Europe Looms as Major Battleground for Google: Via NYT > Privacy.

PARIS — Google has a problem in China. It may be headed for a bigger one in Europe.

So far, no one has accused European governments of cyberattacks like those that Google says it has suffered in China. But on issues from privacy to copyright protection to the dominance of Google’s Internet search engine, clashes with European lawmakers, regulators and consumer advocates are escalating.

Europe matters to Google and its shareholders — potentially more than China. For nowhere else in the world is the company as powerful and as potentially vulnerable. Across most of Europe, Google is by far the biggest search engine, with a substantially bigger market share than in the United States. In a single European country, Britain, Google has roughly 10 times its estimated sales in China.

On a region where the media sector is mostly fragmented along national lines and sometimes dependent on public subsidies, Google’s border-straddling scale, its ambitious pursuit of profit and its embrace of an open, anything-goes Web are raising alarms.

“It’s really Europe versus America,” said Robin Meyer-Lucht, a digital media consultant in Berlin. “It’s the old versus the new, the semicommercial versus the supercommercial, selection versus chaos.”

A blunter assessment came from Germany’s justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, who complained recently about Google’s instinct for “pressing ahead” and its “megalomania.”

“On the whole, I see a giant monopoly developing, largely unnoticed, similar to Microsoft,” she said in an interview with Der Spiegel.

A spokesman later clarified that she was talking about issues like privacy and copyright and had not meant to express an opinion on antitrust matters, which are outside her jurisdiction.

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This month a decision is expected in a trial in Milan, where four Google executives have been charged with defamation and privacy violations in a case involving videos posted on a Google Web site showing the bullying of an autistic boy.

The company says a guilty verdict might require it to edit content on YouTube, Google’s video-sharing service, before it is posted; that, it says, would be incompatible with the open spirit of the Internet, as well as European Union guidelines.

Italian prosecutors accuse Google of negligence, saying it was too slow to remove the video. But Google sees a political dimension. One of the four executives, Peter Fleischer, Google’s chief privacy counsel, called the case part of “an attack on a decade of progress” for Internet companies in Italy.

As a verdict is awaited, the Italian government has proposed a law making online video services like YouTube liable for invasions of privacy, violations of copyright and other transgressions that occur in user-generated content. Meanwhile Google is contesting a copyright lawsuit from Mediaset, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s family company, which is the largest commercial television broadcaster in Italy.

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