The European Commission is investigating whether five major publishers have breached European Union rules by engaging in anticompetitive activity affecting the sale of ebooks, "possibly with the help of Apple".

Like Australia, the European Union appears to be proposing that data on all Internet searches be retained for possible scrutiny by authorities. The EU appears to be claiming otherwise, but its communications on the matter are pathetic.

On Thursday, January 7, 2010, the European Union's European Commission awarded over US$1.44 billion (1 billion euros) to European companies in order to assure the Galileo global satellite navigation system is up and running by 2014. The progress of Galileo has been sluggish over the years, which has prompted this action.

Only days after the Spanish government awarded a 12m Euro contract to maintain the content and security of its EU summit web site the site has been hacked by none other than the bumbling Mr Bean.

Who said there isn’t money to be made in open source? The Spanish government has awarded a 12m Euro contract to Telefonica to maintain the Presidential web site, a site that is built on OpenCMS, an open source content management system.

According to reports, the MySQL public statement by Oracle has swayed the EU to approve the merger. Monty Widenius, creator of MySQL doesn't like the deal.

As the battle to influence EU regulators over the issue of Oracle acquiring Sun Microsystems intensifies, evidence has come to light of Oracle approaching customers to discuss the matter.

In order to appease European regulators, Oracle has made a number of commitments to the future of MySQL.

Lawyers for Oracle emerged from the first day of hearings before the European Commission "pretty damn confident" that the company would satisfy the commission's concerns about Oracle's purchase of Sun. The EC is investigating whether it would be anticompetitive for the database giant to gain control of Sun's MySQL.

Fifty-nine U.S. senators have written to the European Commission, asking it to get on with its investigation of Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. One of the senators suggested that the investigation was an attempt to obstruct American businesses.