F.T.C. Targets Patent Companies

The action is only the first step in what is likely to be a lengthy and broad investigation, which could eventually result in antitrust lawsuits against the companies.

Edith Ramirez, the chairwoman of the F.T.C., said in June that she believed there is little real evidence about the costs and benefits of a rising tide of patent litigation.

By a 4-to-0 vote, the commission agreed to seek public comments on an investigation of “approximately 25 companies that are in the business of buying and asserting patents,” the agency said in a statement. It also will look at about 15 other companies that assert patents in the wireless communications industry, including manufacturers of smartphones.

After reviewing public comments, the trade commission will seek to issue subpoenas to the patent assertion entities, which are also known, unflatteringly, as “patent trolls.”

“Patents are key to innovation and competition, so it’s important for us to get a better understanding” of how the entities operate, Ms. Ramirez said in the statement Friday.

She said the Federal Trade Commission Act allows the agency to gather information about the financial operations of the companies, and it will seek to uncover how much they earn from patent lawsuits and licensing and how the profits are distributed to investors.

That information can form the basis of antitrust lawsuits, among other actions.

The purpose of the inquiry is “to expand the empirical picture on the costs and benefits” of the companies’ activity, Ms. Ramirez said. “What we learn will support informed policy decisions.”

The New York Times reported in June that Ms. Ramirez was trying to get the approval of the full commission to begin issuing subpoenas to the companies, which accounted for more than 60 percent of the 4,000 patent lawsuits filed in 2012. That figure was up from 29 percent two years earlier.

President Obama also has called for the federal government to ascertain how patent assertion entities are operating; he directed executive agencies to take steps to “protect innovators from frivolous litigation.”

The companies that are generally pointed to as the largest of the litigators say that while there is abuse of patents in some sectors, they are not themselves involved in frivolous litigation.

Patent assertion entities span a spectrum. On one end are companies that are essentially legal shells that send letters to businesses claiming infringement and demanding payments; in 2011, for example, such a company targeted coffee shops for setting up Wi-Fi networks for customers.

At the other end are companies like Mosaid Technologies and Intellectual Ventures, which buy large portfolios of patents from technology companies like Microsoft and Nokia, using them to generate licensing payments that run to the millions of dollars.

Bits Blog: Tech Companies Escalate Pressure on Government to Publish National Security Request Data

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E.U. Wrongly Imposed Sanctions on 7 Iranian Companies, Court Rules

The General Court in Brussels, the union’s second-highest tribunal, ruled that the bloc wrongly imposed sanctions against the Iranian companies as part of its efforts to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons, a decision that immediately drew the ire of American officials.

They took the opposite tack on Friday, imposing restrictions on a network of six individuals and four businesses for links to oil sales.

“We are very disappointed by the court’s decision today,” a spokesman for the United States Treasury said in a statement. “The evidence linking these banks to Iran’s illicit nuclear activities is clear and strong, and no financial institution anywhere should allow these Iranian banks to transact with them.”

The Treasury said its actions Friday represented a renewed crackdown to curb the use of front companies, financial institutions and businesspeople to conceal the direct involvement of the Iranian government and entities like the National Iranian Oil Company and the Naftiran Intertrade Company.

The developments came amid signs of a more moderate tone in Iran’s foreign policy after the election of President Hassan Rouhani in June. That has extended to its nuclear activities, which Tehran says are legal and peaceful but which Western nations and Israel consider a cover for developing the ability to make atomic bombs.

The ruling in Europe involved decisions by the union’s governments to freeze the accounts of companies, including Post Bank of Iran, the Iran Insurance Company, Good Luck Shipping and the Export Development Bank of Iran, from 2008-11.

In a statement, the General Court ruled that the Council of the European Union, an executive body of government ministers from all union countries, did not “properly establish” that the companies “had provided support for nuclear proliferation.”

The sanctions will remain in place for at least two months pending any appeal to the European Court of Justice, the bloc’s highest tribunal.

The Treasury Department’s action, which prohibits Americans from doing business with the named individuals and companies, and freezes their assets, was aimed at a network of entities linked to Seyed Seyyedi, an Iranian businessman and the director of Sima General Trading, a company previously penalized by the Treasury.

The Treasury identified KASB International, Petro Royal FZE and AA Energy FZCO as companies based in the United Arab Emirates, controlled by Mr. Seyyedi and helping the Iranian national oil company to evade sanctions.

The Treasury also identified a number of individuals representing Swiss Management Services, National Iranian Oil Company-International Affairs in London and the Iranian Oil Company U.K. as helping the Iranian government evade oil sanctions.

“Our sanctions on Iran’s oil sales are a critically important component of maintaining pressure on the Iranian government,” David S. Cohen, the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the Treasury, said in a statement.

The ruling in Brussels was the latest in a string of reversals for European Union governments, which have been reluctant to share evidence that they deem overly sensitive or that might compromise intelligence gathering.

Seeking to address the problem, European governments agreed in October to shift tactics by moving away from blacklisting individual banks and instead imposing across-the-board measures, like requiring authorization of transactions of more than 10,000 euros, or about $13,100, with some exceptions for transfers in areas like humanitarian aid, medical equipment and farming.

Officials from European governments are expected to hold initial discussions on whether to appeal on Tuesday, according to a European Union diplomat with direct knowledge of those plans. The diplomat spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks would not be made public.

DealBook: With Huge War Chests, Activist Investors Tackle Big Companies

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Two Ad Companies Are Said to Merge, Supplanting Industry Leader

The combination of Publicis, based in Paris, and Omnicom, based in New York, would supplant the advertising industry leader, WPP of London. While Omnicom is slightly bigger than Publicis, the deal is being billed as a merger of equals that would have a combined stock market value of more than $30 billion.

News on Friday of talks between the companies was a surprise to analysts and most of Madison Avenue, including some employees in each agency. On Saturday, Publicis said it planned to make a “major corporate announcement” on Sunday. An Omnicom spokeswoman did not return requests for comment. A Publicis spokeswoman declined to comment.

The marriage would bring under one roof separate networks of ad agencies — including BBDO, TBWA and DDB under Omnicom, and Leo Burnett and Saatchi & Saatchi under Publicis. Collectively, the conglomerates represent some of the world’s largest brands including AT&T, Visa and Pepsi at Omnicom and McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart at Publicis. How the agencies would handle potential conflicts is expected to be addressed by the companies on Sunday.

In an interview with The New York Times this month, Publicis’s longtime chief, Maurice Lévy, said he expected much of the growth in the advertising sector to come from emerging markets and mobile and digital advertising. Publicis has been making aggressive acquisitions in digital advertising including agencies like Rosetta and Razorfish.

“I think we are all talking a lot about what the future markets of mobile will be and how we will be able to get the revenue we are expecting from this market,” Mr. Lévy said, citing a $15 million investment in a mobile polling start-up that is focused on emerging markets like Africa. “It is a huge market with incredible possibility for the future. Everyone is fighting very hard and trying to find solutions to get these next billion consumers,” he said.

Omnicom, which analysts say has focused more on expanding its digital operations organically as opposed to through acquisitions, stands to benefit from the media buying power of the Starcom MediaVest Group, a division of Publicis that is one of the largest media agencies in the world. In April, Starcom signed a multiyear deal with Twitter to combine some of the resources that they both use for measuring and tracking data and advertising. That deal was estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars.

Last year, revenue at Publicis increased nearly 14 percent to $8.8 billion, while revenue at Omnicom increased 2.5 percent to $14.2 billion.

The combined company could be jointly run by Mr. Lévy, who has been with Publicis since 1987, and John Wren, who has led Omnicom since 1997, according to the people with knowledge of the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deal was not completed. Mr. Lévy, 71, has been expected to name a successor since last year.

In a report on Saturday, Brian Wieser, a senior research analyst at Pivotal Research Group, said a merger would be “highly favorable” for the entire ad industry, and “negative for media owners in most traditional media,” because those companies would lose negotiating power.

Some analysts and industry players speculated whether the United States Justice Department would approve such a merger or whether the French government would bristle at a company that was not run by a French national.

But antitrust concerns could be eased if the new company positions itself less as a conglomerate of ad agencies and more of a data company competing with businesses like I.B.M. and Facebook, Mr. Wieser wrote. He added that maintaining Mr. Lévy at the helm or ensuring that a board was dominated by French nationals might be enough to assuage the French government.

News of the talks was first reported by Bloomberg.

Michael de la Merced contributed reporting.

Bits Blog: Why Asian Internet Companies Struggle to Become Global

Bobby Yip/Reuters Tencent, one of China’s most valuable technology companies, owns WeChat, an online messaging service that’s growing in popularity across borders.

Asia is home to nearly half of the 2 billion Internet users in the world. It makes most of the hardware — laptops, smartphones, tablets and other gadgets — that is used to gain access to the Internet. In countries like South Korea and Japan, it has some of the fastest wired and wireless networks for carrying Internet traffic.

Yet in one aspect of the high-technology economy, Asia still struggles. It has yet to create an Internet company with the global scale of a Google, Facebook or Amazon. A report published Wednesday by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a research outfit affiliated with the Economist magazine, examines some of the possible reasons for this.

In some cases, the study says, Asian Internet companies have simply been held back by a lack of international ambition. In countries like China or India, domestic markets are so big that expanding abroad has not always been seen as a necessity. Other companies are reluctant to tackle the cultural challenges of operating in the West, according to the report, whose conclusions were reached after interviews with Internet entrepreneurs and others.

But that is starting to change. A new generation of Asian Web companies is seeing rapid cross-border growth — including, in some cases, in the West. These include online messaging services like Line, from Japan, and WeChat, which is owned by a Chinese Internet business, Tencent. Social gaming companies, like GungHo of Japan, have also achieved strong international growth.

Meanwhile, Alibaba, an e-commerce giant in China, has increasingly international ambitions, and is expected to offer stock to the public soon to finance them. Another Asian e-commerce company, Rakuten of Japan, has moved to expand abroad through acquisitions of companies like PriceMinister of France, and it has adopted English as its official language.

Yet these are the exceptions. The study says Asian Internet companies have been hobbled by factors like a lack of trusted online payment systems, a reluctance among Internet users to pay for digital content and restrictions on hiring foreign workers. The report also highlights burdensome regulations, including laws in countries like India and Thailand that make Internet companies responsible for the content posted on their sites.

“In many markets around the region, change must begin with a better understanding, on the part of governments, of the specific challenges facing Internet businesses, and a more general recognition of the growth opportunity that online commerce represents,” the authors write.

Asia is not alone in struggling to export home-grown Internet services. If anything, Europe has had an even harder time — despite lesser regulatory, linguistic and cultural hurdles to international expansion.

The report was sponsored by the Asia Internet Coalition, a group that was formed by five American Internet companies — Google, Facebook, Yahoo, eBay and Salesforce. The Economist Intelligence Unit says it was written independently. But some of the issues that are highlighted – especially the effect of regulation – do mirror the complaints from American Internet entrepreneurs and executives about operating in Asia.

In addition to the well-known restrictions that American Internet companies face in China, where services like Facebook and Twitter are blocked, Silicon Valley giants have also struggled in some other Asian markets. In South Korea, for example, the Internet search business is dominated by two local players, Naver and Daum, and not by Google.

The report makes clear recommendations for stimulating the Internet economy in Asia, urging governments there, for instance, to make regulatory changes to allow efficient online payments systems to develop.

Who would be the main beneficiaries? That is less clear.

On the Road: Travel Security Companies Watch a Volatile World

A few days ago, Alex Puig, a regional security director for the travel emergency company International SOS, was in his office in suburban Philadelphia watching reports on a volcano erupting in western Alaska. At the same time, he was monitoring events in Turkey, where street violence sharply escalated over the weekend.

Those were just two hot spots on a long list. Troubles, mayhem, disease, natural disasters and other disruptions hit like lightning strikes all over the world, and are monitored around the clock by companies like International SOS, which claims to have 70 percent of the Fortune Global 500 companies as clients, and competitors in the travel alert and response business like iJet.

That pesky volcano, named Pavlof, in the western Aleutian archipelago, began erupting again in mid-May. On some days it was belching ash 20,000 feet into the skies, forcing cancellation of some regional flights. The question was whether the eruptions at the volcano, one of Alaska’s most active, might worsen and spew a higher and wider ash cloud that could potentially disrupt hundreds of flights a day on the ever-more-important travel and cargo routes between North America and Asia.

“The concern now is primarily over the effect that volcanic ash has had, and potentially again could have, on air traffic,” said Mr. Puig, a former travel and cargo security executive with Target and a former agent in the clandestine services of the Central Intelligence Agency. “At the end of the day, let’s assume that more ash clouds get spewed into the atmosphere, and now airlines are having to reroute and greatly reduce — or completely cancel — flights.” That, as we saw in Europe three years ago, can mean big trouble.

In its update on Sunday, the Alaska Volcano Observatory, a joint federal, state and university program, reported that seismic tremors on Pavlof had weakened. But it added that given the volatile nature of Pavlof, “eruptive activity could increase again with little warning.”

While there was no immediate cause for alarm about air travel in the region, there was plenty of precedent for paying attention — for travelers and for those in corporate offices who send business travelers around the world. Those corporate officials are charged with so-called duty-of-care responsibilities, not only to respond properly to emergencies, but also to anticipate them.

Lessons were learned from the calamitous effects on travel caused by the ash cloud that covered much of Western Europe when a volcano in Iceland erupted in spring 2010. At one time, Mr. Puig said, such an event might not have seemed as disruptive or dangerous as, say, an earthquake, and might have been taken for granted.

“People said, ‘O.K., we’ll just fly over it or around it,’ ” he said. “But in Europe we found out that this wasn’t feasible, and a lot of people got stranded.”

Over an eight-day period in April 2010, 104,000 commercial flights in Europe, half of the total scheduled, were canceled. Five million travelers all over the world were left stranded, as the effects of those cancellations rippled through the global commercial aviation networks. It was a slow-moving travel disruption with huge logistical effects — hotel rooms were hard to get, ground transportation was uncertain, work communications were going haywire as travelers found themselves stuck all over the world. But most business travelers at least had support systems in place back home.

“If you’re a business traveler and you get stranded in say, Hong Kong, and you can’t leave because of flight disruptions, it probably means you get to stay an extra week in Hong Kong on the company dime,” while trying to manage work and personal schedules thrown into turmoil, he said. “But as we saw in Europe, a lot of leisure travelers were caught” and were scrambling for options.

“If you’re on your own, you can easily end up sleeping at the airport,” he said.

As the volcano in Alaska quieted down, at least temporarily, the violence in Turkey was becoming worse. Many travel managers with employees on the road in Istanbul and elsewhere had assumed that the situation would be controllable, given the long stability of Turkey. But then concerns were raised at home offices by reports that the riot police and government supporters were singling out foreigners in Istanbul and that police even fired tear gas inside a hotel favored by international business travelers.

“Right now, we’re telling people you can travel to Turkey — not a problem — but make sure your travel arrangements are in order, check that the airports are still working, make sure of your ground transportation, check to see that the hotel where you’re staying isn’t affected,” Mr. Puig said.

“It’s a very tricky thing,” he said of the emergency response in the “be informed” stage, as it was regarding Turkey.

“You don’t want to underreact,” Mr. Puig said. “We actually prefer to land on the overreact side, if we feel it’s moving fast in a certain direction and we need to put our teams on the ground and start to organize logistics.”

Violence on the ground is a lot more dangerous than a volcano that disrupts international air travel, of course. But in these kinds of situations, it pays to be prepared. You just never know. Things could settle down in Turkey, as far as the potential effects on travelers. That volcano in Alaska could go back to sleep. “It’s too early to tell,” Mr. Puig said.

But it’s a good idea to pay close attention.

Europe Fines Drug Companies for Delaying Generics

On Wednesday, the European Commission fined a Danish pharmaceutical company and a number of generic producers a total of 146 million euros, or $195 million.

The commission said that Lundbeck of Denmark colluded with companies like Ranbaxy of India and Merck of Germany in 2002 and 2003 to delay market entry of a less expensive generic version of a blockbuster antidepressant called citalopram. Joaquín Almunia, the European commissioner for competition, said that Lundbeck also destroyed significant quantities of the low-cost version of the drug.

“All this occurred at the expense of patients who were deprived of access to cheaper medicines,” Mr. Almunia said at a news conference on Wednesday. “It also harmed our public health systems, who for a longer period had to artificially bear the costs of an expensive medicine and one of the most widely prescribed antidepressants.”Lundbeck said it had done nothing wrong and would appeal the decision. “The company acted transparently and in good faith in trying to protect our patents,” Lundbeck said in a statement. “Upon entering the agreements, they were all reviewed by external antitrust experts.”

The case mirrors a decision on Monday by the United States Supreme Court, which empowers the Federal Trade Commission to sue drug makers that engage in so-called pay-for-delay tactics. The Supreme Court decision is likely to increase the number of generic drugs, in that way benefiting consumers. The F.T.C. said that pay-for-delay deals cost Americans $3.5 billion a year in higher drug prices.

Many European governments with socialized medical systems buy or help to pay for prescription drugs used by citizens, which means that the blocking of generics affects those nations’ budgets. Mr. Almunia said that when generic versions of citalopram became available in Britain, during the second half of 2004, prices there dropped by 90 percent.

The scale of savings in Britain helped to ensure that “public health systems can remain economically sustainable in these times of difficult budgetary constraints,” Mr. Almunia said. Peter Kaplan, a Federal Trade Commission spokesman, would not comment on the European decision, but he indicated that officials had been coordinating on the issue of drug pricing. “F.T.C. staffers have had productive policy discussions with their counterparts in the E.U. on the pay-for-delay issue, which is a longstanding enforcement priority at the F.T.C.,” Mr. Kaplan said.

Similarly, European Union officials said their decision on Wednesday was not timed to follow the Supreme Court case.

Early this year, the commission accused the drug giants Johnson & Johnson and Novartis of colluding to delay the availability of a generic version of fentanyl, a drug often used to ease severe pain. A year ago, the commission accused the French pharmaceutical company Servier and competitors of delaying the generic entry of perindopril, a cardiovascular medicine. And in 2011, the commission opened an investigation into whether the American pharmaceutical company Cephalon and the generic maker Teva of Israel hindered the entry of the generic version of modafinil, used for the treatment of certain types of sleeping disorders.

Those cases still are pending.

In the Lundbeck case, Mr. Almunia’s office said that various generic makers colluded with the Danish company, agreeing to not enter the market in return for “substantial payments and other inducements from Lundbeck amounting to tens of millions of euros.” Commission officials said that they had found documents referring to a “ ‘club’ being formed and ‘a pile of $$$’ to be shared among the participants.”

The European Commission fined Lundbeck 93.8 million euros, which amounts to roughly 4.6 percent of its 2012 sales. The regulator can fine companies up to 10 percent of annual sales.

Secret Court Ruling Put Tech Companies in Data Bind

The judges disagreed. That left Yahoo two choices: Hand over the data or break the law.

So Yahoo became part of the National Security Agency’s secret Internet surveillance program, Prism, according to leaked N.S.A. documents, as did seven other Internet companies.

Like almost all the actions of the secret court, which operates under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the details of its disagreement with Yahoo were never made public beyond a heavily redacted court order, one of the few public documents ever to emerge from the court. The name of the company had not been revealed until now. Yahoo’s involvement was confirmed by two people with knowledge of the proceedings. Yahoo declined to comment.

But the decision has had lasting repercussions for the dozens of companies that store troves of their users’ personal information and receive these national security requests — it puts them on notice that they need not even try to test their legality. And despite the murky details, the case offers a glimpse of the push and pull among tech companies and the intelligence and law enforcement agencies that try to tap into the reams of personal data stored on their servers.

It also highlights a paradox of Silicon Valley: while tech companies eagerly vacuum up user data to track their users and sell ever more targeted ads, many also have a libertarian streak ingrained in their corporate cultures that resists sharing that data with the government.

“Even though they have an awful reputation on consumer privacy issues, when it comes to government privacy, they generally tend to put their users first,” said Christopher Soghoian, a senior policy analyst studying technological surveillance at the American Civil Liberties Union. “There’s this libertarian, pro-civil liberties vein that runs through the tech companies.”

Lawyers who handle national security requests for tech companies say they rarely fight in court, but frequently push back privately by negotiating with the government, even if they ultimately have to comply. In addition to Yahoo, which fought disclosures under FISA, other companies, including Google, Twitter, smaller communications providers and a group of librarians, have fought in court elements of National Security Letters, which the F.B.I. uses to secretly collect information about Americans. Last year, the government issued more than 1,850 FISA requests and 15,000 National Security Letters.

“The tech companies try to pick their battles,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at American University who has challenged government counterterrorism surveillance. “Behind the scenes, different tech companies show different degrees of cooperativeness or pugnaciousness.”

But Mr. Vladeck added that even if a company resisted, “that may not be enough, because any pushback is secret and at the end of the day, even the most well-intentioned companies are not going to be standing in the shoes of their customers.”

FISA requests can be as broad as seeking court approval to ask a company to turn over information about the online activities of people in a certain country. Between 2008 and 2012, only two of 8,591 applications were rejected, according to data gathered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit research center in Washington. Without obtaining court approval, intelligence agents can then add more specific requests — like names of individuals and additional Internet services to track — every day for a year.

National Security Letters are limited to the name, address, length of service and toll billing records of a service’s subscribers.

Because national security requests ban recipients from even acknowledging their existence, it is difficult to know exactly how, and how often, the companies cooperate or resist. Small companies are more likely to take the government to court, lawyers said, because they have fewer government relationships and customers, and fewer disincentives to rock the boat. One of the few known challenges to a National Security Letter, for instance, came from a small Internet provider in New York, the Calyx Internet Access Corporation.

The Yahoo ruling, from 2008, shows the company argued that the order violated its users’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures. The court called that worry “overblown.”

“Notwithstanding the parade of horribles trotted out by the petitioner, it has presented no evidence of any actual harm, any egregious risk of error, or any broad potential for abuse,” the court said, adding that the government’s “efforts to protect national security should not be frustrated by the courts.”

One of the most notable challenges to a National Security Letter came from an unidentified electronic communications service provider in San Francisco. In 2011, the company was presented with a letter from the F.B.I., asking for account information of a subscriber for an investigation into “international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”

The company went to court. In March, a Federal District Court judge, Susan Illston, ruled the information request unconstitutional, along with the gag order. The case is under appeal, which is why the company cannot be named.

Google filed a challenge this year against 19 National Security Letters in the same federal court, and in May, Judge Illston ruled against the company. Google was not identified in the case, but its involvement was confirmed by a person briefed on the case.

In 2011, Twitter successfully challenged a silence order on a request authorized by the Stored Communications Act.

Other companies are asking for permission to talk about national security requests. Google negotiated with Justice officials to publish the number of letters they received, and were allowed to say they each received between zero and 999 last year, as did Microsoft. The companies, along with Facebook and Twitter, said Tuesday that the government should give them more freedom to disclose national security requests.

The companies comply with a vast majority of nonsecret requests, including subpoenas and search warrants, by providing at least some of the data.

For many of the requests to tech companies, the government relies on a 2008 amendment to FISA. Even though the FISA court requires so-called minimization procedures to limit incidental eavesdropping on people not in the original order, including Americans, the scale of electronic communication is so vast that such information — say, on an e-mail string — is often picked up, lawyers say.

Last year, the FISA court said the minimization rules were unconstitutional, and on Wednesday, ruled that it had no objection to sharing that opinion publicly. It is now up to a federal court.

Nicole Perlroth and Somini Sengupta contributed reporting from San Francisco.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 15, 2013

An article on Friday about technology companies’ discomfort with and challenges of government surveillance programs misstated the type of order to remain silent about an information request successfully challenged by Twitter in 2011. It was an order authorized by the Stored Communications Act, not a National Security Letter.

DealBook Column: Tech Companies Tread Lightly in Statements on U.S. Spying

Robert Galbraith/ReutersMark Zuckerberg, chief of Facebook, one of several companies that denied a direct role in government spying.

Someone’s not telling the whole truth.

In the wake of the news leak that the National Security Agency is engaged in a wide-ranging surveillance program of Internet users through a system called Prism, the world’s biggest technology companies responded by unilaterally denying any involvement in the government’s spying apparatus.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, declared: “Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the U.S. or any other government direct access to our servers,” adding that, “We hadn’t even heard of Prism before yesterday.”

Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and chief executive, went slightly further. “The U.S. government does not have direct access or a ‘back door’ to the information stored in our data centers,” he said. Apple, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo followed with denials as well.

And yet President Obama and the United States director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., have publicly confirmed the existence of the Prism system, without providing any details about it.

Of course, the news — as well as the responses — raises doubts about who is telling the truth and about how extensive the spying program really may be.

But perhaps just as important, the episode also raises questions about how publicly traded companies with hundreds of millions of consumers — companies that are regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission — can, and should, react to news when pressed about involvement in confidential government programs.

“They are in a very difficult position,” said Thomas A. Sporkin, a former S.E.C. enforcement official and now a partner at Buckley Sandler. “On one hand they want to project an image of protecting your privacy. On the other, they have statutory obligations to keep government programs confidential” or potentially risk criminal charges if they exposed a secret government program.

Companies could also face a problem if their disclosures were misleading to investors, but only if they materially affected the stock price or had some other adverse effect, lawyers said.

These companies did not just say “no comment.” They flat-out denied involvement. Mr. Sporkin said, “They are probably not being completely forthcoming, but they are probably not lying.” He noted that the statements were highly vetted by legal teams.

While the companies might have wanted to stick in “no comment” mode, a version of peer pressure kicked in, said one chief executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the fragility of the situation. Once one company issued a flat denial, the others felt they had to follow suit, he said.

Indeed, the statements that companies like Facebook and Google made are probably truthful if taken literally. I don’t doubt Mr. Page when he said, “Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period.” The title of his statement, which appeared on Google’s corporate blog and was also signed by the company’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, was “What the…?”

But I also don’t doubt another part of his statement that was frequently overlooked: “We provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law.”

In other words, when the government makes a legitimate request — and through Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was highlighted by the leak, the government can seek vast troves of information — Google and others comply.

It is possible, for example, that Mr. Page and Mr. Zuckerberg had never been told that the government’s program was called Prism. And it is highly unlikely the government has a password granting access to company servers despite early reports quoting a government document that used the phrase “direct access” and now appears as if it overstated the case.

At the same time, however, companies like Facebook and Google have clearly worked with the government to create systems to transfer vast amounts of private data that is sought by the N.S.A. and other government agencies. The New York Times reported last week, based on people briefed on the matter, that Google and Facebook discussed plans “to build separate, secure portals, like a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information, in some instances on company servers.”

That is different from the idea that the government has “direct access” to corporate servers, but it still means that the companies are providing the government with enormous amounts of data.

One explanation for the distinction between the corporate denials and the leaked presentation was explained this way in The Washington Post, which along with The Guardian posted several slides from a 41-page presentation about the Internet program: “It is possible that the conflict between the Prism slides and the company spokesmen is the result of imprecision on the part of the N.S.A. author.”

Senior executives I spoke with at many of the technology companies cited in the Prism documents said they routinely provided the government with requested data, in some cases months’ worth of e-mail traffic for a certain address. They have teams of people whose entire job is to work with the government to comply with such requests, which come in daily if not more frequently. Once that information is transferred to the government, an agency can store that data and sort it, integrate it with other data to their heart’s content.

Mr. Sporkin, for example, said that when he was at the S.E.C., the agency would regularly make requests for stock trades and then store that information so it could use it later, sorting it and mixing it with other sources of data.

Most technology companies have a “terms of service” agreement that requires users to accept such a provision before signing up. Buried in the fine print of Facebook’s is this: “We may access, preserve and share your information in response to a legal request (like a search warrant, court order or subpoena) if we have a good faith belief that the law requires us to do so.”

Theoretically, a clever lawyer could make the case that the companies’ public denials have now become part of the terms of service and that customers are relying on them to be true. If those denials turn out to conflict with actions in the future, the companies — again theoretically — could face trouble with their customers and even possibly another arm of the government, like the F.T.C., setting up a true conundrum.

So while the nation’s biggest technology companies may not be a part of systematic large-scale spying program, it is clear that they are legally required to play a significant role in funneling data to the government. That leaves them on a tightrope balancing what they can say to their customers and investors while complying with their obligations to keep the government’s secrets.

Tech Companies Concede to Surveillance Program

Twitter declined to make it easier for the government. But other companies were more compliant, according to people briefed on the negotiations. They opened discussions with national security officials about developing technical methods to more efficiently and securely share the personal data of foreign users in response to lawful government requests. And in some cases, they changed their computer systems to do so.

The negotiations shed a light on how Internet companies, increasingly at the center of people’s personal lives, interact with the spy agencies that look to their vast trove of information — e-mails, videos, online chats, photos and search queries — for intelligence. They illustrate how intricately the government and tech companies work together, and the depth of their behind-the-scenes transactions.

The companies that negotiated with the government include Google, which owns YouTube; Microsoft, which owns Hotmail and Skype; Yahoo; Facebook; AOL; Apple; and Paltalk, according to one of the people briefed on the discussions. The companies were legally required to share the data under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. People briefed on the discussions spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are prohibited by law from discussing the content of FISA requests or even acknowledging their existence.

In at least two cases, at Google and Facebook, one of the plans discussed was to build separate, secure portals, like a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information, in some instances on company servers. Through these online rooms, the government would request data, companies would deposit it and the government would retrieve it, people briefed on the discussions said.

The negotiations have continued in recent months, as Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, traveled to Silicon Valley to meet with executives including those at Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Intel. Though the official purpose of those meetings was to discuss the future of the Internet, the conversations also touched on how the companies would collaborate with the government in its intelligence-gathering efforts, said a person who attended.

While handing over data in response to a legitimate FISA request is a legal requirement, making it easier for the government to get the information is not, which is why Twitter could decline to do so.

Details on the discussions help explain the disparity between initial descriptions of the government program and the companies’ responses.

Each of the nine companies said it had no knowledge of a government program providing officials with access to its servers, and drew a bright line between giving the government wholesale access to its servers to collect user data and giving them specific data in response to individual court orders. Each said it did not provide the government with full, indiscriminate access to its servers.

The companies said they do, however, comply with individual court orders, including under FISA. The negotiations, and the technical systems for sharing data with the government, fit in that category because they involve access to data under individual FISA requests. And in some cases, the data is transmitted to the government electronically, using a company’s servers.

“The U.S. government does not have direct access or a ‘back door’ to the information stored in our data centers,” Google’s chief executive, Larry Page, and its chief legal officer, David Drummond, said in a statement on Friday. “We provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law.”

Statements from Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, AOL and Paltalk made the same distinction.

But instead of adding a back door to their servers, the companies were essentially asked to erect a locked mailbox and give the government the key, people briefed on the negotiations said. Facebook, for instance, built such a system for requesting and sharing the information, they said.

The data shared in these ways, the people said, is shared after company lawyers have reviewed the FISA request according to company practice. It is not sent automatically or in bulk, and the government does not have full access to company servers. Instead, they said, it is a more secure and efficient way to hand over the data.

Tech companies might have also denied knowledge of the full scope of cooperation with national security officials because employees whose job it is to comply with FISA requests are not allowed to discuss the details even with others at the company, and in some cases have national security clearance, according to both a former senior government official and a lawyer representing a technology company.

Reporting was contributed by Nick Bilton, Vindu Goel, Nicole Perlroth and Somini Sengupta in San Francisco; Edward Wyatt in Washington; Brian X. Chen and Leslie Kaufman in New York; and Nick Wingfield in Seattle.

The Boss: Arrowsight’s C.E.O., on Building Companies That Last

As a teenager, I worked in a fruit and vegetable store. My job was to make orange juice in the basement. Whenever the longtime employees walked down, I’d pepper them with questions about how everything worked. It was my introduction to business.

In sixth grade, I moved to Boston to live with my father, a physician, then returned to Vermont for college. I graduated from the University of Vermont in 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in economics and history.

During college, I developed a relationship with a financial adviser who worked at what was then Dean Witter Reynolds and was involved in technical trading analysis. He introduced me to a Japanese trading method called candlestick charting. I took the charts along with me on a summer vacation in Greece and continued to study with him for a few months after I graduated.

In 1991, I got a job on Wall Street at what was then CS First Boston as a currency trader, and in 1993 I moved to Paine Webber for a year. I had about 10 bosses in that time, so it didn’t seem like a stable industry. I hoped to start my own trading company. From 1994 to 1999, I was a co-founder of two money management firms that traded currency. When the euro was adopted in 1999, I thought that currency trading would become less profitable, so it was time for another career change.

Around 1997, my wife, Alison, and I watched a television program that included a day care center with a worker who possibly abused drugs. Putting cameras in these centers, enabling parents to see their children in real time by logging into a Web site, seemed like a good idea, and in 1999 I started ParentWatch, the precursor of Arrowsight. ParentWatch is now a division of Arrowsight.

I felt that the beef production industry, with its need for safety, offered greater potential for using video cameras. I thought of how sports teams use game films to improve, and I wondered why businesses weren’t doing something similar.

For three years while running ParentWatch, I studied the beef industry and raised capital for my idea, starting Arrowsight in 2002. My finance background helped me find start-up funding, and I met a senior executive in the meat industry who gave me a fast-track education in the field. I spent hours in meat processing plants.

Using cameras, sensors and remote video software, we started out checking food safety and animal welfare in meat processing plants. In 2004, a beef industry consultant introduced me to Temple Grandin, an expert in the humane treatment of animals. Temple endorsed our operations, which use auditing methods she developed, and she became one of our advisers.

Our customers include Cargill and the OSI Group, and, since we expanded our monitoring services into the health care industry, the North Shore-LIJ Health System and the medical center of the University of California, San Francisco.

When I started Arrowsight, I underestimated how difficult it is to convince potential customers to buy a system that doesn’t currently exist in their budget. I’d advise other entrepreneurs to look for investors who have a long-term view, and to forget their ego and choose colleagues who are smarter than they are.

DealBook: 3 Foreign Companies Invest in U.S. Project to Export Liquid Gas

Michael Stravato for The New York TimesSempra plans to build a liquefied natural gas export facility at its existing terminal in Hackberry, La.

In a sign that the United States shale gas boom is making global waves, two Japanese conglomerates and a big French energy player signed agreements on Friday to invest up to $7 billion in a liquefied natural gas project in Louisiana.

The companies — Mitsui and Mitsubishi of Japan, and GDF Suez of France — each plan to take a 16.6 percent stake in the gas export plant being developed at Hackberry, La. The complex is being built by Sempra Energy, a company based in San Diego with annual revenue of about $10 billion. The companies agreed last year to help develop the project.

GDF Suez predicts that the plant will begin operations in 2017. The companies’ final decision to make their investment will depend on the project’s receiving necessary permits, GDF Suez said.

International companies, responding to a ravenous global appetite for natural gas, particularly in Japan and Europe, want access to shale gas from the United States, which has emerged as an important new source over the last few years. But because the United States has only recently shifted from being a gas importer to being self-sufficient in the fuel, the government has not yet agreed to allow exports except in a few cases and to the 20 countries with which it has free trade agreements, including Panama and Costa Rica.

Export approval, under consideration for several projects by the Energy Department, will be necessary before the potential of shale gas can be fully realized. On Friday, the department approved a Texas project called Freeport L.N.G. It has also signed off on a facility being built by Cheniere Energy at Sabine Pass in Louisiana that is expected to start exporting in 2015.

But international companies are investing all the same, betting that United States shale gas will eventually be able to go onto the global market.

In a statement, Sempra Energy estimated that the foreign partners would be putting up $6 billion to $7 billion in return for just under half the equity in the project, which is forecast to yield 12 million metric tons of liquefied natural gas annually for 20 years. In return, they will receive all the gas. Sempra will retain a stake of just over 50 percent.

‘‘These agreements represent a major step forward in the development of our L.N.G. export project,’’ Sempra’s president, Mark A. Snell, said in a statement.

For international players, the attractions of United States shale gas are the large potential volumes and the relatively low cost of extracting it.

Other foreign companies that have lined up American supplies include the Korean company Kogas, Sumitomo of Japan and BG Group, the British-based company that is a big player in the liquefied natural gas business.

Natural gas prices in the United States are now about $4 per million British thermal units, the industry’s standard measure. European-traded prices are in the $10 per million B.T.U.’s range, with Asian prices about $15 per million per B.T.U.’s. Long-term contract prices are often higher, and liquefication adds to the cost over plain gas.

Japan’s liquefied natural gas imports have surged after the shutdown of nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and were up by 11 percent last year. Japanese imports account for about one-third of the world’s total liquid gas market, according to a recent study by Bernstein research.

Japanese utility executives have said they want to reduce the prices they are paying by tying them to United States supplies.

‘‘It is a win-win situation,’’ said Fadel Gheit, an analyst at Oppenheimer in New York. Such deals will help stabilize global fuel prices over the long term and benefit the United States economy, he said.

A big worry in the industry is whether United States’ exports could contribute to lower prices around the world, eroding profits. ‘‘It will give buyers a choice, something they have never had before,’’ said Jonathan Stern, chairman of the gas program at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

But industry executives think that surging demand, especially from Asia, will easily absorb the exports that the United States government might eventually permit.

United States gas ‘‘won’t have a material effect on long-term pricing,’’ Martin Houston, BG’s chief operating officer, said in a recent presentation on the company’s Web site.

Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting from Washington.

Europe Raids Oil Companies in Price Manipulation Inquiry

Investigators descended on some European offices of BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Platts, a division of the McGraw-Hill Companies that specializes in providing pricing for the oil industry. European authorities are looking into whether the companies may have “colluded in reporting distorted prices” in an effort “to manipulate the published prices of a number of oil and biofuel products.”

All of the companies said they were cooperating with the inquiry.

Shell said it was “assisting the European Commision in an enquiry into trading activities.” A spokesman said that the company’s offices in Rotterdam and London were “visited.”

Platts said that the European Commission had “undertaken a review” at its offices, at Canary Wharf in London. The raiders also visited BP’s oil trading operations on the lower floors of the same building. BP said in a statement the the company was “subject to an investigation.”

Regulators in Europe and the United States have long been worried about the system by which oil and gas prices are set, which can affect the prices consumers pay as well as costs for airline and trucking companies. The concerns reached a frenzied pitch in 2008 when oil prices hit record highs and then quickly plunged. Lawmakers in the United States and elsewhere questioned whether the prices were being distorted.

Authorities are focused in part on the price reporting system for oil and other petroleum products, which is dominated by a small group of companies like Platts. Such companies determine prices by polling traders and using other industry data.

In recent years, Platts has instituted a so-called electronic window through which a significant amount of oil is traded these days. At the end of the day, Platts determines prices based on the trades that go through this system, rather than by simply relying on polling companies.

There are concerns in the industry that companies could distort the prices through a blizzard of last-minute trades. “If you want access to liquidity you are forced to use the window,” said a senior oil trader. But he also said that the window, in theory, should be more accurate than prices determined just by polling traders because the prices were determined by actual trades.

The benchmarks, notably Brent crude, are enormously influential. Much of the world’s oil, particularly outside of the United States, is priced in relation to Brent, which is made up of a basket of North Sea crudes. These benchmarks are also often used in the large futures and derivatives markets.

As production in the North Sea has dwindled, the Brent price has been based on lower volumes of oil, prompting fears that it could be manipulated, possibly by the major players in the region. The Brent price is actually determined through assessing prices of a blend of four North Sea crudes.

In recent years, various regulatory agencies have investigated price setting but seem to have come up with little evidence of manipulation. People in the industry say, however, that the controversy around both oil and gas prices has made companies increasingly reluctant to supply prices for fear of becoming the targets of regulators or lawsuits.

In 2010, the Group of 20 economically most developed nations asked the International Organization of Securities Commissions to look into the potential for manipulation and whether tighter regulation was needed. After a two-year investigation, the price reporting agencies last fall agreed to adopt a series of principles to deal with conflicts of interests and other issues.

An 18-month trial period is under way. Compliance is to be monitored by an independent auditor. If the companies don’t go along, regulators may bar them from providing pricing benchmarks to exchanges, which is a source of revenue.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 14, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the day of the raid. It was Tuesday, not Thursday.

The Haggler: Companies That Get Customer Service Right

EVERY few weeks, the Haggler receives e-mail from happy customers eager to praise companies that have treated them well. Given the howls of dismay and fury that typically fill the Haggler’s in-box, these letters are startling and exotic — like finding a yogi in a mosh pit. When enough unsolicited huzzahs pile up, the Haggler likes to present them in a column.

Why? Because the Haggler’s never-ending quest for an improved, more responsive service economy includes the occasional round of applause for companies that get it right.

And further, if all you knew about the consumer experience in this country was learned from this column, you’d never leave the house. Or answer the phone, or order anything online. Which is a highly skewed portrait.

So with that preamble, the Haggler steps aside and hands the microphone to a species that is rarely spotted in this space: the satisfied customer.

Recently, our three-year-old Cuisinart coffee maker started making noises akin to a strangled parrot, and then ended its life with a theatrical puff of smoke, like a magician’s finale. When contacted about this, Cuisinart — which is owned by the Conair Corporation — immediately shipped us a newer and better machine, even though ours was long out of warranty. The company also provided a box to ship the old one back, presumably for an autopsy.

The whole process took less than five days. Well done, Conair. You have a customer for life.

CRAIG STUART-PAUL, Catonsville, Md.

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Several months ago I bought one of those LED light bulbs that are supposed to last a couple of decades. It was a Philips that cost nearly $40 and I expected it to outlast me.

It died after five months. To my surprise, when I called to complain, Philips offered to refund the purchase price plus the sales tax. They asked only that I return the dead bulb, presumably so they could determine why it failed. A couple weeks later, a check for $40 came in the mail, along with a prepaid label for me to return the bulb.

Very impressive.

BILL FARREN, Monroe, Conn.

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You are sort of the Miss Lonelyhearts of the retail world. So, I thought you might like to know that I just bought a ton of stuff from West Elm and it all went flawlessly. I talked to human beings — not answering machines — several of whom called me to arrange delivery times and inform me that back-ordered items had arrived. I thought this might brighten your day a bit.

NANCY LEROY, Montclair, N.J.

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After about five years of faithful service, my TiVo digital video recorder died. The company offered a good price on a replacement if I sent back the dead unit, which I did. However, I neglected to remove the cable card before I shipped the unit. I didn’t realize my error until the new unit arrived.

I sent an e-mail to TiVo, asking if there was any way they might be able to locate my cable card and send it back. They wrote right away and said they would contact the warehouse, but that it might be difficult.

Lo and behold, a week later a package arrived with my cable card, saving me $75 to replace it and earning TiVo my everlasting customer loyalty. This is the way to run a business and retain customers.

PAUL C. MENDELOWITZ, Park Ridge, N.J.

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My husband recently took a flight from Appleton, Wis., to Eugene, Ore., a trip that included a stop in Portland. The Portland-to-Eugene leg was canceled, so he rented a car in Portland and drove to the Eugene airport. He arrived right around 3:30, which was great because that is when I was supposed to pick him up.

We contacted Delta Air Lines and it responded promptly, politely and apologetically and agreed to refund the unused Portland-Eugene ticket. It would not refund the $100 for the rental car and gas, but offered a $100 gift card from a small selection of companies. My husband went with L. L. Bean.

Given what I read in your column, this all seemed amazing.

ELLEN JOHNSON, North Bend, Ore.

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A U.P.S. driver came to my door with a prepaid label to pick up a baby monitor being returned to Amazon. He accidentally took the wrong box, which contained a rather expensive espresso machine, on its way back to Nespresso for repair, sending it to Amazon instead.

One call to customer service and Amazon found a quick way to handle the problem. The company let me pick a new espresso machine from its inventory, and sent it to me, at no cost.

I’ve always loved Amazon. Now I love it even more.

MORRIS TABUSH, Brooklyn

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I bought a General Electric microwave last summer and upon opening the box found that the clear plastic overlay on the control panel was wrinkled and bubbled. This made it hard to read the symbols on the panel. I thought that I could live with this, but it just got more annoying over time.

I decided to call G.E. customer relations with the expectation that I would probably have to ship it back, at considerable cost. The G.E. representative was pleasant and she asked me to remove the serial number label and to send it to her. “We will send you a refund,” she then said. A check arrived soon after.

DAVID SEGAL, Philadelphia

(The writer, whose name really is David Segal, is not related to the Haggler. But the Haggler still hopes that he will immediately cease and desist from using the name. Please, let’s keep the lawyers out of this.)

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See? Some companies know how to cultivate loyalty. The Haggler salutes them. Really. And now, having finished that salute, this column will return to its regular programming, which is delivering the written equivalent of a Dutch rub to any consumer-abusing chuckleheads that need one.

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

Twitter Hacks Force Companies to Confront Security on Social Media

Burger King’s Twitter account had just been hacked. The company’s logo had been replaced by a McDonald’s logo, and rogue announcements began to appear. One was that Burger King had been sold to a competitor; other posts were unprintable.

“Every time this happens, our sales phone lines light up,” said Ryan Holmes, the chief executive of HootSuite, which provides management and security tools for Twitter accounts, including the ability to prevent someone from gaining access to an account. “For big brands, this is a huge liability,” he said, referring to the potential for being hacked.

What happened to Burger King — and, a day later, to Jeep — is every brand manager’s nightmare. While many social media platforms began as a way for ordinary users to share vacation photos and status updates, they have now evolved into major advertising vehicles for brands, which can set up accounts free but have to pay for more sophisticated advertising products.

Burger King and Jeep, owned by Chrysler, are not alone. Other prominent accounts have fallen victim to hacking, including those for NBC News, USA Today, Donald J. Trump, the Westboro Baptist Church and even the “hacktivist” group Anonymous.

Those episodes raised questions about the security of social media passwords and the ease of gaining access to brand-name accounts. Logging on to Twitter is the same process for a company as for a consumer, requiring just a user name and one password.

Twitter, like Facebook, has steadily introduced a number of paid advertising options, raising the stakes for advertisers. Brands that pay to advertise on Twitter are assigned a sales representative to help them manage their accounts, but they are not given any more layers of security than those for a typical user.

Ian Schafer, the founder and chief executive of Deep Focus, a digital advertising company that also fielded a few phone calls from clients concerned about the Burger King attack, argued that Twitter bore some responsibility.

“I think Twitter needs to step up its game in providing better security,” Mr. Schafer said. In a memo to his staff about such attacks, he called on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest “and anyone else serious about having brands on their platform” to “invest time in better understanding how brands operate day to day.”

“It’s also time for these platforms to use their influence to shape security standards on the Web,” he wrote.

The risk for Twitter is in offending potential business partners as the company tries to build its advertising dollars, which make up the bulk of its revenue. In 2012, the company grew more than 100 percent, earning $288.3 million in global advertising revenue, according to eMarketer.

On Wednesday, it introduced a product that would allow advertisers to create and manage ads through third parties like HootSuite, Adobe and Salesforce.com. Advertising is estimated to account for more than 90 percent of the company’s revenue.

“This is not something we take lightly,” said Jim Prosser, a Twitter spokesman, in an interview last month. (The company declined to comment on the Burger King hacking, saying it did not discuss specific accounts.) Mr. Prosser said Twitter had manual and automatic controls in place to identify malicious content and fake accounts, but acknowledged that the practice was more art than science.

Mr. Prosser said Twitter had taken an active role in combating the biggest sources of malicious content.

Last year, the company sued those responsible for five of the most-used spamming tools on the site. “With this suit, we’re going straight to the source,” it said in a statement. “We hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter.”

But security experts say, and the recent hacks of Burger King, Jeep and other brands have demonstrated, that Twitter could do more.

Some Companies Seek to Wean Employees From Their Smartphones

Atos, an international information technology company, plans to phase out all e-mails among employees by the end of 2013 and rely instead on other forms of communication. And starting in the new year, employees at Daimler, the German automaker, can have incoming e-mail automatically deleted during vacations so they do not return to a flooded in-box. An automatic message tells the sender which person is temporarily dealing with the employee’s e-mail.

No one is expected to be on call at all hours of the day and night, and “switching off” after work is important, “even if you are on a business trip,” said Sabrina Schrimpf, a Daimler spokeswoman, referring to the company’s recently released report, “Balanced! — Reconciling Employees’ Work and Private Lives.”

Disconnecting can be more challenging for business travelers who frequently work across time zones.

And there is a ripple effect, said Leslie A. Perlow, a professor of leadership at Harvard Business School and the author of “Sleeping With Your Smartphone.” “These guys fly in the middle of the night and send e-mails back to colleagues” who wait up, ready to respond.

A study conducted last spring by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project found that while mobile phones were valued as a way to stay productive, there were downsides to being available at all times. The nationwide survey of 2,254 adults found that 44 percent of cellphone owners had slept with their phone next to their bed and that 67 percent had experienced “phantom rings,” checking their phone even when it was not ringing or vibrating. Still, the proportion of cellphone owners who said they “could live without it” has gone up, to 37 percent from 29 percent in 2006.

Sam Chapman, chief executive of Empower Public Relations in Chicago, said he used to feel phantom vibrations and frequently read and sent e-mail on his BlackBerry in the middle of the night. He slept poorly, did not feel refreshed in the morning and considered himself addicted. “I wanted to make sure that what happened to me didn’t happen to my employees,” he said.

So Mr. Chapman adopted what he called a BlackBerry blackout policy. He and his staff of about 20 turn off their BlackBerrys from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. on weekdays and completely on weekends for all work-related use, with rare exceptions. “When I’m well rested, I show up to work ready to go,” he said.

He maintains that regimen while traveling, and said the policy had increased company productivity.

Professor Perlow agreed that companies could improve their bottom line by encouraging employees to disconnect at times. “Being constantly on actually undermines productivity,” she said.

But it is not always easy. In early 2012, when Michelle Barry, Mark Jacobsen and a third partner created Centric Brand Anthropology, a Seattle-based company that advises clients on brand strategy, design and culture management, they gave serious thought to the issue.

“A huge priority for us was to have a good balance between work-life,” said Mr. Jacobsen, Centric’s vice president and creative director. “Yet we have found that very difficult to do while working with large multinational clients,” which often require international travel and constant availability.

Being a start-up compounded those challenges. “Just because you can e-mail at 2 a.m., doesn’t mean it’s a good thing,” he said.

Centric encourages employees to prepare a week before a trip, designating a colleague as backup, informing clients about their travel plans, and trying to avoid deadlines immediately after they return. Employees are also encouraged to take spouses or partners on longer assignments and to build in downtime, said Ms. Barry, the company’s president and chief executive. When traveling, she said, “I make a commitment to myself not to stay up all night answering e-mails.”

Experts say there is no firm data for how many companies have policies restricting the use of electronic devices outside the office. “The companies I know actively encourage workers to stay connected after hours and on weekends,” said Dennis J. Garritan, a managing partner of the private equity firm Palmer Hill Capital and an adjunct professor at Harvard Business School.

Compensation for Chief Legal Officers at Large Texas Companies Up 11 Percent

General counsel who are among the highest-paid executives at large Texas companies earned more on average in 2011 than in 2010, according to Texas Lawyer's annual Corporate Roster, which reports on GC compensation.

Compensation for chief legal officers at 51 large Texas companies averaged $2,198,109 in 2011, up 11.8 percent compared to an average of $1,966,590 at 48 large Texas companies in 2010.

It's the second year in a row that average total compensation for the GCs improved on a year-to-year basis, following two years of declines, and the highest average since 2007, when compensation averaged $1,991,410 for 51 general counsel at 51 Texas companies.

GC pay packages continue to exceed the average profits per partner at large Texas firms. In 2011, partners in the 25 highest-grossing firms in Texas made $924,280 on average, which is less than half of the $2,198,109 average compensation for the GCs at large Texas companies in 2011.

Wayne Watts, senior executive vice president and general counsel at AT&T Inc. in Dallas, heads the list of Texas' highest-paid GCs, with compensation totaling $8,505,373 in 2011, including equity valued at $3,407,689.

In an emailed statement, AT&T writes that it "remains committed to paying for performance, and Mr. Watts' compensation reflects this: in 2011, more than 85 percent of his target compensation was tied to performance.

"Mr. Watts' compensation also reflects his responsibilities as general counsel of one of the world's largest telecom companies and the 12th largest corporation in the United States. During 2011 he effectively guided the company's regulatory filings and compliance matters in addition to providing support for day-to-day operations and M&A activity -- and successfully managed litigation matters, including 158 appeals to various Federal and State Courts of Appeal and 10 to the United States Supreme Court."

Right behind Watts on the best-paid list are Robert Reeves of Anadarko Petroleum Corp.; Larry Hutchison of Torchmark Corp.; and John Wombwell of Plains Exploration and Production Co.

All but six of the 51 general counsel on the best-paid list racked up at least $1 million in compensation in 2011, including the value of their equity compensation. That's more than in 2010, when 40 of the 48 general counsel on the best-paid list earned more than $1 million in compensation.

Texas Lawyer has reported on general counsel compensation in the annual Corporate Roster for the past 20 years.