Tech Firms Lobby EU on Privacy

Microsoft, Google and other US tech giants are pushing to streamline Europe's privacy rules in order to offer more remote computing and data-storage services.

These companies, which are investing billions of dollars to build big data centers in Europe, are seeking a single set of rules across the 27-nation bloc for so-called cloud-computing services. They want to sell computer capacity to businesses and governments -- as well as storage space for everything from pictures of grandma to the medical records of diabetics, to 500 million consumers. The EU's fractured rules may prove "real hurdles or speed bumps to sales" said Mike Hintze, Microsoft's associate general counsel. "That's the case for us, as well as other cloud-services providers." At the moment, there is a patchwork of sometimes contradictory regulations for cloud computing. That could change as part of what the European Commission, the EU's executive, calls its Digital Agenda, a plan to draft 31 legislative initiatives governing areas such as broadband infrastructure as well as pirated music and software. But work on that only began in May; a preliminary text is due in the fall. "It's way too early to say whether the EU directive will create a pan-European authority" to oversee cloud computing and privacy issues, said Matthew Newman, an EU spokesman.