European antitrust regulators have come out with their objections to Oracle Corp.'s (NASDAQ:ORCL) pending $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA), as expected. Another not-so-big surprise: Oracle is coming out swinging.

In a statement issued Monday afternoon in response to the European Commission's objections (which Sun flagged in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission), Oracle accused the EC of having a "profound misunderstanding of both database competition and open source dynamics." European regulators' primary concern is the effect that acquiring Sun's MySQL database management software unit will have on competition, as Oracle is a leader in the database market.

For Rupert Murdoch, new media has not been so kind to News Corp. (NYSE:NWS). A thinly sourced Financial Times story highlights how MySpace continues to drag down the media conglomerate -- which happens to also own the FT's chief rival, The Wall Street Journal.

Murdoch is also in the news Monday for telling reporters that when News Corp. launches its paid strategy, it will probably remove its sites from Google Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOG) search engine index.

IAC/InteractiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) CEO Barry Diller is bullish on content production for the growing Internet and traditional broadcast television models. The brash executive is so excited about the area that he sees his firm getting more for less, saying he's willing to spend less than 10% of his company's $1.8 billion in cash reserves on deals for content production companies.

Diller's ambition to make small deals in content production companies was overshadowed Tuesday by his other announcement that he was willing to part ways with struggling search engine Ask.com.

Look for IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) to unload its Ask.com search engine rather than confront what even chairman and CEO Barry Diller admitted Tuesday was a "speculative" future.

While a sale wouldn't deliver anything near the $1.85 billion that IAC paid to buy Ask.com predecessor Ask Jeeves five years ago, its fourth-ranking 3.9% share of the market has no doubt stirred up interest from search's top three.

Analysts expect solid performance from Amazon.com Inc.'s (AMZN) third quarter results, due for disclosure at a conference call at 5:00 p.m. ET on Thursday. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters on average expect earnings of 33 cents per share on $5.03 billion in revenue.

In July, Amazon said it would acquire online shoe-seller Zappos.com Inc. for about $850 million in stock and cash. It's the online retailer's first major deal since it bought Audible.com Inc. for $300 million in 2008.

Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ:ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison apparently just couldn't sit around any longer and watch his prey -- in this case, Sun Microsystems Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) -- suffer.

Ellison, who said last month that every month the $7.4 billion acquisition is delayed amounts to a $100 million loss for Sun, visited Brussels yesterday for a meeting with European Union Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes about the deal, according to a Bloomberg report.

No. 2 search engine provider Yahoo Inc.'s (NASDAQ:YHOO) third-quarter earnings, due Tuesday after the closing bell, are likely to stand in stark contrast to the stellar results announced by category-leading Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) last week.

Analysts anticipate that this will be the fourth consecutive quarter in which Yahoo's net revenue fell below the preceding quarter's, AP technology writer Michael Liedtke points out.

Analyst estimates for IBM Corp.'s (NYSE:IBM) third quarter have been rising over the last month, with the consensus now at $2.38 per share. The company reports earnings on Thursday.

"IBM has improved its gross profit margin in 19 of the last 20 quarters," reports iStockAnalyst. "That shows it has aggressively controlled costs while finding ways to squeeze more money from its products. Positive gross margin trend is likely to have continued in the September 2009 quarter as well."

As prospects brighten for IT spending next year, big hardware vendors have been coming out of the woodwork and laying the groundwork for growth with some big M&A plays. Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) struck its biggest deal in two years with Thursday's agreement to buy Tandberg ASA (TADBF.PK). Xerox Inc. (XRX) came out with its largest deal ever Monday with the $6.6 billion purchase of Affiliated Computer Services Inc. (ACS), while last week Dell Inc. (DELL) offered $3.9 billion to acquire Perot Systems Corp. (PER).

Could the same be around the corner for the semiconductor sector? Conditions are starting to look up for chipmakers, which have been saddled with the worst downturn in demand for their products in over a decade. The industry's trade association noted Friday that industrywide sales last month were $19.1 billion, a 5% climb from July's figure. While that still represents a 16.1% decline from August 2008, the rate of decline is flattening.

Larry Ellison loves IBM Corp. (NYSE:IBM), but what he'd love even more is to beat the technology giant on as many fronts as possible.

At a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley Monday night, the Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ:ORCL) CEO idolized Thomas J. Watson, who developed IBM into one of the most powerful sales organizations and served as its president from the 1920s through the 1950s.

Fresh on the heels of buying ReCaptcha, Google Inc. (GOOG) is reportedly in the midst of snatching up Brightcove for between $500 million and $700 million.

The report seems to originate with a message sent on Twitter by Mark Glaser, the executive editor of PBS MediaShift and Idea Lab, who is known as @mediatwit on Twitter: "Source with knowledge of deal tells me video service Brightcove in talks with Google about buyout in $500m to $700m range," tweeted Glaser on Wednesday.

The Dolan family has tried on three occasions to take Cabelvision Systems Corp. (NYSE:CVC) private but failed. So would the Dolan family ever let go of their much beloved Cablevision? According to a feature in Barron's, it is a very real possibility.

The article suggests that the country's fifth-largest cable company could be an attractive takeover target now that it has decided to spin off its Madison Square Garden unit, which includes the New York arena, MSG Television Network, and the National Hockey League's New York Rangers and National Basketball Association's Knicks. Barron's says that a spinoff of MSG would make Cablevision's balance sheet much more attractive to both Wall Street investors and potential acquirers, Comcast Corp. (NASDAQ:CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable Inc. (NYSE:TWC).

Two months after chipmaker Broadcom Corp. (NASDAQ:BRCM) gave up its hostile, $912 million takeover pursuit of Emulex Corp. (NYSE:ELX), the company has slapped its unwilling target with a patent infringment suit.

In a press release issued Monday after market close, Broadcom accused Emulex of infringing 10 of its patents related to high-speed data and storage networking technologies. The company said it is seeking unspecified monetary damages and injunctive relief from Emulex's alleged infringements.

Twitter Inc. co-founder Biz Stone outlined the company's plans to generate revenues when speaking with reporters in Mexico City earlier this week.

The trendy microblogging service attracted 20 million users in June and has drawn a reported $55 million in venture capital since its founding three and a half years ago, but it has yet to make money.

Eric Schmidt has been making the rounds, it appears. The Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) chief recently sat down for a wide-ranging interview with TechCrunch, and now he's telling Japanese paper The Nikkei that the Internet search leader has "begun seriously looking at acquisitions again," particularly among venture-backed companies that are poised for growth in the cloud computing realm.

Though it has struck a few deals in the past months, including the $106.5 million purchase of video compression software developer On2 Technologies Inc. last month, Schmidt back in April had signaled that Google would be taking a step back from M&A because prices had not sunk low enough. His words echoed those of Google vice president of corporate development David Lawee a few months earlier. But apparently it's time to go shopping now, with economic conditions on an apparent upswing.

The worker bees at Sun Microsystems Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) are biting their nails. As one Sun employee told me Tuesday, the EU's deadline to approve Oracle Corp.'s (NASDAQ:ORCL) $7.4 billion bid for the server maker is Thursday. Assuming the deal gets approval, "all hell breaks loose" as Oracle moves to quickly close the deal and employees learn who has a post-merger job and who doesn't, the Sun source said.

It might not happen that fast, however. A Reuters report Tuesday afternoon, citing unnamed sources, said the European antitrust authority could delay approval over concerns about Oracle taking over MySQL, Sun's open source database management software. Combining this with Oracle's own leading position in database offerings apparently, if Reuters' sources are right, is giving the EU heartburn.

TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ:TIVO) has had a shaky foundation for much of its life. While it revolutionized the entertainment industry with its digital video recorder that first hit the markets in the late 1990s, it has not been as fortunate as other tech trailblazers, often leaving industry observers to wonder if its story will end in bankruptcy.

The problem for TiVo is the harsh reality that almost all satellite and cable companies now offer their own similar, and less expensive, generic DVR service. For example Time Warner Cable Inc. (NYSE:TWC) utilizes devices from Cisco System Inc.'s (NYSE:CSCO) Scientific Atlanta, and Verizon Communications Inc.'s (NYSE:VZ) FiOS TV service uses Motorola Inc. (NYSE:MOT) boxes.