“Many users were lured by the convenience and comfort of the services,” he said, but he added that the revelations by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden revealed that Google was part of a “massive breach of our security, of our data and of our sovereignty.”
Google, for its part, has denied being complicit in the spying and said it was taking steps to make it much more difficult for spy agencies to breach its systems.
On another antitrust front, regulators have begun a preliminary investigation of the company’s Android operating system for cellphones and other mobile devices. They are examining many complaints from competitors like Aptoide, a Portuguese app store provider that says Google’s search results favor the Google Play app store. Other complaints have come from an association of photo libraries and a telecom company, claiming that Google skews search results.
Digital privacy legislation is also advancing in Parliament. The legislation has accumulated more than 4,000 amendments, a record. Among the main proposals are restrictions on how companies like Google use personal data and requirements that they check with European officials before they comply with American subpoenas.
“Google was an interesting start-up at the beginning and a helpful website, but that has dramatically changed,” said Jan Philipp Albrecht, a member of the Green Party who has been the leading legislator shepherding through the legislation. “For politicians in Europe, it’s clear they have to act and regulate the way Google dominates the market.” [eap_ad_1] Trouble is stirring at the country level, too. In Germany, publishers are fighting in court over compensation for the “snippets of text” that appear with Google News updates.
“Taken together, all these issues point to the pressing need for E.U.-wide common approaches to the challenges posed by Google and other players in the digital era,” Joaquín Almunia, Europe’s competition regulator, said in a speech this summer. “Their centrality for Europe’s economy and their pervasive presence in the lives of the vast majority of our fellow citizens are turning this into one of the defining domains of E.U. policy making.”
Google’s competitors have created a cottage industry dedicated to bashing the company. Axel Springer and a number of other French and German companies banded together to form a group called the Open Internet Project, whose grandiose “Paris Declaration of May 15, 2014,” said “European consumers and digital entrepreneurs demand ban of Google’s manipulative favoring of own services and content.”
Then there is Microsoft, Google’s longtime nemesis, which spends three times as much in Europe on lobbying and similar efforts. ICOMP, a Microsoft-backed group, has long targeted Google.
“Google is clearly in the cross hairs,” said David Wood, a London-based partner at Gibson, Dunn, one of Microsoft’s law firms, and legal counsel at ICOMP. “A lot of the aura has faded, and the shine has come off, and people don’t think they’re the good guy anymore.” (NY Times)
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