Funding that stimulus package just got ever-so-slightly easier -- Hitachi is the latest company to fess up to LCD price fixing, and as part of its deal with the US Department of Justice, it's paying a $31m fine. The company has specifically admitted to fixing the prices on panels sold to Dell from 2001 to 2004, and while no Hitachi execs are due to join their comrades from LG and Chungwha Picture Tubes just yet, we'd encourage them to book their vacations now, since the DOJ seems like it's staying on the warpath.

"Settlement" and "needy schools" aren't two things that most companies would like to see in a press release, but that's exactly what AT&T is dealing with at the moment after it has paid out $8.2 million to settle a dispute involving the E-Rate program, which uses funds collected from phone customers to pay for hardware and connectivity service fees for schools and libraries. According to the Department of Justice, AT&T (or, more specifically, AT&T Technical Services Corp.) allegedly not only engaged in non-competitive bidding practices for E-Rate contracts, but claimed and received E-rate funds for goods and services that weren't eligible for the program, and over-billed the E-Rate program for some of the services it provided. This resolution is also apparently specifically a result of a federal investigation into fraud and anti-competitive conduct in the E-Rate program in Indiana which, it seems, is still ongoing.

As you may recall, one of the requirements that Verizon had to agree with in order to complete its little acquisition of Alltel was that it must offload some $3 billion in wireless assets to avoid becoming too monolithic, and it looks like there's already a number of bidders angling for a piece of the action. The biggest of those, by far, is AT&T, which is apparently looking to pick up as big a chunk of the assets as it is able to and, according to The Wall Street Journal, it's in a good position to do just that. Other interested parties reportedly include a joint bid from the Carlyle Group and Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts & Co, a separate bid from Providence Equity Partners LLC, and at least one unnamed cable provider. Any of those bids, however, would still be subject to approval by the Department of Justice, with AT&T sure to draw the most scrutiny of the lot.

[Via The Wall Street Journal]

Protip, if you were involved in LCD price fixing between 2001 - 2006, just turn yourself in because the U.S. Department of Justice is still coming. To the surprise of anyone who thought the last couple months of guilty pleas and fines were the end, a DOJ statement today spells out indictments returned by a federal grand jury in San Francisco against two former Chungwha Picture Tube execs and one from LG Display. All the legal details in the case against Cheng Yuan Lin, Wen Jun Cheng and Duk Mo Koo are in the statement beyond the read link, but hey man, we're still waiting on our refunds.

[Via Reuters]

Sure, most of the Microsoft antitrust action is going down in Europe nowadays, but Uncle Sam's lingering judgment against Redmond is still kicking around -- Judge Colleen Kollar Kotelly (remember her?) just issued a ruling extending the consent decree against Microsoft for another two years. The judge said that the company has been extremely cooperative with the government thus far, but that "the extreme and unforeseen delay" in acquiring technical documentation from Bill and the boys requires that monitoring continue. That pretty much leaves things at the status quo, although we're not exactly holding our breath for anything to change once the consent judgment actually does expire.

As the two giants edge closer onto each of their respective core markets, the tension gets more pronounced: just last week Google pointed to the integration of search into Windows Vista, claiming to the Dept. of Justice that it discourages people from using other solutions (like Google's Desktop Search) and violates the company's agreement with the Government. This week, Steve Ballmer called the complaint "baseless," and said that the company is in complete compliance with the agreements it has with the U.S. Government. In any case, Microsoft is fighting a losing battle, with Google able to use the DOJ as a router for its claims, and Microsoft then forced to defend itself on two fronts. Maybe it might be a good time for Microsoft to consider a policy of opening its platforms a little bit: it's not like the opponent (this time around) is going to go away anytime soon.

C'mon Google, you can't seriously be upset that you can't get your search engine integrated into every piece of software known to man, right? Actually, it appears that the search giant can indeed bust out the whiner card on occasion, and it has apparently done just that in regard to the Vista Search that's built into Microsoft's latest OS. Reportedly, Google accused Microsoft of "designing Vista to discourage users from running its indexing and search software," and a company spokesman even went so far as to claim that Redmond's current approach "violates its agreement with the government and hurts consumers." Google's gripes start to grow legs when you consider just how difficult it is to actually disable or modify Vista's ingrained search tactics, and while Microsoft has supposedly stated that it is "committed to going the extra mile to resolve this issue," there doesn't look to be any timetables set for giving users the ability to choose just yet.

[Thanks, Dinraj P.]

Hoo boy, this could be a nasty one. You know how NVIDIA and AMD got slapped with those federal subpoenas a week ago? At the time, no one was sure what the DoJ was getting at, but apparently it wasn't just to look at the pretty graphics these firms churn out. Turns out NVIDIA, AMD and ATI have been accused of some antitrust shenanigans, with the DoJ alleging the firms "have engaged in a contract combination, trust or conspiracy, the effect of which was to raise the prices at which they sold graphics processing units and cards to artificially inflated levels." We're not so sure that the main argument -- that graphics card prices are almost always the same, reaching around $500 in the high end -- will hold a lot of water, given the specs pumping nature of the graphics card biz, but allegations of secret meetings between graphics card execs to discuss pricing could be a bit more damning. The DoJ is requesting documents as far back as 1990, so this could get messy. Intel has managed to steer clear of this whole cartel fiasco, thanks to its lack of a discrete graphics biz, but we're sure they're totally jealous right now -- perhaps they'll buy NVIDIA just to join in on the fun.

[Thanks, Mack S.]

While we figured the NYPD could just install Magic Message Mirrors in every mafia hotspot in the Manhattan area, the Genovese family has proven quite the eagle-eyed bunch when it comes to spotting wiretaps, tailing, and other (failed) attempts of bugging their conversations. In order to tap into critical conversations by known mafioso and other, less glamorous criminals, police are utilizing a "roving bug" technique which remotely activates the microphone of a crime lord's cellie, giving the boys in blue convenient access to their secret agenda(s). The presumably controversial tapping was recently approved by top US DoJ officials "for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques." Software hacks (and actual phones, too) have previously allowed such dodgy eavesdropping to occur, with "Nextel, Samsung, and Motorola" handsets proving particularly vulnerable, but this widespread approach in tracking down criminal conversations could hopefully pinpoint future targets where prior attempts failed. Of course, if mafia members hit the internet every now and then, they're probably removing those batteries right about now anyway.

You can color us ignorant here, but we sort of figured that after all those regulatory hoops AMD jumped through in the process of getting approval for its ATI acquisition, the DOJ would've wrapped up any antitrust reservations it might have before the $5.4 billion deal went down. But for whatever reason, the Justice Department picked late Thursday to slap AMD with a federal subpoena regarding an investigation into possible antitrust violations in the graphics card biz. As if this wasn't weird enough, we just got word that NVIDIA has been slapped with a similar subpoena, with just as little explanation as to why. Shares are down for each company, both of which hold about 25 percent of the graphics card market, with Intel managing the rest. Intel apparently hasn't received a subpoena yet, but a spokesman said he was checking with the company lawyers just to make sure. According to analyst Nicholas Aberle, "It's a bit of a headscratcher. I don't know exactly what the angle is from the DOJ." We're just as much in the dark, but we'll definitely be keeping an eye on the situation.

Read - AMD Receives Federal Subpoena
Read - AMD, NVIDIA hit by graphics chip probe

Things weren't looking so great already for those skeezy SRAM price-fixers, but now it looks like they'll have a class action lawsuit to worry about on top of all that DOJ heat they're currently facing. A certain Kenneth Bagwell of Michigan started up the class action suit, claiming the defendants conspired to "fix, maintain or stabilize prices and to allocate markets for the sale of SRAM." And Kenneth isn't screwing around. He's managed to name just about every SRAM manufacturer under the sun as in cahoots: Alliance, Cypress, Etron, GSI, Hitachi, Hynix, Integrated Silicon Solution, Micron, Crucial, Mitsubishi, NEC, Renesas, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, Winbond, Fujitsu, IBM, Seiko Epson, Epson, Sharp and ST Microelectronics are all named as defendants of his own personal cash-in on this debacle. Mr. Bagwell already brought his suit to a Michigan district court, so now we just watch and wait for it all to hit the fan -- as if it hadn't already.

These kids just can't catch a break. The folks at Sony, fresh off their battery debacle, and struggling to make any sort of relevant quantity for next month's PS3 launch, are being probed by the US Justice Department's antitrust division in regards to the company's SRAM biz. Sony, which did $27.7 million worth of SRAM business last year, says it "intends to cooperate fully with the DOJ in what appears to be an industry-wide inquiry," but that's about all the info we've got so far. Apparently US-based Cypress Semiconductor is also under investigation for similar SRAM doings, and Mitsubishi is even in some retroactive trouble, but there's no word if the situation is similar to the price-fixing scandal that Samsung and others got busted for earlier this year. We'll be keeping an eye on this investigation as it develops. It seems unlikely that any sort of accusations that could come out of this could do much damage to Sony's relatively small share in the industry, but we really wouldn't mind a feel-good puff piece on Sony now and then -- you know, just for a change of pace.

It's been several years since Mitsubishi bailed out of the crowded SRAM business, but apparently the US Department of Justice still has a bone to pick with the mega corporation. After handing off its SRAM operations to Renesas -- "a joint venture founded by Mitsubishi and Hitachi" in 2003 -- the firm had seemingly bypassed the barrage of DOJ inquisitions which pinned Samsung with a $300 million fine and led the Korean FTC to examine the uber-low NAND memory prices that only Apple seemed to be receiving. Now the anti-trust agency has tagged its third victim regarding the US SRAM market, but has yet to explain what issue(s) piqued their interest. Mitsubishi, however, is seemingly already hanging its head in shame, as it made statements insinuating that unforeseen penalties could be faced, and noted that the probe could lead to "a possible adverse affect on the company's future business performance." While we aren't exactly sure what skeletons may still be in Mitsu's closet, we've certainly been forewarned that potentially harmful discoveries could be imminent.