Early this year British Telecommunications agreed to transfer more than 14, 000 of its worldwide patents to IPValue Management, a company in Mountain View, California.

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The meeting also included representatives from the British National Technical Authority for Information Assurance, the agency that ensures British telecommunications security, and government representatives from Canada, Australia, France and Germany.

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There are questions however about how effective this directive will be in facilitating competition, because the two incumbents with the biggest cable operations, Deutsche Telekom (DT) and British Telecommunications, have already announced their plans to divest their cable operations.

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In a behind-the-scenes struggle with officials of the party he helped put in power in Belize, Ashcroft is trying to hold on to, and possibly even expand, his monopoly on providing telecommunications in the tax haven and former British colony.

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