“They’re trying to build a moat around the castle and put alligators in the moat,” said Gary L. Reback, a Silicon Valley lawyer who represented a key Microsoft competitor in the 1990s and represents Google rivals now.
Google officials declined to comment Monday on the privacy case in Europe or the antitrust investigations. But company officials have made clear their desire to avoid costly, distracting legal fights such as the ones waged by Microsoft.
NASA's Mason Peck has been in charge of NASA's tech decisions since January 2012.
The probe found subsidiaries in Ireland with no employees or offices; Apple denied breaking any tax laws.
MetroPCS has dropped its lawsuit against the FCC's network neutrality rules, leaving Verizon as the only firm challenging their legality. But even some supporters of network neutrality think Verizon has a point.
“Twenty years ago, a large technology firm was setting the world on fire,” Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said in Senate testimony last year. “Its software was on nearly every computer. Its name was synonymous with innovation. But that company lost sight of what mattered. Then Washington stepped in.
“In the years since, many of us in Silicon Valley have absorbed the lessons of that era.”
Privacy concerns have followed Google and other Internet companies for years, especially as they have moved into Europe, where laws are stricter. Google’s Street View program, in which cars equipped with cameras took pictures of street-level scenes, has provoked outrage in Germany and some other countries. The controversy was made worse when investigations revealed that the cars also collected personal information from unsecured WiFi signals; the company said that was done in error and apologized.
Google said changes to its privacy policy merely simplified and unified rules across its array of products, such as Gmail, YouTube and the Chrome browser. But consumer watchdogs complained that it allowed users to be tracked whenever they signed in to a Google service.
The company says that such tracking allows it to serve more relevant ads; a visitor to golfing sites, for example, might see ads for balls, clubs or golfing-themed resorts. Privacy advocates, however, have warned about the volume and precision of data Google is compiling on people worldwide.
European regulators, led by the French data protection authority, opened an investigation in February. The letter released Tuesday, the details of which were first reported by the Reuters news service, offers several potential remedies that could bring the privacy policy in compliance.
The case is unlikely to have an immediate effect on users beyond Europe, though regulators elsewhere could ask Google to make similar changes. U.S. lawmakers have expressed concern about the company’s policy.
Resolving antitrust issues will probably be more difficult. Google has been negotiating with the European Union’s chief antitrust official, Joaquin Almunia, for months.
He has detailed four possible areas of violations, with the most serious being allegations that Google organizes its search results in a way that highlights its own offerings and penalizes those of rivals.
Staffers at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile, have circulated a draft recommendation of a possible lawsuit against Google over alleged antitrust violations. The letter includes evidence such as internal company e-mails, said a person familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The FTC has declined comment on the case.
Several people familiar with the thinking of commissioners say a majority of the commission, including Chairman Jon Leibowitz, has significant concerns about Google’s behavior. A decision is expected before the end of the year, though few observers expect action ahead of the presidential election.
The antitrust investigation already is generating political attention. Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.), who has a background in the technology industry, sent a letter to Leibowitz last week discouraging the FTC from suing Google, on the grounds that the marketplace remains open to competitors.
“This is a dynamic marketplace, one in which competition exists every day,” Polis said in an interview Monday. “Today’s leader can be tomorrow’s also-ran.”
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