Mark Scott

New proposals published Sept 14 aim to give the European Union’s 500 million consumers greater choice of digital streaming content. Under the revamp, so-called video-on-demand services from national broadcasters, like the BBC iPlayer; digital players like Netflix; as well as potentially premium movies offered by Hollywood studios, among others, may become more readily available across the European Union. (British broadcasters may eventually not be subject to the rules, once Britain leaves the 28-member bloc). The goal is to allow people from Portugal to Poland to stream shows online and give national broadcasters a Continent-size possible audience as part of efforts to create a unified digital market across the European Union. The copyright proposals will now be debated for two years before becoming law.

Not everyone, though, is happy. Here is a primer on who would benefit and who would most likely lose from the proposal.
Winners: Europeans and streaming services.
Losers: Hollywood studios and national broadcasters.

A yearlong digital training course for Irish high school teachers started in 2014. A fund to help European news outlets adapt to the web popped up in 2015. And in March, a virtual reality exhibition began at a Belgian museum to showcase a Renaissance painter. All these projects are aimed at supporting European culture and education, helping the region embrace the fast-changing online world. And all are financed by Google.

Google has been staging a full-court press in Europe to finance everything from start-up offices to YouTube-sponsored music concerts, trying to remake its image in the region as it battles a mounting list of regulatory woes. Those efforts represent a campaign of “soft lobbying” where instead of, or alongside, paying registered lobbyists to advocate its case in the corridors of power, a company looks to change the minds of the public at large. In Google’s case, experts say, its push equates to an almost unprecedented effort by a United States tech company to change the perceptions of Europeans, many of whom still see it as an American interloper that does not play by the rules. Google’s soft lobbying efforts are by no means unique, and have filled a funding gap that governments and European rivals are unwilling, or incapable, of matching. But the company has ramped up its campaign in recent years, earmarking about $450 million from 2015 to 2017 — based on Google’s public filings and industry estimates of its activities — to revamp its reputation with Europeans and, more important, the region’s policy makers who have the power to issue fines totaling billions of dollars.

When it comes to Europe’s lengthy investigations into Google, Margrethe Vestager, the region’s competition chief, is hoping that the third time’s a charm. Vestager announced a new round of antitrust charges against the company — the third set since early 2015 — claiming that some of the company’s advertising products had restricted consumer choice. The efforts are part of her continuing push to rein in Google’s activities in the European Union, where the Silicon Valley company has captured roughly 90 percent of the region’s online search market.

“Google’s conduct, based on our evidence, is harmful to consumers,” she said. “Google’s magnificent innovations don’t give it the right to deny competitors the chance to innovate.” The announcement represents a setback for Google, which vigorously denied any wrongdoing in two previous European antitrust charges linked to Android, its popular mobile operating system, and some of its dominant online search services. It also comes at a difficult time for Europe’s competition authorities, which have been unable to land a knockout punch against Google’s perceived abusive activities in the region, despite investigations that date back to 2010. The stakes are high. Google could face fines of up to 10 percent, or about $7 billion, of its global annual revenue if it is found to have broken Europe’s tough competition rules.

Google says complying with Europe’s so-called right to be forgotten ruling is getting complicated.

In a lengthy response to questions from the region’s data regulators, the search giant said that it often lacked enough information to decide whether it should remove links to web pages to comply with European law.

Google said it had rejected a number of requests made by journalists, who wanted links to articles at publications where they no longer worked to be taken down.

Microsoft has kept its head down since a European court in May ruled that people could ask Internet search services to delink personal information.

But the company is about to invite a lot more attention. Microsoft plans to follow the lead of Google, which responded to the court ruling by creating an online form that lets individuals request removal of links to material they say violates their online privacy.

Microsoft, which operates the Bing search service, is expected to roll out its own request form. The release date of the online form is not yet certain, because Microsoft must coordinate with Yahoo, which also relies on the Bing search engine to power its own search services.

Google’s efforts to carry out a European court order on the “right to be forgotten” took another twist as the company restored search-engine links to several newspaper articles from The Guardian whose delinking had stirred a public furor only a day earlier.

As Google once again declined to explain its decision-making, the episode underscored the potentially bewildering complexities of trying to remove information from the Internet when people request it.

Analysts and public officials, many critical of the way Google is carrying out the court order, say the tumult could have far wider implications. That is because the order, issued in May by the European Court of Justice, dealt with a right to be forgotten that would be much more broadly interpreted in a sweeping digital privacy law that is now the subject of discussions involving the European Parliament, the European Commission and leaders of the 28 member countries of the European Union.

The company told The Guardian that several links to its articles had been reinstated in Google’s European search service after the newspaper complained. Some of the articles were from 2010 about a soccer referee, now retired, who had been accused of lying about why he had awarded a penalty kick in a match in Scotland.

Google declined to explain why it had removed the links, or its reasons for honoring The Guardian’s request to restore them. Critics said the episode highlighted a lack of transparency about how Google is carrying out the court order as it works through requests it has received for removing information, a number that has reached 70,000 and continues to grow.

Your right to be forgotten on the Internet is almost here. Google will start to remove links to online content in Europe by the end of the month to comply with a recent landmark European court ruling intended to protect individuals’ privacy, according to sources with direct knowledge of the issue, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

This step follows a month-long effort by Google to comply with the European Court of Justice’s decision, which requires all search providers operating in Europe to consider people’s requests to remove links that they say violate their online privacy.

Google has already received more than 50,000 submissions from people asking the company to remove links. That includes more than 12,000 requests within the first 24 hours of the form’s being made available, according to one of the people with direct knowledge of the matter.

While the company will start to remove links by the end of June, the process is expected to take several weeks before it is fully operational. Google’s engineering teams -- both in Europe and further afield -- have been tweaking the company’s search infrastructure since the ruling was made in May.

Billy Hawkes might be the most important tech regulator you’ve never heard of. When Hawkes took over in 2005 as Ireland’s data protection commissioner, he said, it was a relatively quiet job focused on local issues. But in the years since, Ireland has become a preferred spot for giant tech companies to place their international headquarters, largely because of the country’s low corporate tax rates.

That has put Hawkes at the center of a growing debate over how these companies use people’s online data. Hawkes is tasked with handling privacy complaints about any company based in Ireland, leaving him responsible for protecting around a billion Internet users -- both European citizens and those further afield. “The biggest change is the number of controversial companies that fall under my remit,” said Hawkes, who will step down from his role. “It’s a shift from a domestic to an international focus.”

The role of Ireland’s data protection regulator is set to expand even further under proposed privacy changes in Europe expected to be approved in 2015. The legislation will allow companies that meet the data protection requirements in one European Union country to operate freely across the Continent. Now, companies like Microsoft and Google have to comply with regulators in each of the union’s 28 member states, which often take different views on how local privacy rules should be enforced.

Google will announce by the end of the month a mechanism for consumers to request that links to information about them be removed from the company’s search engine, a leading European regulator said.

It was one of the first signs that Google was working through how to operate after a court ruling said consumers could make such requests.

Ulrich Kühn, ​head of the technical department at Hamburg’s data protection regulator, one of Germany’s leading data protection agencies, said that the details of the mechanism still had to be finalized. But a basic online tool for people to ask Google to take down potentially harmful links would be in place in about two weeks, he said.

“They are trying to come up with something that users can use to lodge complaints about specific links,” Kühn said. “It will be rolled out across Europe for all citizens.”

How many people need to use your product before it’s a success? That’s a question European tech companies from Dublin to Dubrovnik routinely ask themselves as they look to move beyond their small local markets to reach bigger audiences.