Recently in EU Category

At CTIA, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin ("K-Mart") announced his intent to deny Skype's petition for a declaratory ruling that would apply "Carterfone" rules to wireless networks, meaning the Big Four couldn't interfere with Skype software on iPhones or BlackBerries. Maybe this was a message to Skype, "stay off their lawn."

Skype didn't get the message. According to this press release, they're testing mass-market VoIP software in a number of countries.

Following recent moves to extend Skype? conversations to a wide variety of new mobile and wireless devices, Skype is taking another major step as it continues to merge its internet communications software with mobile phones. Today, the company released a beta version of Skype for your mobile, a mobile "thin" client that works on about 50 of the most popular Java-enabled mobile phones from Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson.

The beta version of Skype for your mobile is available worldwide with a feature set that includes chat, group chat, presence (seeing when your contacts are online), and receiving calls from Skype users, and through SkypeIn.* Additional features, which include the making of Skype-to-Skype and SkypeOut calls from the mobile handsets, are initially supported in seven markets: Brazil (Rio de Janeiro), Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

  Now, note that this doesn't include the US. Maybe because of K-Mart's intentions to let the Big Four block Skype traffic, maybe because they want to see how it goes elsewhere first. But no matter what, when that 700mhz phone market opens up, expect Skype to get huge. You'll be able to have a landline, mobile, and portable number on any device you can think of. Now that's competition.

In an ideal world, they could only hold your data for six months, according to recommendations of a European Commission advisory board, as noted by the BBC.

Search engines should delete personal data held about their users within six months, a European Commission advisory body on data protection has said.

The recommendation is likely to be accepted by the European Commission and could lead to a clash with search giants like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Google and Yahoo anonymise user data after 18 months, while MSN does the same after 13 months.

The body said search companies were not clear enough on data protection.

Google said its privacy policy "strikes the right balance" between privacy, security and innovation.

Do they mean innovation in search, or innovation in selling ads? Is that why you index your users' email to provide them keyword-based ads, Mr. Fleischer? You mean security, not privacy. Privacy would mean that your systems don't scan every piece of mail to serve up contextual ads that have to do with the messages they're viewing. Privacy would mean that Google probably couldn't monetize nearly as much as it has. Privacy is the opposite of revenue for an operation like Google.Can we please stop using cookies as the be-all and end-all of privacy? Cookies are benign. You can set a short lifetime, but collect incredible loads of data with it. You can also collect cookies from other sites to see what your users are doing when they aren't on your pages. 

In 2004, the EU did what the US DOJ suddenly lost the courage to do after the Bush administration took over and fined Microsoft 497 million Euros for abusing what was then a 95% monopoly on desktop software.

Microsoft paid the fine, and simply kept doing the same thing, keeping Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer "in the box" and even further integrating them into their operating system. In the EU, this is an illegal business practice. They knew this, and didn't care, because I guess some accountant figured that they would still make a profit if they paid the fines while crushing competition.

In 2007, they were fined another 280.5 million Euros for non-compliance, which Microsoft appealed, and lost.

This latest penalty is the largest amount of money that any company has had to pay, and the first time a company has been able to treat such penalties as "the cost of doing business." That's right, normal corporations learn their lesson. Microsoft? Not so much. Money quote, from Reuters:

"Microsoft was the first company in 50 years of EU competition policy that the Commission has had to fine for failure to comply with an antitrust decision," Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement.

For years after the decision Microsoft said it was making every effort to comply with the Commission's orders.

"Talk is cheap, flouting the rules is expensive," Kroes said. "We don't want talk and promises. We want compliance."

I wonder if the much-ballyhooed "interoperability" announcement and release of some binary specs is an attempt to avoid further fines, now that it appears they will continue to get bigger and bigger. The fines, I mean. Not Microsoft.