Tag: EU

European regulators have approved Google's plan to buy online advertising giant DoubleClick. The acquisition, which has been in the works for the better part of a year will solidify Google's dominance in the advertising field. Right now Google makes most of its money through its lucrative contextual advertising system. The DoubleClick acquisition will help Google move into display ads, an area ...

After ruling that Microsoft has failed to comply with a 2004 antitrust order, the European Union has added $1.3 billion to the fines already owed by Microsoft. That brings the total to about $2.5 billion, or just slightly more than pocket change to Bill Gates. A few years back, EU regulators had decided that Microsoft was abusing its position as the number one operating system provider by bundling ...

The European Union has faith in BitTorrent. So much so that it's donating $22 Million to help us be able to steal share files. The BBC is one of the biggest investors, figuring that since people download TV shows now anyway, they should probably try to get in on it. Which makes sense. Nobody watches TV on TV's anymore; it's like listening to music on CDs. And when you see someone walking around ...

If you're a file pirate living in the EU, you may have reason to celebrate. Juliane Kokott, Advocate General to the European Court of Justice declared today that European ISPs cannot be forced to reveal the identity behind accounts identified for sharing copyright protected material. The statement was directed to a panel of judges mulling over the legality of a Spanish file-sharing case, and ...

The European Union's data protection advisory group sent a letter to Google this month asking why the company keeps records of user searches for up to two years. The underlying issue here is whether Google and other search engines are violating users' privacy rights by maintaining search records, even if those records are used to improve the user experience by offering personalized search ...

It's taken two years for this to happen, but ODF has finally been approved as a standard format by the International Organization for Standardization. The OpenDocument Format is now poised to be readily adopted throughout Europe, as the EU recognizes the formats recognized by the ISO. BetaNews has the story, plus a great quote from ODF Alliance executive Director Mario Marcich, "We believe ...

In his 2006 New Year's address, French President Jacques Chirac apparently focused on Quaero, a new search engine being built by "some of the top tech labs in France and Germany." The project is ambitious, to say the least, reportedly providing "an array of multimedia tools for identifying and indexing images, sound and text," including "a powerful translating tool which ...