Philip Willan

An Italian court has upheld a €900,000 (US$1.2 million) fine imposed on Apple by Italy's competition authority for allegedly violating consumer protection laws, Italian media reported late Friday.

The Regional Administrative Tribunal (TAR) of Lazio rejected Apple's appeal against the fine imposed by the Antitrust Authority last December for "unfair commercial practices that damage the consumer."

A Rome court has upheld a €900,000 (US$1.2 million) fine imposed on Apple last December by Italy's Antitrust Authority for circumventing consumer protection laws, Italian media reported Friday.

The Regional Administrative Tribunal (TAR) of Lazio rejected Apple's appeal that the fine be suspended pending a ruling on the merits of the question slated for May 9.

The Italian mathematician who contributed to the development of Google's search algorithm is preparing to launch his own challenge to the dominant search engine before the end of the year.

Massimo Marchiori (Source: W3C)Massimo Marchiori, an associate professor at Padua University, recently began talking up the new search engine with videos posted on a promotional website at volunia.com.

The Italian company criticized for supplying the brutal Syrian regime with telecommunications surveillance equipment has frozen participation in the project and is seeking a way to extricate itself from the contract, Area SpA CEO Andrea Formenti said last week.

"At the moment we have no people down there and the project has made no progress in the last two months," Formenti told the Milan daily Corriere della Sera. "The interception system has never been activated and cannot be under current circumstances. There has been no repression carried out thanks to our equipment."

Italy's Internet activists gathered in front of Rome's ancient Pantheon Thursday to protest a new law they say will throttle freedom of expression on the Web.

The new rule, due to be presented in parliament next week as part of a bill to restrict the use and publication of telephone wiretaps, would oblige all online publications to publish a correction within 48 hours of receiving a request or risk a €12,000 (US $16,000) fine.

The Milan judge who convicted three Google executives for allowing the posting of a video showing the bullying of an autistic teenager has received hundreds of threatening and insulting messages via Facebook since the verdict was first announced on February 24.

Judge Oscar Magi revealed the existence of the hatemail on his Facebook profile and provided details in an interview with Il Sole 24 Ore blogger Daniele Lepido published Thursday. The judge's 111-page explanation for his conviction of the executives was released on Monday.

Three Google executives were handed suspended six month prison sentences by a Milan court on Wednesday for privacy law violations relating to a video posted on Google Video showing the bullying of a handicapped boy, a Google spokesman said.

David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, Peter Fleischer, its global privacy counselor, and George Reyes, the former chief financial officer, were convicted of the privacy violations in connections with the video, which was online for two months in 2006, but acquitted on charges of defamation.

An Italian legal initiative seeking compensation from PC manufacturers for undesired preinstalled Microsoft software will begin next week, the head of the consumer group promoting the class action lawsuit said Thursday."We will begin depositing our requests with the courts next week, I think. The lawyers are back from the holidays and are already working on the preparations," Vincenzo Donvito, president of ADUC (Association for the Rights of Users and Consumers), said in a telephone interview.The lawsuits, which take advantage of new Italian legislation permitting class actions that went into effect at the beginning of the year, is likely to affect all the major PC manufacturers, Donvito said. The ADUC president named Hewlett-Packard as one likely target, saying the legal action would concern the manufacturers that sell the largest numbers of computers.

HP officials were not immediately available for comment."Technically, there will be a class action for each manufacturer and the papers will be served in the cities where the companies have their Italian headquarters," Donvito said.Around 2,000 people have expressed interest in participating in the initiative, which is open to individuals who bought PCs with preinstalled Windows but rejected the software license and left the OS unused."We have already won a pilot case on the point of principle," Donvito said. "It's no longer a question of principle, but a concrete action to obtain a refund."

An Italian consumers association is set to mount a class-action lawsuit to obtain compensation for customers who buy PCs with preinstalled Microsoft software but who prefer not to use the Windows OS, the association's president announced Tuesday.

The lawsuit seeking the return of the cost of the unwanted Microsoft software from the manufacturers of computer hardware will be registered with a court in Florence later this week, said Vincenzo Donvito, president of ADUC (Association for the Rights of Users and Consumers).

Italian police Friday arrested an alleged hacker with links to organized crime in the Naples area who is accused of defrauding banks and mobile phone operators out of several million dollars.

Fabrizio Iannelli, 33, was arrested on arrival at Rome's Fiumicino Airport after being expelled from Thailand, Michele De Capola, deputy director of the operations unit of the Naples postal police, said in a telephone interview.

Italy's Antitrust Authority has opened an investigation into Google Italy for alleged abuse of its dominant position in the Internet search market, the Authority announced Thursday.

The inquiry has been launched in response to a complaint from the Italian Newspaper Publishers Federation (FIEG) that the use of its members' content on Google News Italia has a negative impact on their ability to attract users and advertisers, the Antitrust Authority said in a statement.

Google Inc. is preparing for a significant expansion of its book digitization program with agreements reportedly imminent with public libraries in France and Italy.

The search giant's efforts in Europe come even as competitors in the U.S. are pushing for more scrutiny by the Department of Justice of Google's plans to scan and search-enable a wide range of books. In fact, concerns have been raised in Europe as well.