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Google may be using its leading position in the search market to weaken the competition, according to the findings of a French regulator.

Asserting that Google holds a dominant position in search advertising, the French Competition Authority said yesterday that it has found certain possible conduct on the part of Google intended to "discourage, delay, or eliminate" competitors.

Among its findings, the French regulator, or the Autorite, cited exclusivity clauses, technical obstacles, and other methods that Google imposes on its partners or customers and said that the company treats them "in a discriminatory manner or refuses to … Read more

An outage that took down some of Amazon's European Web sites yesterday was caused by hardware error and not hackers, according to the company.

The online retailer's shopping sites in the U.K, France, Spain, and Germany were down for about half an hour starting around 9:15 p.m. GMT, leading to initial speculation that Amazon had been hit by hackers associated with the pro-WikiLeaks group Anonymous.

But in a statement released to Reuters, Amazon attributed the cause to hardware problems.

"The brief interruption to our European retail sites earlier today was due to hardware failure … Read more

The European Union wants stronger rules that would give people more control over how their personal information is used by online companies like Google and Facebook.

The EU has directed its European Commission arm to draft proposals for new rules governing online data, looking to address a variety of questions: What happens to your personal data when you board a plane, open a bank account, or share photos online? How is this data used and by whom? How do you permanently delete profile information on social-networking Web sites? Can you transfer your contacts and photos to another service?

The new … Read more

A new report set to be released this week from open-source systems management provider Zenoss shows that virtualization and cloud computing technologies are set to remain important growth areas in enterprise IT environments.

The overall results of the survey of 204 IT professionals weren't terribly surprising. For example, the report shows that VMware leads the pack with nearly 80 percent of respondents using the VMware hypervisor and that more than 40 percent of the users cite flexibility as the reason for using virtualization.

However, some of the more interesting results include the fact that more than 30 percent of … Read more

On today's show, a rousing discussion on the future of Net neutrality, whether you can handle the truth that is the forthcoming technological revolution, and whether glass-bottomed buses are going to start an upskirting revolution in China. (Ok, actually, that last is about the cleverest little traffic congestion solution ever.)

Blogetery.com's bloggers will get their information back.

That's the word from Joe Marr, chief technology officer of Burst.net, a Scranton, Pa.-based Web hosting service. Burst.net abruptly pulled Blogetery.com offline on July after FBI agents alleged the blogging platform was used by al-Qaeda operatives to distribute recruiting materials and to offer bomb-making tips.

Marr said in a phone interview Friday that his company intends to transfer a "zipped up" copy of Blogetery's records to another server that the service's owner has with Burst.net. Marr said the al-Qaeda materials and … Read more

Remember the Sony Vaio E? When we reviewed it earlier this year, we were quite excited about Sony's more budget-priced multimedia Vaio, both because it had a Core i3 processor and optional Blu-ray. We'll admit it. We were also a little intrigued by the Vaio E's optional neon colors and funky neon keyboard skins.

The only problem? The E was limited to a 15-inch screen size. That's been remedied with new Vaio EA and EC models, in 14 and 17.3 inches, respectively.

The Vaio EA starts at $769 with a Core i3-350M CPU and built-in … Read more

The lack of regulatory consistency across Europe means that businesses and consumers are paying higher prices than necessary and that new telecommunications services are being held back, warns the European Commission.

The EC released on Tuesday the 15th version of its annual report on progress in the European Union's electronic communications market. It found that telecom regulation across the region remains nationally focused, with regulators often procrastinating over the introduction of EU laws.

Because of this, the key to growth in the telecom market, particularly for the creation of next-generation broadband networks, lies in consistent enforcement of legislation across … Read more

With all of the talk about Android, the open Web, and video taking place at this week's Google I/O conference, big software vendors could have easily been lulled into underestimating how much Google is actually targeting enterprises with new and updated offerings.

That would be a mistake.

Google has become such a prolific creator of technology that suits its own business needs, somewhere down the line it crossed over into the future of the enterprise, or at least a version of the future--one that develops software to consume and manage IT services and resources without having to build … Read more