european union

Alphabet reopened Google News in Spain, eight years after it shut down the service because of a Spanish rule forcing the company and other news aggregators to pay publishers for using snippets of their news.Madrid last year transposed European Union copyright rules, revamped in 2020, into legislation, allowing media outlets to negotiate directly with the tech giant. The move prompted an announcement from Google last year that it would re-open Google News the following year. "Today, on the global 20th anniversary of Google…

Chinese-owned short video-sharing app TikTok has agreed to boost European Union users' rights, EU regulators said on Tuesday, averting possible sanctions in a case sparked by multiple complaints from consumer groups in the bloc. The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) in its 2021 complaint said TikTok, which has seen rapid growth worldwide, particularly among teenagers, failed to protect children from hidden advertising and inappropriate content. The company subsequently held discussions with the European Commission and…

U.S. chipmaker Intel has filed a claim for 593 million euros ($624 million) in interest from the European Commission, five months after it convinced Europe's second-top court to scrap a 1.06-billion-euro EU antitrust fine, an EU filing showed on Monday. Europe's top court paved the way for such damage demands last year in a landmark ruling which ordered the EU executive to pay default interest on reimbursed fines in annulled antitrust cases. Judges said late payment of interest will itself incur interest as well. Intel in…

A global deal to introduce a minimum tax rate on company profits hit a fresh roadblock Friday after Hungary vetoed a European Union agreement to implement the measure, which is also stalled in the U.S. The deal to impose a 15% minimum tax on the profits of large corporations was agreed by 137 countries in 2021, paving the way for the most significant overhaul of international tax rules in a century. Governments had hoped to implement the changes next year, but mounting opposition in…

Facebook META -5.31% owner Meta Platforms Inc., Twitter Inc. TWTR -2.11% and other social-media platforms have agreed to abide by tougher European Union standards for policing online postings, offering a preview of the type of rules big tech companies will face under a coming digital-content law. The EU’s code of practice on disinformation, unveiled Thursday, replaces an earlier,…

LONDON—The Bank of England on Thursday raised its key interest rate by a quarter percentage point for the fifth consecutive time, but said larger moves might be needed to tame inflation. The bank’s latitude to raise rates is limited by mounting impediments to growth. These include soaring energy costs caused by the Ukraine war and a possible trade dispute with the European Union after the U.K. government presented legislation that would allow it to tear up parts of its Brexit agreement with the bloc. As in the U.S., the…

Europe's second-highest court on Wednesday sided with chip-maker Qualcomm that had appealed 1 billion euros ($1.04 billion) anti-trust fine from the European Union (EU) regulators over payments made to Apple to use its chips.The EU had issued the fine in 2018, and said payments Qualcomm had made to Apple between 2011 and 2016 to exclusively use its chips were illegal under EU antitrust rules.Apple sued Qualcomm in 2017 for nearly $1 billion over royalties, with Cupertino-based tech giant alleging the wireless chipmaker…

BRUSSELS—The European Union’s second-highest court scrapped a €997 million ($1.04 billion) fine that the bloc’s antitrust regulator had levied on Qualcomm Inc. over payments it made to Apple Inc. for the iPhone maker’s exclusive use of Qualcomm chips. The General Court of the European Union on Wednesday said the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, had included a number of irregularities when it was putting together the case-file against San Diego-based Qualcomm, a supplier of…

Alphabet Inc unit Google, Facebook Inc, Twitter Inc and other tech companies will have to take measures to counter deepfakes and fake accounts on their platforms or risk hefty fines under an updated European Union code of practice, according to an EU document seen by Reuters. The European Commission is expected to publish the updated code of practice on disinformation on Thursday as part of its crackdown against fake news. Introduced in 2018, the voluntary code will now become a co-regulation scheme, with responsibility…

Amazon has offered to share marketplace data with sellers and boost the visibility of rival products on its platform, trying to persuade EU antitrust regulators to close their investigations without a fine by the end of the year, people familiar with the matter said.The world's largest online retailer is hoping its concessions will stave off a potential European Union fine that could be as much as 10 percent of its global turnover, Reuters reported last year.The European Commission in 2020 charged Amazon with using its…