Tag archive: European Commission

It hasn't been a good day for Samsung in its protracted, multinational patent battle with Apple: a German court has upheld (German) an injunction barring the sale of its Galaxy Tab 10.1 and 8.9 in Germany, and the European Commission has announced it is launching a formal investigation into whether Samsung is abusing patents it pledged to 3G standards for licensing under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. First up, a… Read More

The European Commission has outlined a proposal for reforming data protection laws in the European Union, touting the move as a way to both protect consumers' and individuals' privacy as well as save businesses billions every year by reducing the overhead needed to comply with current regulations. As outlined by EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding, the proposed laws would make data protection requirements uniform across the… Read More

The European Commission has temporarily suspended its initial January 10, 2012 deadline to approve or disapprove Google's pending merger with Motorola Mobility. According to Bloomberg, EC spokesperson Amelia Torres says the European Commission's antitrust authority will restart the review process after it has obtained additional documents regarding the transaction. In addition, the commission has published a notice in the European… Read More

Speaking at the Freedom Online conference at The Hague, European Commissioner Neelie Kroes called for the European Union to develop and distribute technology to help bloggers and others living under oppressive regimes to communicate safely—and anonymously—with the rest of the world. Kroes outlined a four-part strategy that included not only developing technology to aid in communication, but also teaching activists how to use it, developing… Read More

Remember back in early 2010 when Apple launched iBookstore? The idea of selling electronic books wasn't new — the Kindle, Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble Nook, and other e-readers were already on the market, along with their associated book stores and third-party efforts like Google Books. But one thing that made consumers' jaws drop when Apple unveiled iBookstore was the price tags: New releases were initially priced at $12.99 to… Read More

French search engine 1PlusV says it has launched a €295 million (US$418 million) lawsuit against Google, claiming the Internet giant leveraged its dominance of the Internet search market to stifle competition. The French company develops a number of niche search sites, including the ejustice.fr legal search engine, says Google's business practices have hindered the company in developing verticalized search engines in particular nice… Read More

Once the anticompetitive super-villain of the technology industry, Microsoft now finds itself on the other side of the battle after the company filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google on Thursday that accuses the search giant of taking measures to push out Microsoft and other competitors in the European market. Microsoft first announced its plans to file the suit with the European Commission on Wednesday in a blog post by Microsoft senior vice… Read More

Google is already facing antitrust scrutiny in Europe over how sites get ranked in Google's search results; now, France's 1PlusV is adding more fuel to the fire, filing a new complaint with the European Commission that Google deliberately prevents companies using vertical search technology from using AdSense. 1PlusV is the search engine company behind Ejustice.fr, and is also a party to the existing antitrust investigation the EC… Read More

Internet giant Google has run into increasing amounts of friction with the European Union, with the European Union launching a formal antitrust investigation almost a year ago. The EU's scrutiny has focused not only on the company's Google Books and Google Street View projects, but has also spilled over into the company's core online advertising business and even looking into whether the company demotes competitors in search… Read More

A new study released by the European Commission finds that while most Internet filtering software does a good job of blocking access to particular Web sites, the technology is significantly less successful at filtering “Web 2.0″ content like social networking services and blogs. And just to make parents more nervous, only a handful of products can do anything about filtering content to mobile phones, portable devices, or game… Read More

As billions of handsets and and thousands of mobile phone models have filled the pockets (and, eventually, the landfills) of the world, they've been accompanied by another device: phone chargers. And as anyone who has owned more than one phone can probably attest, most of those chargers only work on one or two phones. Now, the European Commission has put the final touches on an agreement between fourteen leading phone manufacturers to… Read More

In these days when it seems people live their entire lives in full view of the global Internet via services like Facebook and Twitter, the European Union is working on a framework to strengthen protections for personal data—including a “right to be forgotten,” meaning that individuals' data should be removed when no longer needed and that individual would have a right to demand their data be deleted. “The… Read More

The European Commission has laid out the rules and policy proposals it hopes will guide the development of broadband development in Europe for the next decade, calling for basic broadband access to be available by 2013 and 30 Mbps minimum broadband to be available by 2020. The proposal also sets aside portions of the 800 MHz spectrum band—currently being vacated by analog television broadcasters—and dedicates them to mobile… Read More

IBM might have launched the PC revolution back in the dark ages by sparking an industry of “IBM compatible” personal computers, but the company hasn't been a real presence in the PC market ever since it sold its ThinkPad business to Lenovo — which that company has turned into a serious enterprise. However, that doesn't mean IBM is out of the computing biz: The company is well known for its server products and for its… Read More

The European Commission has filed a “statement of objections” to Oracle's planned takeover of Sun Microsystems, saying the takeover would give Oracle too much influence over the market for database product by putting the company in charge of both its own proprietary database systems as well as the open source MySQL database owned by Sun. The statement is part of a preliminary assessment of the Oracle-Sun deal that the EC… Read More