer, Mr. Lam worked to come up with a business that he could command instead of the other way around.

The problem is that these days, ad-supported media business models all depend on scale, because rates go lower every day. Success in Web media generally requires constant posting to build a big audience. Mr. Lam knew where that led.

With friends — including Brian X. Chen, who now works at The New York Times — he came up with his own version of a gadget blog. But instead of chasing down every tidbit of tech news, he built The Wirecutter, a recommendation site that posts four to eight updates a month — not a day — and began publishing in partnership with The Awl, a federation of blogs founded by two other veterans of Gawker Media, Choire Sicha and Alex Balk.

While there are many technology sites that evaluate and compare products, usually burying their assessments in a tsunami of other posts, Mr. Lam and his staff of freelancers decided to rely on deep examinations of specific product categories.

Using expert opinions, aggregated reviews and personal research, they recommend a single product in each category. There are no complicated rankings or deep analytics on the entire category. If you want new earphones or a robot vacuum, The Wirecutter will recommend The One and leave it at that.

“I was tired of doing posts that were obsolete three hours after I wrote them,” Mr. Lam said. “I wanted evergreen content that didn’t have to be updated constantly in order to hunt traffic. I wanted to publish things that were useful.”

He bootstrapped the site, spurning outside investment. “If you take the money, you have to pony up in terms of scale, and I don’t want to do that,” he said.

The clean, simple interface, without the clutter of news, is a tiny business; it has fewer than 350,000 unique visitors a month at a time when ad buyers are not much interested in anything less than 20 million.

But The Wirecutter is not really in the ad business. The vast majority of its revenue comes from fees paid by affiliates, mostly Amazon, for referrals to their sites. As advertising rates continue to tumble, affiliate fees could end up underwriting more and more media businesses.

“Brian’s insight is that in a world of loudest and fastest, he has turned it down, doing it slow and doing it right,” Mr. Sicha said. “And by being consumer facing, he doesn’t have to have monster numbers. The people come ready to buy.”

In fact, somewhere between 6 and 11 percent of its visitors click on links, a rate that would make ad sellers drool.

Mr. Lam hardly invented the model. The Web is full of mom-and-pop shops that live on referral fees for everything from pet supplies to camping gear. Many companies also pay for referrals — eBay, Half.com, even retailers like Gap and Old Navy. A business that used to be mired in spam is now becoming far more legitimate.

For small businesses like Wirecutter, it’s risky to rely so much on a single company, but Amazon seems disinclined to mess with its very successful model.

“We have been working hard to give publishers of all sizes the tools to work with Amazon,” said Steve Shure, Amazon’s vice president for worldwide marketing.

But it’s not just the little guys. Hearst’s Good Housekeeping has commerce links to Amazon, and Gawker Media, Mr. Lam’s old employer, is building affiliate revenue and other nonadvertising revenue into a seven-figure business by next year. In a sense, it’s back to the future, the days of the Whole Earth Catalog and its compendium of splendid things. Kevin Kelly, its former editor and publisher and now “senior maverick” at Wired, has a site called Cool Tools that will be observing its 10th anniversary.

“Affiliate income is six times as much as advertising by now,” Mr. Kelly said in a phone call, describing the revenue at Cool Tools. “Part of what is attractive about our site and Brian’s is that it is a distillation, a trusted friend. You don’t find out everything, just what you need to know.”

Mr. Lam’s revenue is low, about $50,000 a month, but it’s enough to pay his freelancers, invest in the site and keep him in surfboards. And now he actually has time to ride them.

In that sense, Mr. Lam is living out that initial dream of the Web: working from home, working with friends, making something that saves others time and money.

“I don’t want to get too hippie about it, but surf is bad when it all comes in one big lump,” he said. “Our traffic is spaced out in manageable waves, a set that we will grow over time. And even if it doesn’t, that’s fine by me.”

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

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Dr. William F. House, Inventor of Cochlear Implant, Dies

Dr. William F. House, a medical researcher who braved skepticism to invent the cochlear implant, an electronic device considered to be the first to restore a human sense, died on Dec. 7 at his home in Aurora, Ore. He was 89.

The cause was metastatic melanoma, his daughter, Karen House, said.

Dr. House pushed against conventional thinking throughout his career. Over the objections of some, he introduced the surgical microscope to ear surgery. Tackling a form of vertigo that doctors had believed was psychosomatic, he developed a surgical procedure that enabled the first American in space to travel to the moon. Peering at the bones of the inner ear, he found enrapturing beauty.

Even after his ear-implant device had largely been supplanted by more sophisticated, and more expensive, devices, Dr. House remained convinced of his own version’s utility and advocated that it be used to help the world’s poor.

Today, more than 200,000 people in the world have inner-ear implants, a third of them in the United States. A majority of young deaf children receive them, and most people with the implants learn to understand speech with no visual help.

Hearing aids amplify sound to help the hearing-impaired. But many deaf people cannot hear at all because sound cannot be transmitted to their brains, however much it is amplified. This is because the delicate hair cells that line the cochlea, the liquid-filled spiral cavity of the inner ear, are damaged. When healthy, these hairs — more than 15,000 altogether — translate mechanical vibrations produced by sound into electrical signals and deliver them to the auditory nerve.

Dr. House’s cochlear implant electronically translated sound into mechanical vibrations. His initial device, implanted in 1961, was eventually rejected by the body. But after refining its materials, he created a long-lasting version and implanted it in 1969.

More than a decade would pass before the Food and Drug Administration approved the cochlear implant, but when it did, in 1984, Mark Novitch, the agency’s deputy commissioner, said, “For the first time a device can, to a degree, replace an organ of the human senses.”

One of Dr. House’s early implant patients, from an experimental trial, wrote to him in 1981 saying, “I no longer live in a world of soundless movement and voiceless faces.”

But for 27 years, Dr. House had faced stern opposition while he was developing the device. Doctors and scientists said it would not work, or not work very well, calling it a cruel hoax on people desperate to hear. Some said he was motivated by the prospect of financial gain. Some criticized him for experimenting on human subjects. Some advocates for the deaf said the device deprived its users of the dignity of their deafness without fully integrating them into the hearing world.

Even when the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology endorsed implants in 1977, it specifically denounced Dr. House’s version. It recommended more complicated versions, which were then under development and later became the standard.

But his work is broadly viewed as having sped the development of implants and enlarged understanding of the inner ear. Jack Urban, an aerospace engineer, helped develop the surgical microscope as well as mechanical and electronic aspects of the House implant.

Karl White, founding director of the National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management, said in an interview that it would have taken a decade longer to invent the cochlear implant without Dr. House’s contributions. He called him “a giant in the field.”

After embracing the use of the microscope in ear surgery, Dr. House developed procedures — radical for their time — for removing tumors from the back portion of the brain without causing facial paralysis; they cut the death rate from the surgery to less than 1 percent from 40 percent.

He also developed the first surgical treatment for Meniere’s disease, which involves debilitating vertigo and had been viewed as a psychosomatic condition. His procedure cured the astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. of the disease, clearing him to command the Apollo 14 mission to the moon in 1971. In 1961, Shepard had become the first American launched into space.

In presenting Dr. House with an award in 1995, the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation said, “He has developed more new concepts in otology than almost any other single person in history.”

William Fouts House was born in Kansas City, Mo., on Dec. 1, 1923. When he was 3 his family moved to Whittier, Calif., where he grew up on a ranch. He did pre-dental studies at Whittier College and the University of Southern California, and earned a doctorate in dentistry at the University of California, Berkeley. After serving his required two years in the Navy — and filling the requisite 300 cavities a month — he went back to U.S.C. to pursue an interest in oral surgery. He earned his medical degree in 1953. After a residency at Los Angeles County Hospital, he joined the Los Angeles Foundation of Otology, a nonprofit research institution founded by his brother, Howard. Today it is called the House Research Institute.

Many at the time thought ear surgery was a declining field because of the effectiveness of antibiotics in dealing with ear maladies. But Dr. House saw antibiotics as enabling more sophisticated surgery by diminishing the threat of infection.

When his brother returned from West Germany with a surgical microscope, Dr. House saw its potential and adopted it for ear surgery; he is credited with introducing the device to the field. But again there was resistance. As Dr. House wrote in his memoir, “The Struggles of a Medical Innovator: Cochlear Implants and Other Ear Surgeries” (2011), some eye doctors initially criticized his use of a microscope in surgery as reckless and unnecessary for a surgeon with good eyesight.

Dr. House also used the microscope as a research tool. One night a week he would take one to a morgue for use in dissecting ears to gain insights that might lead to new surgical procedures. His initial reaction, he said, was how beautiful the bones seemed; he compared the experience to one’s first view of the Grand Canyon. His wife, the former June Stendhal, a nurse, often helped.

She died in 2008 after 64 years of marriage. In addition to his daughter, Dr. House is survived by a son, David; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

The implant Dr. House invented used a single channel to deliver information to the hearing system, as opposed to the multiple channels of competing models. The 3M Company, the original licensee of the House implant, sold its rights to another company, the Cochlear Corporation, in 1989. Cochlear later abandoned his design in favor of the multichannel version.

But Dr. House continued to fight for his single-electrode approach, saying it was far cheaper, and offered voluminous material as evidence of its efficacy. He had hoped to resume production of it and make it available to the poor around the world.

Neither the institute nor Dr. House made any money on the implant. He never sought a patent on any of his inventions, he said, because he did not want to restrict other researchers. A nephew, Dr. John House, the current president of the House institute, said his uncle had made the deal to license it to the 3M Company not for profit but simply to get it built by a reputable manufacturer.

Reflecting on his business decisions in his memoir, Dr. House acknowledged, “I might be a little richer today.”

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Dr. William F. House, Inventor of Cochlear Implant, Dies

Dr. William F. House, a medical researcher who braved skepticism to invent the cochlear implant, an electronic device considered to be the first to restore a human sense, died on Dec. 7 at his home in Aurora, Ore. He was 89.

The cause was metastatic melanoma, his daughter, Karen House, said.

Dr. House pushed against conventional thinking throughout his career. Over the objections of some, he introduced the surgical microscope to ear surgery. Tackling a form of vertigo that doctors had believed was psychosomatic, he developed a surgical procedure that enabled the first American in space to travel to the moon. Peering at the bones of the inner ear, he found enrapturing beauty.

Even after his ear-implant device had largely been supplanted by more sophisticated, and more expensive, devices, Dr. House remained convinced of his own version’s utility and advocated that it be used to help the world’s poor.

Today, more than 200,000 people in the world have inner-ear implants, a third of them in the United States. A majority of young deaf children receive them, and most people with the implants learn to understand speech with no visual help.

Hearing aids amplify sound to help the hearing-impaired. But many deaf people cannot hear at all because sound cannot be transmitted to their brains, however much it is amplified. This is because the delicate hair cells that line the cochlea, the liquid-filled spiral cavity of the inner ear, are damaged. When healthy, these hairs — more than 15,000 altogether — translate mechanical vibrations produced by sound into electrical signals and deliver them to the auditory nerve.

Dr. House’s cochlear implant electronically translated sound into mechanical vibrations. His initial device, implanted in 1961, was eventually rejected by the body. But after refining its materials, he created a long-lasting version and implanted it in 1969.

More than a decade would pass before the Food and Drug Administration approved the cochlear implant, but when it did, in 1984, Mark Novitch, the agency’s deputy commissioner, said, “For the first time a device can, to a degree, replace an organ of the human senses.”

One of Dr. House’s early implant patients, from an experimental trial, wrote to him in 1981 saying, “I no longer live in a world of soundless movement and voiceless faces.”

But for 27 years, Dr. House had faced stern opposition while he was developing the device. Doctors and scientists said it would not work, or not work very well, calling it a cruel hoax on people desperate to hear. Some said he was motivated by the prospect of financial gain. Some criticized him for experimenting on human subjects. Some advocates for the deaf said the device deprived its users of the dignity of their deafness without fully integrating them into the hearing world.

Even when the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology endorsed implants in 1977, it specifically denounced Dr. House’s version. It recommended more complicated versions, which were then under development and later became the standard.

But his work is broadly viewed as having sped the development of implants and enlarged understanding of the inner ear. Jack Urban, an aerospace engineer, helped develop the surgical microscope as well as mechanical and electronic aspects of the House implant.

Karl White, founding director of the National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management, said in an interview that it would have taken a decade longer to invent the cochlear implant without Dr. House’s contributions. He called him “a giant in the field.”

After embracing the use of the microscope in ear surgery, Dr. House developed procedures — radical for their time — for removing tumors from the back portion of the brain without causing facial paralysis; they cut the death rate from the surgery to less than 1 percent from 40 percent.

He also developed the first surgical treatment for Meniere’s disease, which involves debilitating vertigo and had been viewed as a psychosomatic condition. His procedure cured the astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. of the disease, clearing him to command the Apollo 14 mission to the moon in 1971. In 1961, Shepard had become the first American launched into space.

In presenting Dr. House with an award in 1995, the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation said, “He has developed more new concepts in otology than almost any other single person in history.”

William Fouts House was born in Kansas City, Mo., on Dec. 1, 1923. When he was 3 his family moved to Whittier, Calif., where he grew up on a ranch. He did pre-dental studies at Whittier College and the University of Southern California, and earned a doctorate in dentistry at the University of California, Berkeley. After serving his required two years in the Navy — and filling the requisite 300 cavities a month — he went back to U.S.C. to pursue an interest in oral surgery. He earned his medical degree in 1953. After a residency at Los Angeles County Hospital, he joined the Los Angeles Foundation of Otology, a nonprofit research institution founded by his brother, Howard. Today it is called the House Research Institute.

Many at the time thought ear surgery was a declining field because of the effectiveness of antibiotics in dealing with ear maladies. But Dr. House saw antibiotics as enabling more sophisticated surgery by diminishing the threat of infection.

When his brother returned from West Germany with a surgical microscope, Dr. House saw its potential and adopted it for ear surgery; he is credited with introducing the device to the field. But again there was resistance. As Dr. House wrote in his memoir, “The Struggles of a Medical Innovator: Cochlear Implants and Other Ear Surgeries” (2011), some eye doctors initially criticized his use of a microscope in surgery as reckless and unnecessary for a surgeon with good eyesight.

Dr. House also used the microscope as a research tool. One night a week he would take one to a morgue for use in dissecting ears to gain insights that might lead to new surgical procedures. His initial reaction, he said, was how beautiful the bones seemed; he compared the experience to one’s first view of the Grand Canyon. His wife, the former June Stendhal, a nurse, often helped.

She died in 2008 after 64 years of marriage. In addition to his daughter, Dr. House is survived by a son, David; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

The implant Dr. House invented used a single channel to deliver information to the hearing system, as opposed to the multiple channels of competing models. The 3M Company, the original licensee of the House implant, sold its rights to another company, the Cochlear Corporation, in 1989. Cochlear later abandoned his design in favor of the multichannel version.

But Dr. House continued to fight for his single-electrode approach, saying it was far cheaper, and offered voluminous material as evidence of its efficacy. He had hoped to resume production of it and make it available to the poor around the world.

Neither the institute nor Dr. House made any money on the implant. He never sought a patent on any of his inventions, he said, because he did not want to restrict other researchers. A nephew, Dr. John House, the current president of the House institute, said his uncle had made the deal to license it to the 3M Company not for profit but simply to get it built by a reputable manufacturer.

Reflecting on his business decisions in his memoir, Dr. House acknowledged, “I might be a little richer today.”

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Disruptions: Disruptions: Instagram Testimony Doesn't Add Up

SAN FRANCISCO — On a late August morning, Kevin Systrom, chief executive of Instagram, took an oath before testifying at a hearing of the California Corporations Department, which sought to determine if Facebook’s acquisition of the photo sharing service was in the best interest of Instagram investors.

When asked if his company had received any offers besides Facebook’s at the time of the negotiations, Mr. Systrom replied, “No, we never received any offers,” according to transcripts of the hearings. He went on to say Instagram had “talked to other parties, but never received any formal offers from anybody else.”

Ivan V. Griswold, a lawyer for the state regulators, asked again: “Immediately before the negotiations, did you receive any offers from invest — .” Before he could finish his question, the transcripts show, Mr. Systrom cut him off.

“We never received any formal offers or term sheets,” Mr. Systrom said. “No.”

Yet the accounts of several people close to Twitter and Facebook, and documents reviewed by The New York Times, contradict the statements he made under penalty of perjury.

Mr. Systrom and Mike Krieger, the other founder of Instagram, held several meetings as late as March with top Twitter executives, according to people on both sides of the negotiations, who requested anonymity because the talks were supposed to be private and because they were concerned about legal repercussions. These people said the two sides had verbally agreed just weeks earlier on a price for Instagram of $525 million in cash and Twitter shares.

Mr. Systrom told Twitter on March 20 that he and Mr. Krieger had thought about the offer and had decided to “remain independent.” Less than three weeks later, Twitter found out, along with the rest of the world, that Instagram had agreed to be acquired by Facebook in a $1 billion deal negotiated personally by Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.

The people familiar with the negotiations said Twitter executives were shocked that they had not been given an opportunity to present a counteroffer. They said Twitter was prepared to make higher offers.

Facebook and Mr. Systrom declined to comment about the statements made to regulators or the talks with Twitter. Gabriel Stricker, a Twitter spokesman, also declined to comment.

Although it might seem unimportant whether wealthy investors made a few million dollars less than they could have, those investors often represent funds that include workers’ pensions and mutual funds. The case could also be seen as another example of a large tech company’s sidestepping regulators.

Statements made by other people involved in the Instagram deal don’t add up, either. When Facebook submitted its applications to California regulators, its general counsel, Ted Ullyot, wrote that although the board had considered possible alternatives, there was a “lack of interest in acquiring the company expressed by other potential acquirers of the company.” Through a spokesman, Facebook declined to comment.

Mark Leyes, director of communications for the Corporations Department, said the department — which is supposed to protect consumers and investors from self-dealing in financial transactions — had “not received any complaints or protests of our original fairness hearing proceedings in the Facebook/Instagram acquisition.”

In general, said Eric Talley, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “if there is sworn testimony, there are perjury risks.” Also, he added, “there are fraud risks in which an inaccurate statement to your investors could violate antifraud laws at both the state or federal level.”

Dr. Talley said there were many reasons people might try to hide information from investors, including “deal sweeteners,” in which someone might be allowed to remain chief executive of a company or be given higher cash compensation.

Mr. Systrom, who previously worked on mergers and acquisitions at Google, was careful about his interactions with Twitter from the start. He asked to meet in restaurants around San Francisco, rather than in either company’s office, according to people briefed on the talks. When he was handed the term sheet by a Twitter employee, a nonbinding document outlining the terms of a proposed acquisition, he read it and then handed it back, asking Twitter executives to hold on to it over the weekend as he weighed the details, those people said.

It is possible investors would have been better off selling in an open auction, to Twitter or even to Google or Microsoft.

The deal with Facebook closed at $735 million in early September, after Facebook’s stock plunged because of investors’ fears that its revenue growth prospects were weak. Given that the privately traded Twitter is expected to make $1 billion in revenue next year, which would increase its valuation considerably, Instagram investors might have made millions of more dollars.

It is unclear why Facebook didn’t mention Twitter’s interest. A clue might be found in the company’s amended S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, outlining details of the Instagram acquisition: it used language often reserved for antitrust cases.

The wording in the updated S-1 filing, which included a termination fee of 20 percent if the deal fell through, “suggests that there really was some concern about antitrust clearance from the F.T.C.,” Dr. Talley said, referring to the Federal Trade Commission. “These antitrust questions would not have been raised if Instagram was selling to Twitter or Google.”

An F.T.C. spokesman, Mitchell J. Katz, declined to comment.

Facebook has tangled with regulators before. What the company does with its customers’ data attracted the attention of the F.T.C., which accused it last year of “unfair and deceptive” practices. The agency’s settlement with the company required Facebook to respect its users’ privacy wishes and to submit to regular privacy audits for 20 years.

Facebook has also sparred with the S.E.C. over its depiction of its mobile strategy in its filing to go public.

At the end of the Corporations Department hearing, regulators asked Mr. Systrom a third time about other offers: if there had been “any other inquiries from third parties about a possible acquisition of Instagram” after the Facebook deal was announced. Although Twitter executives had since tried to contact Mr. Systrom, he replied, “I and the board have not received any.”

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

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Liberal Democratic Party Returns to Power in Japan

Christopher Jue/European Pressphoto Agency

Japanese poll workers counted ballots at a polling station in Tokyo during parliamentary elections on Sunday.

TOKYO — Japan’s voters handed a landslide victory to the Liberal Democratic Party in parliamentary elections on Sunday, giving power back to the conservative party that had governed Japan for decades until a historic defeat three years ago.

In a chaotic election crowded with new parties making sweeping promises, from abolishing nuclear power after the disaster at Fukushima to creating an American-style federal system, the Liberal Democrats prevailed with their less radical vision of reviving the recession-bound economy and standing up to an increasingly assertive China. The win was a dramatic comeback for the party that built postwar Japan, but was ejected from power in 2009 after failing to end two decades of social and economic stagnation.

A victory all but ensures that the Liberal Democratic leader, Shinzo Abe, a former prime minister who is one Japan’s most outspoken nationalists, will be able to form a government with himself as prime minister.

However, many Japanese saw Sunday’s vote not as a weakening of Japan’s desire for change, or a swing to the anti-Chinese right, but as a rebuke of the incumbent Democrats, who had swept aside the Liberal Democrats with bold vows to overhaul Japan’s sclerotic postwar order, only to disappoint voters by failing to deliver. Mr. Abe acknowledged as much, saying that his party had simply ridden a wave of public disgust in the failures of his opponents.

“We recognize that this was not a restoration of confidence in the Liberal Democratic Party, but a rejection of three years of incompetent rule by the Democratic Party,” Mr. Abe told reporters on Sunday.

In the powerful lower house, the Liberal Democrats held a commanding lead, winning 266 of the 400 seats that had been decided. NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster, was forecasting that the Liberal Democrats could win more than 300 of the 480 seats up for grabs, which would almost mirror the results in 2009, when the Democrats won 308 seats. The Democrats won only 44 of the seats that had been decided, putting them in a dead heat for a distant second place with the news Japan Restoration Party, which was started by Osaka’s popular mayor. It was a crushing defeat for a party whose victory three years ago was heralded as the start of a vigorous two-party democracy.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda resigned as head of the Democratic Party to take responsibility for the loss, despite holding onto to his own seat in Chiba, outside Tokyo.

“We failed to meet the people’s hopes after the change of government three years and four months ago,” Mr. Noda told reporters.

In a sign of how far the pendulum had swung against the incumbents, former Prime Minister Naoto Kan was fighting to keep his seat from an unknown Liberal Democratic challenger in a contest that remained too close to call. Other prominent members also lost their seats in what was increasingly looking like a rout.

“We tried the Democratic Party for three years, and it was a total disaster,” said Hideyuki Takizawa, a 52-year-old stockbroker at a polling station in the Tokyo suburb of Kawagoe. Mr. Takizawa said he had voted for the Democrats in the last election but had opted for the Liberal Democrats this time. “I have higher hopes now in the Liberal Democratic Party, especially in foreign affairs,” he said.

On declaring victory, Mr. Abe quickly promised to pass a massive spending bill, and said stimulating the faltering economy and ending deflation were his top priorities. He also promised help for the nation’s beleaguered export sector including more aggressive steps to drive down the yen and make Japanese products cheaper abroad.

There had been concerns that the hawkish Mr. Abe might try to fan Japanese anxieties over China’s growing strength, particularly that nation’s increasingly assertive claims to disputed islands in the East China Sea known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in Chinese. But Mr. Abe promised to move quickly to improve ties with China, Japan’s largest trading partner.

Makiko Inoue in Kawagoe, Japan, contributed reporting.

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