Stories about: European Commission

The European Commission is investigating a possible cartel among manufacturers of the smart card chips used in payment cards and mobile phones, it said Wednesday.

The European Commission has set up an advisory panel including executives from Google and Intel to help it revise European Union laws on data protection.

Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices has accused Intel of deliberately stalling a European Union antitrust investigation through Intel's appeal to Europe's second highest court in October, a senior AMD executive said Wednesday.

The European Union's antitrust investigation of Intel is "discriminatory and partial," the chip maker complained in an action that's detailed in a recent edition of the EU's official journal, saying it's not being permitted to properly defend itself against the charges.

Dutch software trader Samir Abdalla has filed a broad antitrust complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission, charging that the firm's pricing policies violate European Union treaties. The trader complains that Microsoft charges European users at least 30 percent higher prices than in the United States.

Broadband access to the internet should be a universal service for all European Union citizens, the European Commission said Thursday as it launched a debate on the issue with policy makers, industry and the public.

Should European governments favor open-source software when they hold tenders for public contracts? Economists and policy makers appear to think so but industry giants including Microsoft argue that this would be discriminatory and are considering legal action to prevent this from happening.

Two digital rights advocacy groups have filed a lawsuit against the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) in an attempt to get the office to turn over information about a secret international treaty being negotiated to step up cross-border enforcement of copyright and piracy laws.

Microsoft said Wednesday it would purchase up to $100 million in coupons for Suse Linux support from Novell, furthering a controversial 2006 partnership aimed at customers who run both Windows and Linux in their server environments.

A study this week has revealed just how slow is the rate of adoption for IPv6, the next version of the Internet's main communications protocol, and some experts say black markets where companies trade unused IP addresses may be only a few years away.

Call it the great multicore discord: a parade of major hardware and software vendors promising desktop applications powered by multicore chips yet all marching out of step, leaving confused software developers in the dust -- but times are changing.