March 29, 2024

E.U. Competition Chief Texting With the Enemy

Joaquín Almunia sometimes sends Eric E. Schmidt a text.

Like his predecessors, Mr. Almunia has the power unilaterally to decide to block mergers or fine companies billions of dollars. But where he differs is in how comfortable he is in personally reaching out to executives across the table — or the ocean — to negotiate settlements that avoid long drawn out battles.

“I have an open phone line, or e-mail line, or SMS line at any moment,” Mr. Almunia said during an interview Monday, adding that by using the available technology, “we tend to understand every day, better, these markets.”

Mr. Almunia, 64, served as the European Union’s commissioner for economic and monetary affairs before being appointed four years ago as the bloc’s competition commissioner. The post is likely to be his last job in Brussels and he does not foresee a return to politics in Spain, where he led the Socialists to defeat in 2000 before resigning as party leader.

But the formal complaint that recently hit his desk, focusing on how Google runs its mobile software business, is the latest sign that Mr. Almunia remains the go-to figure for antitrust enforcement in the world’s technology sector.

That complaint, filed by a coalition of companies including Microsoft and Nokia, accuses Google of using the Android mobile operating system to promote its own products and services in the majority of smartphones that are being sold to consumers.

Mr. Almunia still must decide whether to take up the new complaint, which landed just as he appeared to be reaching the final stages of settlement talks with Google over the way it conducts its search and advertising business. But it would be surprising if Mr. Almunia declined to pursue the case given the rising importance of mobile computing.

In recent years, the European Commission has become a defender of fair play in computing and communications, even as regulatory bodies with far more experience — notably those in the United States — have grown squeamish about using antitrust law to pry concessions from some of the world’s most dynamic companies.

Yet there is a paradox about the way Mr. Almunia has managed his vast regulatory powers that allow him, unlike his U.S. counterparts, to decide punishments without first obtaining judicial approval. In a departure from previous competition commissioners, Mr. Almunia has made a point of avoiding public showdowns with chief executives, or seemingly endless litigation.

Mr. Almunia has made negotiation, rather than confrontation, a hallmark of his term in office in order to avoid dust-ups with U.S. giants like Microsoft and Intel, which were the subject of bitter, decade-long investigations. The change of approach has been most noticeable in the inquiry into Google’s search and advertising business.

Less that three years after formally opening the case, Mr. Almunia said this week that he would test proposals submitted by Google aimed at making it easier for people to distinguish when Google was proposing its own services — the strongest sign yet that the investigation into Google’s search business would end in a settlement and without a fine or a finding of guilt.

Even as his officials burrowed into the inner workings of Google’s hugely successful search and advertising businesses, Mr. Almunia met and spoke with Mr. Schmidt and telephoned other senior representatives, like David Drummond, the company’s chief legal officer, to update them.

His willingness to meet with executives to forge relationships and to gain knowledge about the sector also extends to figures like Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook. At a meeting with Ms. Sandberg in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the two discussed “the relationship between the search activity and the social network’s activity, but they were general conversations,” Mr. Almunia said.

Not everyone is happy with how European antitrust enforcement is evolving.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/technology/eu-competition-chief-texting-with-the-enemy.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Faceoff in Chinese City Over Censorship of Newspaper

The face-off between liberals and leftists at the headquarters of a newspaper company in southern China came after disgruntled editors and reporters at Southern Weekend last week decried what they alleged was crude meddling by the head of party propaganda in Guangdong Province, which has long had a reputation as a bastion of a relatively free press.

Negotiations between journalists and officials over the dispute are still at a standoff as the newspaper’s next publication date on Thursday looms, said Chen Min, a former senior writer for the paper.

Senior Chinese officials have so far not commented in public on the censorship dispute at the newspaper, which has tested how far the recently appointed Communist Party leader Xi Jinping will extend his vows of economic reform into a degree of political relaxation. But self-proclaimed defenders of communist orthodoxy who turned up at the newspaper headquarters said they were there to make the party’s case.

“We support the Communist Party, shut down the traitor newspaper,” said one of the cardboard signs held up by one of ten or so protesters who came to defend the government.

“Southern Weekend is having an American dream,” said another of the signs. “We don’t want the American dream, we want the Chinese dream.”

Some of the group held up portraits of Mao Zedong, the late revolutionary leader who remains a symbol of communist zeal, while others waved the red flags of the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party. Most of the party supporters refused to give their names. They said they came on their own initiative, and not at the behest of officials.

The dueling protests outside the newspaper’s headquarters in this provincial capital reflected the political passions and tensions churned up by the quarrel over censorship, which has erupted while Mr. Xi is trying to win public favor and consolidate his authority.

Hundreds of bystanders watched and took photos on smart phones as the leftists shouted at the 20 or more protesters who had gathered to denounce censorship, and shoving matches broke out between the demonstrators.

At one point, leftists were showered with 50-cent renminbi currency notes. The “Fifty Cent Party” has become a popular term for disparaging pro-party leftists, who are alleged by critics to be willing to take 50 cents in payment for each pro-party message they send onto the Internet.

“It’s the only newspaper in China that’s willing to tell the truth,” said Liang Taiping, 28, a poet from Changsha in southern China, who said he took the train to Guangzhou to show his support for Southern Weekend, which is widely read nationwide.

“What’s the point of living while you can’t even speak freely?” he said.

About 70 police officers and security guards stood nearby. They did not try to break up the protests, but officers recorded them with video cameras and occasionally stepped in to stop shoving and fisticuffs. Later, the rival protesters broke into separate camps concentrated on different sides of the gate to the newspaper headquarters.

The protesting journalists at Southern Weekend have called for the dismissal of Tuo Zhen, the top propaganda official in Guangdong Province.

They blame Mr. Tuo, a former journalist, for making a drastic change in a New Year’s editorial that originally called for greater respect for constitutional rights. The revised editorial instead lauded Communist Party’s policies.

Chen Min, a prominent former opinion writer for Southern Weekend who is better known by his pen name, Xiao Shu, said staff members at the newspaper have been negotiating with officials over a possible solution to the standoff that might allow the next issue to appear on Thursday, as usual.

The protests at Southern Weekend broke out while Mr. Xi, the party’s general secretary appointed in November, has been sending mixed signals about his intentions. He has repeatedly said he supports faster and bolder reform, but on Saturday he gave a speech defending the party’s history and Mao Zedong’s standing in it.

China’s Central Propaganda Department, which administers the censorship apparatus, issued instructions telling news media that the dispute at Southern Weekend was “due to the meddling of hostile outside forces,” according to China Digital Times, a group based in Berkeley, Calif., that monitors media and censorship issues.

Both supporters and critics of Southern Weekend journalists have claimed that Mr. Xi would back their cause.

“I don’t believe that Xi is totally hypocritical when he talks about reform,” said Mr. Chen, who was forced out of the newspaper in 2011.

“The Southern Weekend journalists have said that they accept party control, but the question is what kind of control and how far should it go unchallenged,” Mr. Chen added.

Jonah Kessel reported from Guangzhou, China, and Chris Buckley from Hong Kong. Mia Li contributed reporting from Guangzhou, and Patrick Zou from Beijing.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/world/asia/faceoff-in-chinese-city-over-censorship-of-newspaper.html?partner=rss&emc=rss