Senator wants Sun's federal contract cancelled
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(InfoWorld) - A U.S. senator has called for the U.S. government to cancel an ongoing purchasing contract with Sun Microsystems Inc., but the company says Senator Chuck Grassley's request is based on bad information. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has repeatedly criticized Sun for allegedly overcharging government agencies while on a government-wide purchasing schedule at the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) called a multiple award contract. The GSA's inspector general has accused Sun of overcharging government agencies by more than US$25 million in contracts dating back to June 1997. Grassley, in a letter to the GSA last Friday, asked the agency to cancel Sun's contract. Grassley accused the company of not complying with information requests from the GSA's contracting officer and inspector general. The information was necessary for an audit requested by Grassley, the senator said. "I do not understand why Sun would refuse to cooperate fully with this audit," Grassley wrote to GSA Administrator Lurita Doan. "Why is Sun apparently afraid to open its books for inspection? It makes me wonder: Does Sun have something to hide?" Sun, in a statement released late Monday, said Grassley is "misled" about the company's cooperation with inspectors. The company has responded to "multiple demands" from the inspector general and other agencies, the company said. "Ironically, in the same week the senator accused us of not producing sufficient information [inspector general] officials canceled a meeting to discuss these matters because our document production was so voluminous that they needed additional time to review," Sun said. "We have produced tens of thousands of documents, plus transactional data covering billions of dollars in sales, while being subjected to deadlines that appear to be designed to ensure the demands cannot be met." The questions about Sun's contracts surfaced in September 2004, when the GSA Office of Inspector General received a hotline complaint about the company's pricing, according to March congressional testimony from Inspector General Brian Miller. In July 2005, the GSA told Sun resellers the agency was cancelling Sun's contract, because the company was allegedly charging government customers more than some commercial customers. But Sun avoided a cancellation by agreeing to drop some prices. Sun remains a defendant inÂ an Arkansas lawsuit alleging a multimillion-dollar kickback scheme involving IT vendors'Â work on numerous U.S. government contracts. Sun has accused the GSA's Miller of being biased and prejudiced against the company. Part of the problem, the company says, stems from a conflict between Doan and Miller after Doan questioned the inspector general's auditing tactics. Miller has defended his actions, saying he's doing his job. "The president and Congress sent me here to GSA to root out fraud, waste and abuse and to ensure that GSA programs are run with efficiency, economy, and effectiveness," he said in his March testimony. Doan in August 2005 rushed to keep Sun on the GSA contract even though there were continuing questions about the company's pricing, Miller said in his testimony. Doan was worried GSA's IT contracting division "could be destroyed" without Sun participating, he said. Grassley, in his Friday letter, called on the GSA to give Sun 30 days to comply with audit requests and cancel the contract if the company did not comply. The GSA should follow the lead of its inspector general, who has called for Sun's contract to be cancelled, Grassley said. But Sun, in its statement, said Miller's reports on its contracts "are riddled with inaccuracies and conspicuous omissions of multiple know facts." Grassley and Miller have not attempted to compare Sun's contract to contracts by other IT vendors, the company said. "The only party who would be hurt by a cancellation of the Sun GSA contract is the American taxpayer," Sun said. "Our pricing is very often better than our competitors, and the contract offers the government extremely aggressive discounts and contractual protections." Â
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Idaho Senator Larry Craig is considering resigning, Republican officials said today, after days of public and private pressure.
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Two senators on Wednesday threatened  to introduce bipartisan legislation that would block the U.S.  Federal Communication Commission from acting quickly to ease  rules governing media ownership.
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Democratic Senate candidate Jim Webb has a television ad ready to air featuring praise from his late boss Ronald Reagan &#151; and Nancy Reagan called on him Friday to cancel it.
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The Federal Communications Commission chairman, Kevin J. Martin, has rejected a senatorâs request to delay a vote on a change in media-ownership rules.
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(InfoWorld) - U.S. senators questioned Thursday whether members of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission plan to enforce merger conditions that AT&T Inc. agreed to in its December acquisition of BellSouth Corp. Democratic members of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee questioned why FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate issued a joint statement while approving the merger saying the FCC couldn't broadly enforce some of AT&T's concessions. "What I find difficult to understand is that ... you said that you do not intend to stand by the deal that was reached," said Senator Daniel Inouye, the committee chairman and a Hawaii Democrat. Martin and Tate, both Republicans, had protested a net neutrality condition, preventing AT&T from giving priority transmission speeds to its own or its partners' Web content for at least two years. The net neutrality conditions "very well may cause greater problems than the speculative problems they seek to address," Martin and Tate said in the statement Dec. 29. Martin on Thursday said he intends to hold AT&T to the net neutrality agreement, but he doesn't plan to impose those standards on other broadband carriers. "Since [AT&T] volunteered to do that, we would enforce that," he said. "That does not mean we were changing our policy." Martin also suggested another part of the agreement setting out wholesale rates for some data services may be unenforceable. "What is your legal authority as chairman ... to not enforce something you just did?" asked Senator Mark Pryor, an Arkansas Democrat. AT&T agreed to lower the wholesale special access prices for DS1, DS3, and Ethernet services available to some regional telecom carriers and large businesses, but not to large competitors. But the FCC's policy in the past has been that wholesale discounts should apply to all customers, Martin said. "That tariff actually has some components that I believe are illegal under the commission precedent," Martin said. "They can file [the proposed discount], but I'm not committing to approving something that would be in violation of our precedent. We don't allow for that kind of discrimination." But Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, a Democrat who pushed for conditions on the AT&T merger, noted that the FCC adopted the AT&T merger conditions on a 4-0 vote. "It's hard for me to understand why we can't implement something we adopted unanimously," he said. Senators also urged the FCC to work on ways to get broadband service to rural, inner city and poor areas. The FCC on Wednesday issued a report saying the number of high-speed lines in the U.S. increased by 26 percent during the first half of 2006, from 51.2 million to 64.6 million lines in service. The number of high-speed lines grew by 21 percent in the second half of 2005. Senators also pointed to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's latest study saying the U.S. ranks 12th in broadband adoption rate among industrialized nations. Commissioner Michael Copps called on Congress and the FCC to develop a national broadband strategy. He called the U.S. broadband adoption rates "woeful." "I am really worried that we can go into the 21st century and have a bigger digital divide in this country ... than we had back in the days of plain, old telephone service in the 20th century," he said. "This just isn't feel-good liberal theory -- we're talking about the competitiveness of the United States of America."
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A RED HAT vice president has slammed Sun for refusing to open source its Java code and hanging on like grim death to its patents. The bone of contention is the April agreement between Sun and Microsoft.
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Except for the military, dedicating spectrum to a particular user is no longer a good idea. Making a big chunk of spectrum available to all users and restricting access as needed is a far better strategy, ignoring the politics, of course, says columnist Craig J. Mathias.
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A Florida company seeks to change FCC rules against selling such equipment to local and state agencies.
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Three federal lawmakers yesterday called on the new administrator of the General Services Administration to halt her plan to replace government auditors in the agency's inspector general's office with private auditors, saying in a letter that the change  could lead to less oversight of contractors.
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In Saturday radio address, VP candidate says measure curtails pay at a time workers need it. ATLANTA (CNN) - Calling to mind his days unloading tractor trailers during the summer, Sen. John Edwards blasted
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A behind-the-scenes tussle between nonunion Nissan Motor Co. and the United Auto Workers threatened to derail the Senate's energy bill.
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More than 70 lawmakers on  Monday urged antitrust authorities to block the proposed merger  of the nation&#39;s two satellite radio companies, contending that  the deal is anticompetitive.
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Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill yesterday threatened to pull about $120 million of state business out of Bank of America , and the Romney administration demanded a public accounting of the bank's layoffs and other recent moves in Massachusetts.
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Ziff Davis - Sun's open-source license proposal for Open Solaris will surely be unpopular.
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Political opposition to the merger of satellite radio providers XM and Sirius increased on Wednesday, as the chair of the Senate antitrust committee sent a letter to both the FCC and Justice Department opposing the deal.
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After a pep talk from Arlen Specter, the embattled Idaho Senator may fight to keep his seat