Items tagged with European-Commission
Investigations into Apple, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), and Meta, three of the six tech giants the EU named as “gatekeepers,” are underway for possibly breaching the Digital Markets Act (DMA). A few of the shortcomings listed are Apple’s rules on steering in the App Store, Alphabet’s rules on steering in Google...
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The European Union’s DMA, which officially goes into effect today, requires Apple to permit third party app stores, such as Epic Games Store, on its platform. Epic had planned to bring the Epic Games Store and Fortnite to iOS devices in Europe under the DMA rules. However, in what Epic calls “a serious violation of...
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Microsoft's Activision Blizzard deal may be in jeopardy, as the European Commission launches an "in-depth" investigation into the buyout. The European Commission announced its more in-depth investigation into the deal in order to assess its likely impact on competition.
The deal for Microsoft to buy out Activision...
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Slowly but surely, Apple has begun trending towards a future where USB Type-C is the default charging standard, though not on its iPhone devices. That could change with the iPhone 14 (or whatever comes after the newly announced iPhone 13 series—perhaps an iPhone 13s lineup?), if the European Commission pushes through...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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;...
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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...
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