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European commission expected to fine Microsoft hundreds of millions of euros after software company broke antitrust promise

The EU competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia, is expected to use the fine – which could run into hundreds of millions of euros – to set an example after the US software giant became the first company to break a promise made to end an antitrust probe

The fines relate to an antitrust battle in Europe more than a decade ago. In order to avoid a penalty then, Microsoft promised to offer European consumers a choice of rival browsers.

rejected an international treaty to crack down on digital piracy, a vote that Internet freedom groups hailed as a victory for democracy but that media companies lamented as a setback for the creative industries.

European legislators

Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, which has been signed by the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, South Korea and a number of individual E.U. members.

The European Union is seeking to increase the private sphere of its citizens by strengthening data protection laws for the web. Large Internet firms and lobbyists are fighting the plans.

Gmail and Facebook may be forced to abandon their ad-supported models and start charging their customers in Europe or stop providing them with these popular services altogether.

Take Facebook, for example, which has its European headquarters in Ireland. The Irish government's data protection commissioner would then be responsible for the concerns of all EU citizens relating to the company's privacy policies.

European Commission and the White House have set out a series of new rules designed to stem the rising tide of cyber-attacks against public and private victims.

Alongside his state-of-the-union message on February 11th, Barack Obama released an executive order intended to plug the gap left by the failure of Congress to pass cyber-security legislation that matches the growing threat.

By contrast, the European Commission’s cyber-security strategy is at an earlier stage. It wants member countries to introduce laws compelling important firms in industries such as transport, telecoms, finance and online infrastructure to disclose details of any attack they suffer to a national authority, known as a CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team). Each CERT will be responsible for defending vital infrastructure-providers against online attacks and sharing information with its counterparts, law-enforcement agencies and data-protection bodies.

However unwittingly, you share personal information with complete strangers every single day - via the internet.

Mr Chester.

But Google is not the only internet service busy farming out data and this raises the question of the invasion of people's rights.

As European parliaments reject the Anti-Counterfeiting trade Agreement on human rights grounds, some are asking why it was signed in the first place.

The question is – why was the agreement signed in the first place, if its chances of being ratified are dropping by the day?

The pretext was the protection of intellectual property, and to control Internet resources that could be used by terrorists or to incite riots and other criminal activity.

is strictly controlled by Google."

to allow European users of its Windows operating system to choose among competing browsers, according to a Reuters report citing three anonymous sources.

A recently discovered flaw in the HTML 5 coding language could allow websites to bombard users with gigabytes of junk data, with a number of popular browsers being open to the vulnerability

Some time later this month we are expecting the European commission to decide how it will proceed with its investigation of the search giant Google, following the latter's submission of proposed remedies at the end of January over allegations that it has engaged in a range of anticompetitive practices.

Google is a global company and its activities will require a global solution.

Google's global revenues were £23.5bn in 2011. Those are its revenues before tax, although Google's approach to tax is another and equally interesting story. Those vast revenues do not come from those who search, but from those who bid to place advertisements alongside the search results. This means that Google has a clear interest to arrange the rankings in a way that maximises its profits and faces a stark conflict of interests when it does so. It has every incentive to demote other companies, who might actually be offering answers or services that are more relevant to the user queries, and to advance its own services.

Google told to fix privacy policy by EU data regulators

consolidate 60 separate privacy policies into a single agreement.

Google has been told it should give clearer information about what data is being collected and for what purpose. It has also been told to give users more control over how the information is combined.

Google representatives are to be summoned to appear before European data protection officials over concerns about the way it collects data on web users.

On Thursday, a coalition of 30 data protection officials, including Britain's information commissioner, demanded "significant progress" from Google before the summer

The authorities are concerned about changes Google introduced to its privacy policies in March last year. The changes were made to "unify" how information is collected across approximately 60 products, including YouTube GoogleMail, Google has said.

Microsoft has been fined €561m by the European commission for failing to give users a choice of web browser when they logged into Windows computers in Europe between May 2011 and July 2012 – breaking a binding commitment it had made in 2009.

Microsoft made a five-year commitment in 2009 to offer users a choice of different browsers, after the EC's competition commission determined that the combination of its dominance on the desktop – where Windows runs around 95% of machines – gave the pre-installed Internet Explorer browser an unfair advantage over rivals

The commission implemented the "browser choice" system to create a level playing field - and said that once in use, it was very effective: "The choice screen was very successful with users," Joaquín Almunia, the competition commissioner, said in a statement. "For example, until November 2010, 84 million browsers were downloaded through it."

Microsoft, maker of the Windows 8 operating system and the Internet Explorer web browser, has been fined €561m ($732m) by the European Union’s antitrust regulators for breaking a promise to offer its customers a choice of the browser they would like to use to surf the internet on their personal computers.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was once dominant in the browser world,

Google’s Chrome, Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari