Items tagged with European-Commission
Have you ever tried to buy a game but found that it was not available in your region for some unknown reason? This may be due to a practice Valve’s game platform Steam does, called “geo-blocking.” This is done to lock out certain countries from getting a particular game or to manage pricing worldwide. The European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, took issue with the latter and has now fined the gaming company approximately $1.9 million. According to the European Commission website, “geo-blocking” is how a company “segment[s] markets along national borders and to increase profits to the detriment of foreign customers.” They claim that Valve,...
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It's hard for many of us to trust the studies that seem to come out on a daily basis covering a variety of topics. You can find studies on the same subject that come down on completely different sides of the topic depending on who funded them. You might expect a study commissioned by the European Commission (EC) to be made public no matter what the results were, but that certainly wasn't the case with an EC study conducted back in 2015 looking into a link between digital piracy and the decline in legal sales. Why was the report unpublished to the public for two years? The reason is simple: The study found no link between illegal downloads and a reduction in legitimate purchases of digital goods...
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Facebook is feeling the burn today thanks to actions taken by the European Union. The company came under fire both at home and abroad when it announced last year WhatsApp would begin sharing user information with its parent (which just so happens to be Facebook). This flew in the face of comments that WhatsApp made when Facebook acquired the company in March 2014. With this in mind, the EU has decided to fine Facebook for its transgressions, which include “providing incorrect or misleading information” during the European Commission’s investigation into the merger. Getting to the nitty gritty, the Commission found that Facebook flat out lied when it said that users shouldn’t be worried about...
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The EU does not fool around when it comes to handing out fines, and it also apparently does not second-guess itself. The European Commission levied a hefty fine of 1.06 billion euro (or roughly $1.44 billion USD) at Intel for anti-competitive practices back in 2009, and after years of legal supplication, the decision has been upheld according to Reuters. Intel was found to have unacceptably fought rival AMD in the processor market by giving rebates to PC makers in exchange for those companies using primarily CPUs made by Intel--and concealing it. European Commission building "The General Court considers that none of the arguments raised by Intel supports the conclusion that the fine imposed is...
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A federal judge has ruled that Apple is guilty of conspiring with publishers to raise the prices of ebooks from late 2009 to early 2010, which is a violation of antitrust laws and lands Apple in hot water. U.S. District Judge Denise Cote wrote in her decision, "Apple chose to join forces with the publisher defendants to raise ebook prices and equipped them with the means to do so. Without Apple's orchestration of this conspiracy, it would not have succeeded as it did." According to Reuters, Apple’s price-fixing conspiracy was pushing Amazon’s ebook prices from about $9.99 to between $12.99 and $14.99 due to Apple’s “agency agreements” with publishers that allowed...
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The race towards gigabit Internet continues as Google Fiber slowly proliferates and other ISPs work to catch up, but Samsung announced that it’s actually looking at gigabit speeds--for mobile devices. Indeed, Samsung says it has been testing a 5G mobile communications system, the eventual successor to 4G LTE that is capable of up to 1Gbps. The 5G technology, dubbed mmWave, runs in millimeter Ka bands and requires a “broad range” of frequencies but operates at 28GHz, delivering up to 1.056Gbps for up to 2 kilometers. It uses adaptive array transceiver technology with 64 antenna elements. (Image credit: variety.thaiza.com) Of course, this is all in the testing phase, so don’t...
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According to a Reuters report, the European Commission is planning to level fines at six major electronics companies that participated in a price-fixing scheme for CRT displays in the late ‘90s. The apparently guilty parties include LG Electronics, Philips, Samsung SDI, France’s Thomson, Panasonic, and Toshiba. Presumably, the companies have all been bracing for this inevitability, as they were raided by the European Commission five years ago, and the day of reckoning is likely to be November 28th. European Commission building It’s unclear how much the sanctions against the companies may be, but because of the length of time over which the price fixing occurred, they may be...
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You have to hand it to the European Commission--those folks are not shy about going after tech companies with guns blazing if they believe there have been antitrust violations. The latest alleged offense is a bit of a doozy, as it pertains to a baker’s dozen optical drive companies selling their wares in Europe; the EC believes they may have colluded in a worldwide cartel. No companies have been fingered by name, but an EC press release indicates that there were two major OEMs organizing a bid rigging endeavor that has lasted five years. Bid rigging is “one of the most serious breaches of EU antitrust rules”, and the EC is concerned that it affected customers who bought drives...
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It’s a good bet that someone’s head at Microsoft is going to roll because of this one: Whether it was an honest mistake--a “technical error”, as Microsoft said in a press release--or some half-baked nefarious plot to cripple Web browser competition, the European Commission is displeased with Microsoft’s failure to comply with a 2009 edict that the company allow users overseas to choose their preferred browser when starting up their Windows machine instead of being handed Internet Explorer by default. Microsoft had to add a Browser Choice Screen (BCS) on its Windows PCs sold in Europe, and as far as anyone can tell, the company abided by the ruling--until Windows...
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