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Google Makes Offer in 3-Year European Antitrust Case

February 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Neither the company nor European officials were willing on Friday to describe the settlement proposals. But Google has been expected to offer revisions to the way it conducts its search business in Europe to address regulators’ concerns that its activities were unfair to other Web publishers and its online competitors.

The two parties are still negotiating the terms of the proposed settlement, and a final agreement is expected in the coming week, according to a person briefed on the negotiations who spoke on condition of anonymity while the agreement was still under discussion.

Google’s competitors did not take a wait-and-see attitude. After filing a new complaint against Google on Thursday, Icomp, an industry group backed by Microsoft, urged European regulators on Friday to approach the company’s proposal with caution.

“To be seen as a success, any settlement must include specific measures to restore competition and allow other parties to compete effectively on a level playing field,” David Wood, legal counsel for Icomp, said in a statement.

Michael Weber, chief executive of an online mapping service called Hot-map.com and a member of Icomp who is based in Germany, said he hoped Google’s offer would be “enough to restore competition,” but “if not, we will take into account all legal options we have and we won’t hesitate to use them.”

Icomp’s new antitrust complaint contended that Google was using exclusive agreements to discourage advertisers and publishers from using competing advertising platforms and search services like Bing and Yahoo.

If critics of Google in Europe remain dissatisfied, they can sue the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, at the General Court of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg and accuse it of failing to push hard enough for an effective solution. Final judgments in such cases can take years.

Google reached one settlement on Friday. In France, it agreed to pay 60 million euros, or $82 million, into a fund to help French media develop their presence on the Internet. Publishers in France had been pushing for Google to pay them licensing fees for the headlines and summaries of articles in its search engines.

The commission has taken a tougher line with Google than has the United States Federal Trade Commission. The F.T.C. decided in January that Google had not broken antitrust laws after a 19-month inquiry into how the company operated its search engine.

Joaquín Almunia, the European competition commissioner and the top European antitrust official, has been formally investigating Google since November 2010. He has insisted that Google make changes to the most sensitive area of its business, online search.

If Mr. Almunia ultimately accepts Google’s offer, the company will avoid further investigation. Additional inquiry could lead to a fine of as much as 10 percent of Google’s annual global sales, which came to about $50 billion last year. Google would also avoid a guilty finding, which could restrict its activities in Europe.

“We continue to work cooperatively with the commission,” Al Verney, a spokesman for Google in Brussels, said on Friday.

Antoine Colombani, a spokesman for Mr. Almunia, said at a news conference on Friday that Google had sent a detailed proposal that the commission was analyzing before taking further steps.

There is no formal timeline in European antitrust cases, so negotiations could continue.

“I can’t anticipate the timing or the substance of the analysis,” Mr. Colombani said.

Mr. Almunia could still take a far more confrontational stance with Google by sending the company a statement of objections, the European equivalent of formal antitrust charges. But that is something Mr. Almunia has been eager to avoid because he favors nonlitigious solutions to antitrust problems, particularly in the fast-moving technology field, to prevent cases from dragging on for years.

The next stage for Mr. Almunia is to assess Google’s offer and decide whether it addresses his concerns sufficiently. Then he will invite another, formal submission from the company, which would be sent to the complainants for review.

Claire Cain Miller contributed reporting from San Francisco.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/business/global/google-submits-proposals-to-resolve-european-antitrust-concerns.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

French Twitter Case Is Latest Skirmish Over Net Speech

January 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The court order came in a lawsuit brought by French groups who said the Twitter postings, which were made under pseudonyms, broke French law against racist speech. Twitter has said that under its own rules, it does not divulge the identity of users except in response to a valid court order in the United States, where its data is stored. Twitter has already removed some of the content at issue from its site in France, in keeping with company policy to remove posts in countries where they violate the law.

On Thursday, Twitter said in a brief statement that it would review its legal options after the French ruling; officials at the company’s San Francisco headquarters did not respond to numerous requests for comment.

It remains unclear whether French prosecutors will press their case across the Atlantic and force Twitter’s hand in an American court under a time-consuming process detailed in a so-called mutual legal assistance treaty.

The case revolves around the broad question of which country’s laws have jurisdiction over content on the Internet. This question has become increasingly complicated as vast piles of information are stored in sprawling data centers, known as the cloud, that are accessible over the Internet anywhere, anytime.

“It is a big deal because it shows the conflict between laws in France and laws in the U.S., and how difficult it can be for companies doing business around the world,” said Françoise Gilbert, a French lawyer who represents Silicon Valley companies in courts on both continents.

In this case, the jurisdictional issue has an additional wrinkle because Twitter does not have an office in France and does not face the prosecution of its employees here, a problem that other Web companies, like Facebook and Google, have faced elsewhere. Twitter is popular in France, nonetheless. It is available to anyone with an Internet connection and sells ads on its site here. This could embolden French authorities to try to apply its laws to the service.

With 200 million users, most of them outside the United States, Twitter has confronted these conundrums over hate speech and free expression before, especially in Europe.

In October, at the request of the German government, Twitter blocked users in Germany from access to the account of a neo-Nazi group banned there. It was the first time Twitter acted on a policy known as “country-withheld content,” announced last January, in which it agreed to block an account at the request of a government.

In 2011, British authorities went to court in California to extract information about a Twitter user who went by the pseudonym Mr. Monkey and was accused of defaming members of a British town council. The company complied.

Twitter says in its online help center that foreign law enforcement agencies can seek user data through what is known as a “mutual legal assistance treaty.”

“It is our policy to respond to such U.S. court-ordered requests when properly served,” the company says on the site.

But Twitter is not the only Web company facing government requests for personal data. Google said this week that it received more than 21,000 requests in the last six months; more than 8,000 from the United States, which was followed by India, France, Germany and Britain.

Twitter, though, has sought to cast itself as a special defender of free speech, sometimes describing it as a competitive advantage. On occasion, it has fought unsuccessful battles with prosecutors in the United States seeking to extract data on Twitter users.

The French case is also part of a brewing fight between the United States and Europe over the data controlled by American Web companies and stored in the cloud. European lawmakers worry about American companies sharing data about Europeans with the United States government under American laws that authorize surveillance on foreign citizens. This case flips that objection on its head, with European authorities seeking information on its citizens from an American company.

Chris Wolf, an American lawyer who was in Brussels this week at a conference debating European data protection laws, said it was proving difficult to interpret jurisdiction laws in the digital age.

He offered a paper analogy. If French authorities sought access to files stored in an American company’s offices in Paris, they could physically get their hands on the material and use it in a court of law.

Eric Pfanner reported from Paris and Somini Sengupta from San Francisco.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/technology/twitter-ordered-to-help-reveal-sources-of-anti-semitic-posts.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Abercrombie Wants Off ‘Jersey Shore’ (Wink-Wink)

August 18, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Now Abercrombie Fitch is doing one better: it has offered to pay the cast members of the trashy-and-proud MTV reality show “Jersey Shore” never to wear its clothes on air. “This association is contrary to the aspirational nature of our brand, and may be distressing to many of our fans,” the company said in a news release.

Michael S. Jeffries, Abercrombie’s chairman and chief executive, said on Wednesday that the company was “having a lot of fun” with the proposed payoff, which analysts and MTV characterized as a publicity stunt — even if a pretty good one for a slow day in August.

Drew Kerr, a public relations consultant in New York, said the move reminded him of Larry Flynt offering famous people millions to pose for Hustler. “It’s offering something publicly that you know is never going to happen, but you do it because it’s just made for the press,” he said.

In a news release with the title “Abercrombie Fitch Proposes a Win-Win Situation,” the company said on Tuesday that it had become concerned after noticing that a cast member, Mike Sorrentino, known as “the Situation,” had taken to wearing its clothes. Mr. Sorrentino’s nickname is a reference to his six-pack abs.

It is hard to imagine Abercrombie’s fans were too distressed — they would probably be more upset if their parents started wearing the clothes. After all, Abercrombie is a mass-market brand that goes after teenagers and is not shy about controversy — when it opened its Paris store earlier this year, it paraded shirtless models along the Champs-Élysées before the police shut the show down.

Jordan Yospe, a lawyer who handles product-placement deals in movies and television shows, said that if Abercrombie were serious about keeping its clothing off the Situation, it would have pursued legal options rather than offering him money.

“They could try to prevent the series from airing their intellectual property without their permission,” said Mr. Yospe, a lawyer at Manatt, Phelps Phillips in Los Angeles. Logos and labels fall under fair-use law, he said, and shows have to get approval from the owner of the intellectual property to use them.

That’s why on so many low-end reality shows, brands are often blurred, Mr. Yospe said — the shows either could not or did not try to get approval. Abercrombie “could say, ‘Blur ’em,’ ” if they really wanted to sever the association, Mr. Yospe said.

However, in issuing a news release instead, Abercrombie seemed pleased to fan the flames. And MTV played along on Wednesday. “It’s a clever P.R. stunt, and we’d love to work with them on other ways they can leverage ‘Jersey Shore’ to reach the largest youth audience on television,” it said in an e-mail.

Mr. Kerr, the public relations consultant, said the episode echoed one last year on the same show, when rumors about product placement surrounded Mr. Sorrentino’s cast mate Nicole Polizzi, known as “Snooki,” a brunette with voluminous hair who likes to wear tiny leopard-print dresses. The contention, never confirmed but given media attention nonetheless, was that luxury handbag companies were supplying Snooki with rival brands’ purses so that theirs would not be associated with her.

Abercrombie reported quarterly earnings on Wednesday, and its executives seemed rather pleased with their Situation situation in a conference call with Wall Street analysts.

“Is no one going to ask about the Situation?” Mr. Jeffries, the chief executive, asked after a series of questions about Abercrombie’s finances and strategy.

Finally, an analyst did, and Mr. Jeffries explained the background.

“Last Friday morning, I was with a group of people here and someone came up and said, ‘Mike, I have terrible, terrible news for you. Last night on “Jersey Shore,” the Situation had A. F. product on.’ We all said, ‘Oh! That’s terrible! What are we going to do about it?’ And the group kind of came up with the solution: Let’s pay them not to wear our product.”

John D. Morris, an analyst with BMO Capital Markets, said the move was a smart one because it left an optimistic tone to Abercrombie’s conference call.

“This puts the name Abercrombie top of mind during the all-important back-to-school season,” he said. He added that while Abercrombie’s quarterly results beat forecasts, executives’ caution about the rest of the year seemed worrisome. “Our take was, if they were so concerned about the current state of business, would they be bringing up something as grave as the Situation?” Mr. Morris said.

Still, Abercrombie’s stock fell more than 8 percent on Wednesday, dropping $6.15 a share to close at $64.87.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a11e2d6418ef555ef814d8a3591b7229

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,