• The Financial Times (UK), Thursday, June 10, 2010 2:17 PM

Citing unnamed sources "close to the situation," the Financial Times is reporting that U.S. antitrust regulators plan to investigate whether Apple is unfairly restricting its smartphone rivals from participating it its forthcoming mobile ad network.

On Monday, Apple changed the rules that govern its new iAd mobile advertising platform to seemingly exclude direct competitors like Google -- new owner of mobile ad network AdMob -- and Microsoft. The dispute, which stems from a change in an obscure clause in Apple's developers agreement, has split the high tech community," Fortune explains. "Some see it as classic Apple high-handedness, 'a re-run,' as Federated Media's John Batelle put it, 'of the Us vs. The World mentality that forced the Mac into a corner back in the late 1980s.'" Other argue that Google started the fight when it began competing in smartphones with Android and snatched up AdMob, which Apple was reportedly about to buy itself.

Read the whole story at The Financial Times (UK) »