Brussels

For seven years, AirData, a small wireless operator in Stuttgart, did something the largest German mobile operators, including T-Mobile, were unwilling to do: It delivered broadband Internet to consumers in remote corners of the country.

But at the end of 2007, AirData's license to use the 2.6 gigahertz band expired after the country's regulator, Bundesnetzagentur, deemed AirData's service inappropriate for the frequency, which it wanted to reserve for mobile phone, not broadband, services.

Microsoft offered Monday to observe a European privacy panel's request to reduce the length of time it kept search queries made by individuals to six months if its rivals, Yahoo and Google, did the same.

Google and Yahoo, in separate statements, said they were unwilling for now to change their policies.

When Google began hiring in Zurich for its new engineering center in 2004, local officials welcomed the U.S. company with open arms. Google's arrival is still bearing fruit for Zurich: 450 employees, about 300 of them engineers, work in Google's seven-story complex in a converted brewery on the outskirts of the placid mountain metropolis.

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Dell Inc. said Thursday it expects sales to outpace computer maker rivals despite a slowing global economy.

CEO Michael Dell told reporters that "our expectation is that Dell will continue to grow faster than the industry this year."

The company warned last week that corporate spending on technology is weakening further, causing its shares to fall to their lowest point since September 2001 and dragging down other industry stocks.

Under pressure from the United States and Asia, the European Union proposed Monday to eliminate taxes on imports of newly developed high-tech goods in the hope of avoiding a lengthy and costly World Trade Organization dispute.

Brussels said it wants to "update and expand" a 1996 WTO agreement that ended tariffs on information technology equipment by granting the special treatment to new products that have entered the market since the accord went into effect.

The U.S. says these new products are already covered by the deal, and charges the 27-nation bloc with breaking the rules.

The heads of two major technology associations have been at the table since January discussing a possible merger. The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) and AeA, formerly the American Electronics Association, are now formally meeting in the hope of combining.

Christopher Hansen, AeA's president and CEO, said he and old friend Phil Bond, ITAA's president and CEO, felt for a long time that the associations in the technology space should come together because there were too many of them, and individually their voices were being lost.

The European Union's telecommunications minister plans to propose a new set of price controls that would sharply cut the roaming fees charged by mobile operators to send short text messages while also reducing the cost of surfing the Internet on a cell phone.

Details of the proposal, obtained by the International Herald Tribune on Wednesday, show that the minister, Viviane Reding, will seek to cap retail roaming fees for short text messages, or SMS, within the European Union at 11 euro cents, or 16 U.S. cents, a message.

In an ongoing legal battle, a group of Belgian newspapers want Google to pay millions of dollars for publishing and storing copyrighted content. Copiepresse, the newspaper copyright group representing the French-language publishers, has summoned Google to appear before a Brussels court on Sept. 18. The group hopes judges will decide the search company should pay between $51.7 million and $77.5 million in damages for infringing on newspaper copyrights.

Estonia and six NATO allies sign a deal this week to provide staff and funds for a new research center designed to boost the alliance's defenses against cyber terrorism.

The agreement to be signed in Brussels on Wednesday comes a year after the small Baltic nation was exposed to an unprecedented wave of cyber attacks that crippled government and corporate computer networks.

The attacks lasted three weeks and followed deadly riots sparked by the relocation of a Soviet war memorial. Many Estonians suspect the Kremlin was behind the virtual strikes but Moscow has denied involvement.