ACTA has taken a blow already today with the resignation of the French MEP (Member of European Parliament) who was in charge of investigating the bill. On his Web site, Kader Arif posted a statement titled, “ACTA: A masquerade I …

ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, has just been signed in by the European Union. ACTA, for those who don’t know, is kind of like SOPA’s big brother. It’s a multi-national trade agreement that seeks to protect copyright through a brutish …

If you could erase all your personal data on the Internet, would you? The BBC is reporting that a new law is going to be proposed to the EU on Wednesday. It would include the provision for a “right to …

Google may or may not face a “statement of objections” from the EU’s antitrust department. Apparently it could go either way, as the regulators have so far been unable to decide whether or not to go this route. I guess …

The group that’s fined companies like Microsoft and Intel billions of euros in the past few years might reach a less harsh solution where its antitrust probe of Google is concerned.  Rumors indicate that Google and the European Commission are holding talks.

Note: these rumors are very much unproven, with even the unnamed source who leaked them indicating that negotiations aren’t far along.  Google could still be in a lot of trouble.

Even if Facebook’s received the lion’s share of attention from privacy advocates today, a group of European data protection authorities hasn’t forgotten about Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.  The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party said earlier they’re still not obeying an EU data protection directive.

The companies are all supposed to anonymize search data after no more than six months.  Google’s keeping it for nine, instead, and the Working Party asserted in an open letter to the search giant that it’s doing a poor job of anonymization afterward.

Maybe Microsoft won’t get fined a gazillion dollars by the European Union, after all.  The software giant is supposedly making an attempt to settle two antitrust probes, and according to the same report, even has a firm cut-off date in mind. 

The Google Book Search team may have access to all sorts of literature, but the simple term "clear sailing" is probably fading from members’ vocabulary.  Another obstacle has come up as the European Union has decided to study if a recent settlement complies with local copyright law. 

In about five months’ time, the current agreement between ICANN and the U.S. government will expire.  At that point, Viviane Reding, the European Union’s Commissioner for Information Society and Media, is hoping ICANN will become a fully independent organization with a more international support network. 

The vote’s been tallied, and the European Union’s new Safer Internet program turned out to be roughly as controversial as claiming that water’s wet.  While almost three percent of members abstained, a full 96 percent of the European Parliament agreed to spend 55 million to protect children online.

It’s not hard to imagine Google and the EU as an out-of-shape individual and a tough personal trainer.  Since Google decided to hold onto personally identifiable search data for nine months instead of 18, the European entity is praising its progress, but at the same time, pushing for even more of a reduction.

Storing news articles from properties managed by Belgium’s Copiepresse returned as an issue for Google, as the newspaper group wants damages for Google’s normal indexing of their content.

A third of European consumers are being misled or ripped off by Web sites selling airline tickets, according to EU Consumer Commissioner Meglena Kuneva.

"It is unacceptable that one in three consumers going to book a plane ticket online is being ripped off or misled and confused," Kuneva told a news conference.

The dominant search advertising company worked on convincing members of a European Parliament Committee that its DoubleClick purchase won’t infringe on people’s privacy.

European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes isn’t quite ready to rubber-stamp Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick.

Privacy considerations for Internet users suffer from a lack of a global standard, leaving it to companies to try and figure out what they should be doing.

Several years of contentious litigation over Microsoft’s business practices in Europe have finally yielded a compromise between the two sides.

November 13th will be the new date for the European Union Competition Commission to give its decision on Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, based on the Commission’s perception of competition issues.

The proposed DoubleClick purchase has put Google back on its heels as people assail the blockbuster deal on several fronts.

Peter Fleischer, Google’s top global privacy counsel, said data retention issues are of no concern to a European privacy watchdog group.

When the European Union confronted Google over its data retention policies, some people – including Google’s own global privacy counsel – wondered why Yahoo, Microsoft, and a number of other companies were left alone.  Now it appears that the EU is going to take a look at them, after all.