Stories by: Paul Meller

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.

Google will half the length of time it holds data linking surfers' IP addresses to their Web searches.

The European Commission is about to slap new antitrust charges on Intel, this time for trying to squeeze rival chip maker Advanced Micro Devices out of some of Europe's most important technology retail stores, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Google has begun photographing streets in European cities in preparation for the launch of its Street View feature on Google Earth this side of the Atlantic.

The European Parliament rejected attempts to criminalize the sharing of files by private individuals, and threw out the idea of banning copyright abusers from the Internet, in a plenary vote Thursday.

Microsoft has won a year-long quest to make its Office Open XML document format an ISO-recognised international standard.

The European Commission fined Microsoft a massive 899 million euros (US$1.3 billion) for continued failure to honor the 2004 antitrust ruling against it, Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes said Wednesday.

Microsoft has dropped two outstanding appeals of European antitrust rulings, following the deal struck with the European Commission at the beginning of this week, the company said.

Changes Microsoft will make to its business practices to comply with the 2004 European Commission antitrust ruling will "profoundly affect the software industry," European competition commissioner Neelie Kroes said this week.

Microsoft failed Monday in its bid to overturn a European Commission antitrust ruling against it, when the European Union's second highest court dismissed the company's appeal and ordered it to pay the bulk of the Commission's legal expenses.

Microsoft suffered a humiliating legal defeat Monday when it lost a court appeal to overturn the European Commission's 2004 antitrust ruling against it.