#eu-antitrust

#eu-antitrust

The European Commission has launched a new antitrust probe into Google, expanding its long-running scrutiny of the tech giant's advertising practices. Regulators suspect the company may be manipulating the pricing of its search ad auctions, potentially inflating clearing prices "to the detriment of advertisers," according to a February 9 letter sent to affected businesses and seen by Bloomberg. The investigation marks the latest in a series of EU actions against Google,

The case began in 2009, when mobile computing was in its infancy and netbooks ( remember those?) were all the rage in the PC space. At the time, the EU ruled that Intel violated antitrust laws on multiple fronts. First, it used illegal hidden rebates to push rivals out of the PC processor market. Second, it paid manufacturers to delay or stop production of AMD-powered products.

According to a new report today, Apple and Meta's regulatory woes in the EU are almost over. Both companies are allegedly close to settling their antitrust cases with the European Commission (EC), which will definitely be good for them as they'd avoid some additional hefty fines that the EC might impose otherwise. This information isn't official yet, the report says it comes from "officials briefed on the discussions" between the EC on one side, and Apple and Meta respectively on the other.

This week in Other Barks & Bites: the European Union Intellectual Property Office announces that it will host its first two-day Copyright Conference in November; the D.C. Circuit finds that Shira Perlmutter showed a likelihood of irreparable harm in granting injunctive relief allowing her to temporarily resume her role as Register of Copyrights; Novartis becomes the latest pharmaceutical company to lose constitutional challenges to the IRA Drug Price Negotiation