Donald Trump has accused Jeff Bezos of using the Washington Post, which he owns, to sway politicians into making corporate tax policy decisions favorable to Amazon.com, which he founded. “He’s using the Washington Post, which is peanuts, he’s using that for political purposes to save Amazon in terms of taxes and in terms of antitrust,” Trump told Fox News on Thursday.

One rarely accumulates a net worth of $1.9 billion without breaking the rules. Repeatedly. IAC chairman Barry Diller has agreed to pay $480,000 in civil penalties for anti-trust violations related to his purchase of voting shares in Coca-Cola from 2010 to 2012.

The Senate is about to debate whether Google is evil. The search giant's competitors, including Yelp, have come out swinging, and they seem to have a good case.

Some big news in the telecom world today, as the Justice Department has sued to block AT&T's $39 billion purchase of T-Mobile on antitrust grounds. This is just like in the old days, when antitrust laws were enforced.

Google is about to be officially investigated for being evil. The Federal Trade Commission thinks its search engine may have violated antitrust law, and that Google may be a bully to the core. Review some potential supporting evidence below.

Microsoft has just filed its first antitrust complaint, in the EU against Google. Let's try to get past the obvious fact that this is like Lady Gaga complaining that someone dresses weird and rips off Madonna while she hurls stones out of a glass house. This is important stuff. It could determine which massive tech corporation controls all of our data in the dystopian future!

With Disney's big buy of Marvel, America suddenly finds much of its entire animated universe — from Spider-Man to Pluto — in the hands of one media conglomerate. How many cartoon characters must a company own before the FTC acts?

Apple has announced Eric Schmidt is leaving the Cupertino company's board of directors by "mutual" agreement. Apple CEO Steve Jobs cites increasing competition between the two companies; by that standard this should have happened a year and a half ago.

Yesterday, executives from most of America's biggest newspapers held a hush-hush meeting about the future of their dying industry. Isn't that basically, obviously, a huge violation of antitrust laws, probably? No, thanks to the corporate freedom-supporting Supreme Court!

Everyone has misunderstood why Google, from CEO Eric Schmidt on down, is cozying up to Barack Obama. It's not out of some likeminded geekiness. It's out of desperation and fear.

Google's G1 is the biggest enemy of Apple's iPhone. And Apple is making a big push into the Web. So it's totally hunky-dory that Google and Apple share board members, right? Wrong, say antitrust cops.

Marcy Simon, the former mistress of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, has landed a PR gig at Mark Penn's Burson-Marsteller. We hear her new job is stirring up antitrust trouble for Google at Microsoft's behest.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently told the BBC that the U.S. should break up banks that get "too big to fail." What about Google? Is it too big — and should the government take action?

Microsoft, harried by regulators in the 1990s, once lobbied Congress to cut spending on antitrust enforcement. Now, it's profiting from their efforts. The software giant's lobbying budget nearly doubled from 2006 to 2008, helping it sink Yahoo's deal to have Google sell ads for its search pages. The failure of that deal helped speed Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang out the door, and could set Microsoft up to win Yahoo's search business. CNET News]

LG, Sharp and Chunghwa have agreed to plead guilty. The crime: Coordinating higher prices on flat-screen LCD displays sold to Apple, Dell, Motorola and others. The Department of Justice's antitrust division claims the three companies held meetings and traded messages in order to agree on higher prices for the displays. The DOJ's press release has full details. (Illustration by Plasma.com)

When did Eric Schmidt turn into such a wimp? When Google and Yahoo first proposed a deal to have Google sell search ads for Yahoo, Schmidt brazenly gave antitrust regulators a four-month deadline to review it. After that, Google would blaze ahead with the deal. The deadline came and went. Over the weekend, Google and Yahoo turned in a revised deal that they hoped would impress regulators. The bottom line: It is half as lucrative as Yahoo had hoped, generating $400 million a year rather than $800 million, limiting Google-sold ads to a quarter of Yahoo's search-related revenue. It's better than nothing, but it leaves Schmidt in a weak position the next time he wants to talk tough with the feds. Then again, maybe he's planning to dump Larry and Sergey for a nice, safe government job.

That's the question about the company's obvious leaks to the Wall Street Journal which suggest it might walk away from talks with the government about its search deal with Yahoo. Short answer: Yes, yes it is. [BoomTown]

Yahoo's deal to outsource some of its search advertising to Google continues to face scrutiny on Capitol Hill. Google CEO Eric Schmidt had said he'd carry out the deal whether or not regulators had finished their review. Regulators called his bluff, and America's CTO has now lost face, not to mention credibility. Why not just bow out and move on? That seems easier.

Why hasn't Google finished its acquisition of Begun, a Russian online-advertising startup? The country's antitrust authority has asked Google to provide lists of people who control the company. Or work there. Something may have been Jewish, and liberal, is no friend of the authoritarian state.

If the Justice Department does allow Google to serve ads on some of Yahoo's websites, Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl believes it should then monitor "the amount of advertising outsourced by Yahoo to Google" to make sure it doesn't increase over time. His math: "Should the amount significantly increase, we believe the threat to competition will also increase." Then, the DOJ could step in "if, over time, you determine that Google is gaining a dominant market position as a result of the Google-Yahoo agreement." Here's hoping Alaska Senator Ted Stevens will weigh in next on the need to monitor the deal's tube-clogging effects. [Reuters]