Foreign firms must obey EU laws no matter where they're based, says EU. Hear that, Google?

In the midst of the ongoing antitrust negotiations with Google, Europe’s competition chief doesn’t give a fig where the search engine is from — it must simply obey EU laws or else.

“In this, as in any other investigation, we are indifferent to where the companies involved happen to be headquartered," said Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, speaking at the Presidents Institute summit in Copenhagen on Thursday.

"This is the important part: that the same rules apply to all," she added.

“This is how we have traditionally enforced competition rules in Europe, and this is how we will continue to enforce them on my watch," she added.

“Enforcement” seems to be the key word as sources in Brussels believe Vestager is gearing up to slap the search giant and advert slinger with a Statement of Objections, the first step on a path to a fine of up to 10 per cent of annual turnover.

Google is accused of abusing its dominant position in the European search market, systematically directing users to its own services, imposing restrictive contracts on advertisers, and scraping content from other sites.

Although the Chocolate Factory has offered to make changes to rectify these concerns, the good old Commish was unable to reach an agreement. The new College of Commissioners is due to discuss the case at their weekly meeting on Wednesday.

Earlier this week the search giant lost another battle with EU-based regulations.

In Germany, Hamburg’s data protection commissioner, Johannes Caspar, ordered Google to change its privacy policy by the end of the year so that it no longer merges information about users of different services.

In 2012, Google merged its privacy policy for Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar etc., so that it could build a complete profile of users. Caspar claims this breaches Germany’s strict privacy laws. ®

Sponsored: Rise of the Data-First Enterprise

from ffffff http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/10/google_eu_antitrust_chief_vestager/

via IFTTT