European Commission

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.

For more than a year, European data privacy officials have been battling with U.S.-based Internet search engines, trying to get them to conform to European restrictions on the storage of personal information gleaned from the Web.

Now, as the U.S. titans Google, Microsoft and Yahoo continue to retain personal data beyond the six-month time limit established this year by the European Commission, regulators say their patience is running thin.

Sending a text message home to boast about a beach vacation should cost less than half of what it does now, EU regulators said Tuesday.

The European Commission wants to set a price cap for text messages of 11 euro cents (16 U.S. cents), far below the current EU average of 29 euro cents (43 cents).

The EU's top telecom official, Viviane Reding, said she was putting the new rules forward because telecommunications companies had not responded to her call for them to lower the roaming charges for sending or receiving mobile phone text messages outside a user's home nation.

Advertisers are not happy with a proposed ad partnership between Google and Yahoo, and the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) has asked for the agreement to be blocked.

Since announcing the agreement to partner on advertising, Google and Yahoo have been dealing with opposition from advertisers. The agreement allows Yahoo to run ads supplied by Google alongside Yahoo's search results on some of its Web sites in the U.S. and Canada.

At the request of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), an international organization for the newspaper industry, the European Commission's Competition Directorate has launched an inquiry into a proposed online advertising relationship between Google and Yahoo.

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.

EU regulators warned Thursday that they may take action against mobile phone companies who overcharge users for calls made abroad.

EU spokesman Martin Selmayr said some European phone operators are fixing roaming fees by the minute instead of by each second of a call.

On average, users pay 24 percent more for calls they make outside their home nation and 19 percent more for calls they receive, he said.

Selmayr said EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding "may tackle this issue" in draft rules to be presented at the end of September.

Europe's mobile phone operators regularly charge users for more time than they actually use when it comes to expensive calls made away from home, European regulators said Wednesday.

Users are billed more "by a significant margin" for calls they make abroad because many operators charge for each minute of a call instead of by the second, the European group of national telecoms agencies said in a report.

That means people are paying for 24 percent more minutes than they make, and 19 percent more than they receive.

The legal salvos between Nokia Corp. and Qualcomm Inc. stopped months ago, part of what officials at the wireless industry heavyweights described as a truce in a long-running battle that spanned three continents.

Peace came Wednesday as the two sides prepared for a courtroom showdown. Nokia, the world's largest handset maker, and Qualcomm, the world's largest maker of chips that run cell phones, agreed to settle a high-stakes licensing dispute and drop all legal complaints against each other in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Iayn Dobson, a computer technician from a suburb of Manchester, downloaded a 60-minute episode of the U.S. television show Prison Break last September using a 3G network and mobile data card. Wireless data are expensive in Europe, but Dobson's mistake was making the download while on vacation in Portugal.

That became clear when his monthly bill arrived from Yes Telecom, a subsidiary of Vodafone, the largest European mobile operator: pound(s)31,000, or about $61,000 -- most of it for international data-roaming charges from the video download.