Stories by: Paul Meller

The European Parliament demanded Wednesday that the European Commission open up secret negotiations about an anticounterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) to the public.

The U.S., Europe and other countries are secretly drawing up rules designed to crack down on copyright abuse on the Internet, in part by making ISPs liable for illegal content, according to a copy of part of the confidential draft agreement that was seen by the IDG News Service.

The U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission on Thursday both unconditionally approved Microsoft and Yahoo's plan to work together in the field of Internet search.

The European Commission has approved Hewlett-Packard's US$2.7 billion takeover of 3Com without attaching conditions, the Commission announced on Friday.

The European Commission granted Oracle an unconditional approval to take over Sun Microsystems on Thursday, following a controversial and drawn out examination of the deal.The deal still awaits approval in other jurisdictions, including Russia and China, but approval in the European Union is a big step forward for a deal hailed by some as transformational for the entire software industry, and by others as the killer of one of the most successful open source programs in the world, the MySQL database.

Google is pushing for the creation of an E.U. group to look at security and privacy policy, the company's top privacy lawyer, Peter Fleischer, said Tuesday.

Microsoft announced plans to cut the length of time it stores IP addresses of Web searchers using its Bing search engine from 18 months to six in a bid to improve its privacy track record.

With the European Commission seen as virtually certain to approve Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems in just a week, those campaigning to prevent the deal encompassing Sun's MySQL database unit have shifted their efforts to regulators in Russia and China.

Microsoft's successful settlement of its antitrust issues with the European Commission was welcomed by the software company's foes and friends alike Wednesday, with many hailing the moment as a turning point for the computer industry.

Oracle's latest commitments designed to address the European Commission's concerns regarding its acquisition of Sun Microsystems and the MySQL database are paper thin, and even if they were confirmed they wouldn't safeguard MySQL's future, said Florian Mueller, an outspoken critic of the deal, on Monday.