Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems seems set for regulatory clearance in the European Union. The companies' latest promises to safeguard competition in the market for database software, make the Commission optimistic that the case will have a satisfactory outcome, it said Monday.
Oracle is expected to portray its planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and more specifically of Sun's MySQL unit, as a procompetitive move necessary to balance the might of Microsoft in the low end database market during a two-day hearing in Brussels that opened Thursday.
Secretive international trade negotiations intended to clamp down on counterfeiting risk undermining the openness and innovation-friendly nature of the Internet, said EuroISPA, a trade group representing Europe's Internet service providers (ISPs), on Monday.
Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner who for the past five years has championed consumer rights in the telecommunications and IT arenas, has been picked to take charge of a re-write of the European Union's 15-year-old data protection laws due to start next year.
The European Commission has accused manufacturers of cathode-ray tubes of running cartels in the markets for computer monitors and TVs, the regulator said Thursday.
After two years of often bitter debate, the European Parliament approved a raft of new telecom laws Tuesday.
Oracle and Sun Microsystems have been granted an extra week to defend their planned US$7 billion merger in front of European regulators, the European Commission said Friday.
The European Ombudsman accused the European Commission on Thursday of "maladministration" during its antitrust investigation of Intel, which resulted in a hefty fine earlier this year, as well as an order to desist from its anti-competitive practices.
In an unusually blunt rebuff, the European Commission has dismissed as "facile and superficial" criticism of its decision to issue formal objections to Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
Oracle is planning an aggressive fight with European regulators if its attempt to take over Sun is slapped with a statement of objections in the coming week, said people close to the company Wednesday.
Oracle must be stopped from taking over MySQL, according to Richard Stallman, a developer and prominent activist for free software.
The European Commission issued a call to arms to European lawmakers and those involved in the process of digitizing books Monday, urging the European Union to create a "pro-competitive European" answer to the legal arrangement Google and others seek to implement in the US
Microsoft appears to have reached an agreement with the European Commission that concludes an antitrust battle that has lasted a decade, Europe's top competition regulator said Wednesday.
The European Commission has ordered all makers of portable music players to add a default volume setting of around 80 decibels (dB) and a health warning to all new devices within the next two years.
Google appeared to have won a partial victory in its long-running legal battle with trademark owners Tuesday, when a senior judge at the European Court of Justice said the company hasn't infringed anyone's trademark rights by allowing advertisers to buy search keywords corresponding to those trademarks.