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Each year, 24/7 Wall St. identifies 10 important American brands that we predict are going to disappear within a year. This year’s list reflects the brutally competitive nature of certain industries and the reason why companies cannot afford to fall behind in efficiency, innovation or financing...

What the net-neut obsessives refuse to recognize is that anticompetitive intent isn't worth worrying about if an anticompetitive result isn't possible. If AT&T were "double-dipping," or charging sender and recipient for the same data, as some allege, its rivals would quickly copy its innovation and compete away any excess revenues. If AT&T were to degrade websites that don't pay up, its rivals would pounce and steal AT&T's dissatisfied customers.

T-Mobile USA will merge with smaller rival MetroPCS Communications Inc., a deal that would give the fourth-largest U.S. wireless carrier more scale as it tries to compete with the industry's leaders.

Each year, 24/7 Wall St. identifies 10 important American brands that we predict will to disappear within a year. This year’s list reflects the brutally competitive nature of certain industries and the reason why companies cannot afford to fall behind in efficiency, innovation or financing. American Airlines will disappear in 2013 because of its inefficiency. It was the premier carrier in the United States for almost 30 years — even surviving through periods when most other carriers went bankrupt. However, it lost its critical advantage of scale when Northwest merged with Delta (NYSE: DAL) and Continental merged with United (NYSE:...

If anyone reading this owns a ZTE Score M Android smartphone, your device has been found to include a backdoor allowing root access without user authentication.The discovery of the backdoor comes via a post on the text storage website Pastebin. It has since been confirmed via Reddit by Justin Case of Cunning Logic and TeamAndIRC. He has confirmed with someone at ZTE that the backdoor does indeed exist and that a fix is in the works.The question that needs to be asked is, why is it there at all?Apparently the handset includes a hard-coded password that allows access to a...

HELP! My MetroPCS phone just died. The weird thing is that tonight I was actually going to contact the Nokia company to tell them about my miracle phone that next month would have been 4 years old and AMAZINGLY used the same battery. Sooooo... When I got home, the phone finally died. Its not the battery. I'm sure it is the phone. I'll get another MetroPCS phone tomorrow but what really worries me is my contact info in the phone. Can it be transferred from a dead MetroPCS phone to another MetroPCS phone?

The $116 billion business of selling cell phone calls in the U.S. faces a long, ugly decline. That petrifies just about everyone in the industry except Roger Linquist.With his gray hair and grandfatherly demeanor, Roger Linquist hardly seems like the kind of guy to kneecap a $116 billion industry. Yet the 71- year-old chief executive of MetroPCS cheerfully and brazenly promises to do just that. He aims to bring down the lucrative business of selling cellular phone calls, a business that for four decades has grown bigger and richer with every passing year. MetroPCS, which Linquist founded 15 years ago,...

Regional prepaid cell phone carrier MetroPCS announced Wednesday a new plan that allows its customers to make unlimited international calls to over 100 different countries for only $5 extra a month. To be eligible for the $5 unlimited international calling plan, users must already be signed up to an unlimited national calling plan that costs $40, $45, or $50 a month. Making international phone calls from a cell phone has typically been rather expensive with major carriers such as AT&T and Verizon Wireless. For example, AT&T offers its WorldConnect service for $3.99 extra a month, which gives subscribers lower rates...