May 2012

Google must submit remedies within weeks to assuage European Union regulators’ antitrust concerns to avoid a formal complaint and possible fines, EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said. Almunia asked the company to send him proposals within “a matter of weeks” to eliminate concerns that Google promotes its own specialist “vertical” search services, that it copies rival content including travel and restaurant reviews and that its contracts with software developers prevent ads from being moved to different services. “I am today giving Google an opportunity to offer remedies to address concerns we have already identified,” Almunia told reporters today in Brussels. “Any final proposal by Google will be market tested before it’s made legally binding by the commission.”

See new link below to release from Joaquín Almunia Vice President of the European Commission responsible for Competition Policy.

In many ways Facebook is a very American success: forged at Harvard, warmed up in the crucible of Silicon Valley, and now reaching boiling point by becoming one of the nation’s most valuable companies. But it’s also a very international business, too, with 900 million users spread all around the world. The company has made no secret of its ambition to make sure every person on the planet is connected to its service. What might seem like hubris, however, is actually necessity: with Wall Street now breathing down its neck, overseas growth is important — investors want to see that however big it has become, Facebook still has headroom left. So how will it manage?

As smartphone-crazed consumers fiddle with Angry Birds and challenge each other on Words With Friends, policymakers are playing a different game: bringing order to mobile apps.

To Washington, the daily deals tools, social networks and other programs that consumers download onto their smartphones present new challenges to consumer privacy and security. Lawmakers are keenly aware of the horror stories of apps surreptitiously accessing user address books or broadcasting location data sans permission. “There is an expectation of privacy when you use a mobile device, particularly when using an application that can collect and transmit personal information such as geolocation,” said Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. There’s a “lot of work to do to make sure that consumers have control over what personal information is being collected about them and that companies respect consumer privacy.” The result has been a classic Beltway power struggle: A cutting-edge-yet-still-neophyte industry boasting millions of dollars in revenue is looking to stave off regulation from the wary sheriffs on Capitol Hill and at regulatory agencies.

Here are the three key areas Washington is watching: 1) Protecting privacy, 2) Location tracking, and 3) Mobile wallet safety.

The Pakistani government blocked access to the social networking service Twitter after publicly holding Twitter responsible for promoting what it described as a blasphemous cartoon contest taking place on Facebook, officials said.

The restoration of Twitter service was as sudden as its suspension. No official statement or explanation was given for an act that some rights campaigners saw as much as a warning shot at the media and public expression as a reaction to controversial content. A government spokesman was quoted by local news media as saying that the government had been in talks with Twitter to remove “objectionable” material, but that there had been no results. “The material was promoting a competition on Facebook to post images of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad,” Mohammad Yaseen, chairman of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, told Pakistani news organizations. He was also quoted as saying that Facebook had agreed to allay the concerns of the Pakistani government. It remained unclear — and unlikely — that Twitter had agreed to the demands of the Pakistani government before access was restored.