Tag: eu

Microsoft opposes Brexit

Posted on May 18, 2016 by - News

european-commissionMicrosoft’s UK boss has sent a letter to staff outlining why the firm believes the country is better off remaining in the EU.

This is expected as the IT community generally has backed the campaign to remain in the EU and even put their names to a letter published in a national newspaper.

But Michel Van der Bel, UK CEO of Microsoft did not join the throng, making many wonder if Vole really did hate Europe.  Now he has nailed his colours to the mast and penned a letter to the little Voles who work for him outlining his views and the reasoning behind it to make the case against Brexit.

Van der Bel stated that the vote was very much a question for individuals but, “as a business that is very committed to this country, our view is that the UK should remain in the EU”.

“We have a long history here. It’s where we opened our first international office in 1982 and we have been investing in the UK ever since. We have more that 5,000 highly qualified people working in fields including support, marketing, gaming, communications, cybersecurity and computer science research,” he added.

“Historically, the UK being part of the EU has been one of several important criteria that make it one of the most attractive places in Europe for the range of investments we have made. At key moments in our international growth we have specifically chosen to invest in our capabilities here in the UK,” stated the letter.

Microsoft recently invested in data centres in the UK to service the European market. This will be dicey if the Britain leaves the EU.

 

Microsoft solves EU cloud problem

Posted on March 16, 2016 by - News

grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloudMicrosoft announced a number of new cloud offerings today including one which will solve the company’s European cloud problesm.

The problem is that Microsoft is US company and its country delights in spying on its allies.  The EU fears that the NSA could get a court order and force Microsoft to hand over data from its European clouds and force it not to tell anyone.

Microsoft has come up with a wizard wheeze by creating a product called Azure Deutschland — a German cloud region that will offer Azure services that come not directly from Microsoft, but from the German data trustee Deutsche Telekom.

It not only makes sure that data remains in Germany, but also means that Microsoft can’t actually get to the data itself.  By operating under a German company, the NSA can’t force Vole to do squat.

In fact, while the region offers redundancy and backup, it does so through a private network to ensure that none of the bits being backed up even go through the public Internet where they might stray onto foreign soil.

Germany has some of the strictest data privacy protection laws on the books, and Microsoft said that Deutsche Telekom will have strict protocols regarding when Microsoft is allowed access, even for support:

 

EU gives Dell deal the thumbs up

Posted on February 19, 2016 by - News

Happy man portrait

Happy man portrait

Tin box shifter Michael Dell is going to be given unconditional EU antitrust approval for its $67 billion bid for data storage company EMC.

Dell unveiled the deal in October last year, the largest ever in the technology industry sector, and designed to enable Dell to better challenge rivals Cisco Systems Inc, IBM and HP in cloud computing, mobility and cyber security.

European Commission spokesman Ricardo Cardoso has so far said nothing, but leaks in Brussels [shurely that should be sprouts.ed] claim that the when the Commission gives its ruling on the deal by February 29 Dell will be a happy bunny.

 

Dell founder and Chief Executive Michael Dell took the company private three years ago with the help of private equity firm Silver Lake.

The computer maker has arranged a debt package for up to $49.5 billion to help finance the EMC deal, the second-largest M&A financing on record.

 

EU gives its cloud to BT, IBM, Accenture and Atos

Posted on February 8, 2016 by - News, Products

Eu-flag-vector-material2The European Commission has announced BT, IBM, Accenture and Atos will get most of the contracts to supply its new cloud services.

Contracts were broken out into three “lots,” covering a private cloud setup, public cloud setup, and platform-as-a-service, for which it will pay $38.5 million.
The whole lot will be platformed by Telecom Italia which is a bit unfortunate. That outfit is under resourced and its mobile arm TIM just adopted the iChing hexagram for “standing still” as its logo.waiting

It is unusual that Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Amazon and none of the other big cloud outfits managed to get their paws on the EU’s clouds.

The Commission said that all the systems will be physically located within the European Union, the Commission noted, “to be compliant with EU data handling requirements” basically it means that the US will not be able to steal it.

According to the announcement, the contract will “enable the Commission to follow the ceaseless pace of today’s technological race.”

The EU hopes that use of cloud services will help it come up with future improvements to how it works, such as using “Big Data.”

The private cloud service will provide computing and storage facilities through a private network link connected to the EC’s data centres, and will be hosted by a single provider. The public cloud infrastructure will be run over the public internet. And the public platform-as-a-service will include both operating systems and database services run over the cloud.

The first cloud services should appear this year.

Cloud channel will not have long to wait for US data pact

Posted on October 30, 2015 by - News

grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloudThose resellers who sell cloud services for US companies in the EU will be relieved to discover that the US is close to coming up with a new “Safe Harbour” deal.

Safe Harbour was a fast-track process that US companies could use to comply with European data protection law, which prevents EU citizens’ personal data being transferred to non-EU countries deemed to have insufficient privacy safeguards.

The EU Courts have struck down the current “Safe Harbour” laws because the US clearly was taking European data.

US. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker said that the “Safe Harbour 2.0” agreement currently being negotiated would meet European concerns about the transfer of data to the United States.

“A solution is within hand. We had an agreement prior to the court case. I think with modest refinements that are being negotiated we could have an agreement shortly. The solution … is Safe Harbour 2.0, which is totally doable.”

EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova told a parliamentary committee this week that she hoped to have made progress on “intensive technical discussions” with her U.S. counterparts before a visit to Washington DC in mid-November.

Pritzker admitted that it was costing small and medium-sized US businesses that depend on Safe Harbour a lot of dosh. But that is the price you pay when your government believes that it can spy on whoever it likes.

EU denies it is “anti-American”

Posted on October 2, 2015 by - News

euThe EU has denied US corporate claims that it is “anti-American” in its recent wave of litigation against top American tech companies.

European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager’s accusations of anti-US bias over her decision to go after Google for abusing its internet search dominance and Apple over an Irish tax deal, saying such talk was a fallacy.

The US media fails to understand why all the cases on Vestager’s agenda all happen to be big companies from the Land of the Free – Google, Apple, Amazon and Starbucks. The feeling is that regulation is for non-American companies and the US should be allowed to do what it likes in its colonies.

Vestager told the Foreign Policy Association in New York that the nationality of companies played no role in her assessment.

“Yes, US companies are often involved when we investigate the digital industry. But you will also see many Japanese firms in our car-part cartel cases,” she said.

The European Commission is now studying Google’s response to antitrust charges of favouring its Google Shopping service over rivals. It is also investigating the company’s popular Android operating system for smartphones.

Amazon is in the EU’s crosshairs for a Luxembourg tax deal and Starbucks for a Dutch tax arrangement.

The EU is also wondering if it should ban cloud connections to the the US while its intelligence agencies insist that they have the right to steal it.

EC approves Nokia’s Alcatel-Lucent buy

Posted on July 27, 2015 by - News

euThe European Commission has approved Finnish telecom equipment group Nokia’s planned buy of Alcatel-Lucent because the two were not close competitors.

It said the merged Fin-French outfit will still face shedloads of competition even if it will have combined market shares around or above 30 percent for several specific types of equipment.

“The overlaps between the two companies’ activities are effectively limited,” the Commission said in a statement.

Nokia had a strong presence in Europe, where Alcatel-Lucent was small, with the positions reversed in North America.

Nokia launched its all-share deal then worth 15.6 billion euros to buys its smaller French rival in April. The move is seen as the company building up its telecom equipment business to compete with market leader Ericsson.

The merged group is smaller than the son of Eric, but bigger than Chinese rival Huawei’s and ZTE.

 

EU quizzes Qualcomm rivals about evil

Posted on May 11, 2015 by - News

movies-60-years-of-bond-gallery-7EU antitrust regulators have sent a questionnaire to Qualcomm’s rivals asking if it has been committing any atrocities over the way it licenses products.

Qualcomm has been feeling the regulatory heat in Europe, the United States, China, Japan and South Korea in recent years as watchdogs focus on its licensing model and its power over patents.

The bulk of its revenue comes from selling baseband chips, which let phones communicate with carrier networks, but a large portion of its profit comes from licensing patents for its CDMA mobile technology.

The European Commission told Qualcomm last year that it was investigating the way it sells and marketed chips and its rebates and financial incentives offered to customers.

The EU competition authority asked about the impact of various Qualcomm practices such as pass-through rights where phone makers are allowed to use patents already licensed by Qualcomm.

It also wanted to know how they feel about cross-licences and mutual non-assertion provisions in which companies agree not to enforce patent rights against each other.

Recipients of the document of more than 40 questions have until mid-May to respond.

A Commission spokeswoman declined to comment and Qualcomm had no immediate comment.

This is one of two EU inquiries into the company. The other probe, begun in 2010, was triggered by a complaint from British cell phone chipmaker Icera, a subsidiary of Nvidia, about rebates and financial incentives.

 

EU waters down roaming charges kill off

Posted on March 6, 2015 by - News

european-commissionEuropean regulators have dropped plans to ban roaming charges and have proposed net neutrality rules allowing privileged access in some cases.

It means that carriers will still be allowed to charge more to use mobiles abroad.

Also worrying are net neutrality rules would bar discrimination in internet access, but allow prioritisation of some services.

This is a watering down of laws first floated in 2013, observers said.

Instead of ending data roaming charges as was promised, the European Commission has recommended that operators be allowed to add surcharges to their domestic rates.

The proposals were said to be “transitional” and mindful of “wholesale costs” incurred by the mobile operators.

In other words it is only temporary and there is nothing to worry about. But, according to Ovum analyst Matthew Howett, they would amount to the continuation of data roaming charges until at least 2018, when European lawmakers would reconsider whether or not to ban them.

He told the BBC that the watering down happened because operators had already introduced more reasonable charges.

The proposals also covered net neutrality rules. Originally the EU sought to ensure that internet users could get online however they wanted and view any legal content they wanted, free from discrimination by their service providers.

Now it seems that there is a provision for specialised services “other than internet access services” to be prioritised if they required high quality internet access to function.

It is not clear what these specialised services are. More optimistic typeshope that it is connected cars and other elements of the internet of things.

The European Commission specified, however, that service providers would have to ensure a good standard of internet access for consumers if they did prioritise such services. This could mean that streaming video content could require users to shell out more cash.

EU furious with Obama’s defence

Posted on February 17, 2015 by - News

Obama BarackThe European Commission is angry at US president’s Barack Obama claims that the EU was  intentionally setting up commercially-driven roadblocks to prevent US technology companies from operating here.

Obama claimed these roadblocks were put in place to stop US tech companies like Google and Facebook from doing business in Europe and competing fairly with homegrown rivals.

Instead, Obama praised the US companies for being “more commercially-driven than anything else” while the EU companies were rubbish because they could not really compete with the glorious US corporations.

Obama said that the US “owned the internet” and it was created by US companies. “And oftentimes what is portrayed as high-minded positions on issues sometimes is just designed to carve out some of their commercial interests.”

He said that the Germans “given its history with the Stasi” are very sensitive to [privacy] issues.

All this seems particularly dark when you consider that the roadblock appear to be antitrust investigations held by the European Commission against Google.

That sort of pro-corporate US Imperialism did not go down too well with the Europeans.  After all it was a British person who invented the world wide web.

A European Commission spokesperson told the Financial Times: “This point – that regulations are only there to shelter our companies – is out of line. Regulations should make it easier for non-EU companies to access the single market. It is in [US companies’] interest that things are enforced in a uniform manner.”

However, there is more to it than that. Pressure is mounting on the EU to do something about US companies’ tax avoidance efforts, as well as prevent companies from taking a monopolistic stranglehold of any one market.

Last year, Google was made to comply with Europe’s “right to be forgotten” which allows people to request their personal details are removed from the company’s search engine results.

Catalan MEP Ramon Tremosa told the FT: “President Obama forgets or maybe isn’t aware that among the dozens of complaints in the Google antitrust case, there are several US companies.”

Tremosa added: “Some companies, like [search engine] Yelp, have no problem going public. Others don’t want to attack Google only because they fear retaliation measures, such as demotion/exclusion and penalties supposedly applied by Google to some rival companies.”

Google only forgets in Europe

Posted on January 20, 2015 by - News

thanks-for-the-memory-movie-poster-1938-1020198195Search engine Google has decided to incur the wrath of the EU and only remove search results from European websites when individuals invoke their “right to be forgotten”, contrary to regulators’ guidelines.

The company’s chief legal officer David Drummond said that Google is reviewing that policy but it has not changed since November.

“We’ve had a basic approach, we’ve followed it, on this question we’ve made removals Europe-wide but not beyond,” he said.

Google has consistently argued that it believes the ruling should only apply to its European websites, such as Google.de in Germany or Google.fr in France.

However, privacy watchdogs from EU countries, the Article 29 Working Party, concluded in November that they want search engines to scrub results globally because it is easy to swap from Google.co.uk to Google.com.

Google feels that there has to be limits to the rules because it really is a European concept. In the US, it is considered OK to libel someone and then have the smear hang around for decades.

Since the ruling in May, Google has received more than 200,000 requests from across Europe affecting over 700,000 URLs, according to its online transparency report.

Citizens whose removal requests have been refused by a search engine can appeal to their national data protection regulator, who can then take action against the company.

EU watchdogs suspect that Amazon deal broke law

Posted on January 16, 2015 by - News

watchdogEuropean antitrust watchdogs have serious doubts about Amazon’s cosy arrangement with Luxemburg to dodge its taxes.

According to a report released today, the European Commission believes the Amazon deal constituted state aid and doubted that such aid was lawful.

The European Commission, which rules on competition and subsidies in the European Union, announced in October that it had opened an investigation into a tax ruling struck in 2003. It published details of its case on Friday.

The 23-page document, which was penned in October 7, concluded that Luxemburg gave Amazon an unfair advantage over European competition.

“The Commission’s preliminary view is that the tax ruling of 5 November 2003 by Luxemburg in favour of Amazon constitutes state aid… and the Commission has doubts at this stage as to that ruling’s compatibility with the internal market.”

US tech snooping is a trade barrier

Posted on December 9, 2014 by - News

 shoe phoneThe US government’s mass surveillance of the whole world has become a trade barrier for European Internet companies trying to provide services in the United States, a top EU official claims.

Paul Nemitz, a director in the European Commission’s justice department said that US citizens are deterred from using European e-mail providers because they do not get the same protection as they would by using US providers, said

Laws which empower the NSA to basically grab everything which comes from outside the United States, is a real trade barrier to a European digital company to provide services to Americans inside America.

Nemitz, who is overseeing an overhaul of the EU’s 20-year-old data protection rules, told a conference on data protection in Paris that an American in the United States using a European service does not have the same level of protection as he would if he used an American service.

Using a European service, his communication is transmitted outside the United States, so it is subject to interception.

The comments underscore the widespread unease within Europe about access to people’s data by both security services and companies. They also come at a time when Brussels and Washington are renegotiating a data-sharing agreement – called Safe Harbour – used by over 3,000 companies.

The Safe Harbour agreement makes it easier for US companies to do business in Europe by certifying that their handling of user data meets EU data-protection laws.

The EU wants Washington to guarantee that it will only access Europeans’ personal data for national security reasons when it is strictly necessary, as it does with US citizens’ data.

Meanwhile the EU is also negotiating a new pan-European data- protection law which would impose stiff fines on companies mishandling personal data in Europe.

Companies in both the United States and the EU have lobbied against some parts of the new rules, arguing that they will impose too much red tape on businesses.

EU wants to widen “right to be forgotten”

Posted on November 27, 2014 by - News

thanks-for-the-memory-movie-poster-1938-1020198195European privacy regulators want Internet search engines such as Google and Microsoft’s Bing (MSFT.O) to scrub results globally, not just in Europe, when people invoke their “right to be forgotten”.

The European Union’s privacy watchdogs agreed on a set of guidelines on Wednesday to help them implement a ruling from Europe’s Supreme Court that gives people the right to ask search engines to remove personal information that is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant”.

Google has been scrubbing results only from the European versions of its website such as Google.de in Germany or Google.fr in France, but they still appear on Google.com.

Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, the head of France’s privacy watchdog and the Article 29 Working Party of EU national data protection authorities, told a news conference that from the legal and technical analysis we are doing, they should include the ‘.com’.

Google said the company had not yet seen the guidelines but would “study them carefully” when they are published.

Google has previously said that search results should be removed only from its European versions since Google automatically redirects people to the local versions of its search engine.

However some feel that Google’s current approach waters down the effectiveness of the court ruling, given how easy it is to switch between different national versions.

The search engine has problems in Europe. Google is facing multiple investigations into its privacy policy and is bogged down in a four year EU antitrust inquiry.

The EU ruling has pitted privacy advocates against free speech campaigners, who say allowing people to ask search engines to remove information would lead to a whitewashing of the past.

EU programmers are rubbish

Posted on October 16, 2014 by - News

euTop technology companies including Microsoft, Facebook and SAP have written a stiffly worded missive to the EU to complain that the blocs’ programmers are rubbish.

The open letter said that kids of today are not being given the skills to flourish in tomorrow’s digital economy and society and are not learning to code.

“It is undeniable that Europe needs more computer scientists and engineers if it is to prosper and compete – the number of unfilled ICT vacancies in Europe is expected to reach 900,000 by 2020,” the letters said.

Coding was not just for “geeks” or those destined for a career in ICT. A plethora of interesting, creative jobs all depend on a degree of coding ability. Whether analysing healthcare data, designing security software or creating special effects for movies, coding is the red thread that runs through Europe’s future professions, the letter said.

“The spread and sophistication of coding teaching in Europe remains too limited. Code is easy to learn but not widely taught in schools. Only 20 per cent of Europe’s school children are in schools which have adopted over-arching formal policies covering the use of ICT across all subjects.”

Part of the problem is that ICT and computer science skills are seen as niche, with little relevance to other fundamental academic pursuits. In Europe, fewer than 15 per cent of students have the opportunity to use the kind of higher level ICT in school that would help them develop ’21st century skills’ such as collaboration, self-regulation and problem-solving.

Teachers have the power to awaken passions and inspire ideas. And they are enthusiastic adopters of technology, keen to implement digital skills in their classroom. However, they receive little to no structured ICT training, it said.