EU to give MasterCard months to change fee-source
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The European Commission will give credit card company MasterCard  six months to reconfigure the fee it sets for processing transactions or face daily fines, an industry source said on Wednesday.
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The amount consumers are charged for making mobile calls while abroad is to be investigated by EU regulators.
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The EU is presenting a 'blue card' that would aim to attract skilled workers to Europe and regulate immigration.
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The European Union set mobile phone companies a July deadline on Monday to cut their roaming charges for text messages and Internet use or face regulation.
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The British and French finance ministers will present a joint initiative to their EU partners next month on tax reductions for "green" products, a European Commission spokeswoman said Friday.
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BARCELONA, Spain  - Mobile phone operators must  act before July 1 to avoid the European Union imposing lower  prices for texting or surfing the Web via mobile phones when  abroad, the bloc's top telecoms regulator said on Monday.
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Will that be cash or charge? That&#39;s the question American Express (nyse: AXP - news - people ) will be asking Visa and MasterCard as it prepares to file a suit against the two largest card associations in
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The British government has admitted the cost of introducing identity cards will be almost double its original estimate of three billion pounds (5.6 billion dollars, 4.3 billion euros)), the Financial Times reported.
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(InfoWorld) - The European Parliament urged the European Commission Tuesday to propose a law that would force the dismantlement of the current method of distributing online copyright fees to songwriters and musicians in Europe. The Commission also wants to change the fee distribution regime to open up the market to greater competition. However, it has said it would be enough for collecting societies, which operate in each European country on behalf of artists and publishers, to reform the way they work online themselves. But in a show of hands rather than an actual vote count at the plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg Tuesday, a large majority of parliamentarians said this wasn't enough. "I am not happy with the softer approach taken by the Commission in regulating this area, which is of growing economic importance," said Hungarian Socialist member of the European Parliament, Katalin Levai. "It requires more than just soft law to open up this market. A binding legal instrument is needed," said Federico de Girolamo, a spokesman at the Parliament. At the moment musicians and publishers must choose the collecting society in the country where they are based to handle the collection of the royalties generated from both online and offline music distribution. These collecting societies collect royalties generated from around Europe on behalf of the artists in their countries. They argue that this form of cooperation is sufficient to create a properly functioning, competitive single market across the 27 countries in the EU. The Commission has been examining the way collecting societies operate for many years. It stopped short of proposing a law to pry open the market because it said this might stifle progress in the fast-evolving space. "The Commission wishes to note that the online market is still only in a stage of development -- we need to be especially careful not to limit its potential by adopting an overly inflexible approach," said Vladimir Spidla, the European commissioner for employment, who was standing in for Single Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy at a meeting with members of the European Parliament Monday. Parliamentarians Monday rejected Spidla's fears. "We don't want unrestrained competition at any cost. We feel a law is needed to ensure competition, while at the same time guaranteeing cultural diversity around Europe and protecting the interests of smaller, lesser-known artists who might suffer if competition drove down royalties too far," said de Girolamo. The Commission didn't rule out introducing a proposal for a law along the lines the Parliament is calling for. However, people close to Commission president Jose Mauel Barroso said the Commission -- the EU's executive body -- has no appetite for pursuing a law. "Barroso has been approached by companies in the music industry who have urged him to avoid proposing a law," said one source close to the Commission who asked not to be named. In a separate but related matter concerning copyright levies charged on blank CDs, photocopiers, printers, and the like, Barroso last year ordered McCreevy to abandon a plan to harmonize rules across the EU after he was lobbied heavily both by copyright owners, including record companies, and by the French government. The Parliament stopped short of giving precise instructions to the Commission concerning an online copyright law. "It's not for us to dictate the content of the framework directive we want to see. That's for the Commission to do," de Girolamo said.
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Incoming European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said Thursday that he would make &quot;selective changes&quot; in a new team that will submitted to the European Parliament in a month.
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FIFA will pay MasterCard $90 million  to end a legal dispute over sponsorship of the next two World  Cups, the credit card provider said on Thursday.
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(InfoWorld) - While mobile operators claim to be cutting the cost of roaming, their efforts are just a smoke screen and have no appreciable effect on charges overall, a European consumer rights group has said. The lower tariffs are typically available for a limited duration, sometimes requiring payment of an additional subscription fee, and may only be cheaper for long calls made using certain networks, BEUC, the European Consumers' Organisation, said on Tuesday. The fees should be capped at â¬0.33 ($0.43) per minute for customers roaming outside their home country, consumer groups said . Their demand is considerably lower than the cap of â¬0.49 per minuteÂ proposed by the European CommissionÂ in draft legislation that could be voted by June. Viviane Reding, Commissioner for Information Society and Media,Â announced plans last FebruaryÂ to crack down on mobile phone roaming charges, which she said were unreasonably high. On July 12, the Commission proposed cutting by 70 percent the cost of making and receiving calls while travelling in another European Union member state, saving European consumers â¬5 billion a year, according to the Commission's figures. Under the Commission's proposal, operators will be allowed to charge no more than â¬0.16 per minute for calls received while travelling abroad, â¬0.33 per minute for calls made within the country being visited, or â¬0.49 per minute for calls made back home or to a third country while abroad. However, that's still too much for the consumer groups, which called for charges of â¬0.16, â¬0.25 and 0.33 per minute, respectively. The French Consumers' Union (UFC - Que Choisir) called for national telecommunications regulators to collect more information about the volume of incoming, outgoing and local roaming calls, and the wholesale prices charged by operators for each type of call. Without such statistics, it's difficult to measure the effects of tariffs and policies, the group said. Regulators and consumers are dependent on figures provided by the GSM Association, which represents 700 mobile phone operators, the French group said. Those figures showed that the cost of making roaming calls in Europe fell by 25 percent in 2006, from â¬0.83 per minute to â¬0.62, the GSM Association said on Feb. 8. The price decline shows that regulation, especially of the retail market, is unnecessary, the Association said. In the absence of independent measurements of the market, BEUC and UFC - Que Choisir commissioned their own economic analysis in order to determine what they consider fair price caps. Limiting charges to â¬0.33 per minute will stimulate demand, and so have no adverse effect on operators' revenue or profit, they said. Based on mobile phone bills supplied by Members of the European Parliament, they calculated that lower charges could save MEPs an average over â¬1,000 each per year. European telecommunications ministers are expected to discuss the Commission's proposed regulations at informal meetings alongside the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, next month, while the European Parliament will vote on the proposals in April. Germany, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, has announced its intention to push the legislation on roaming prices through by the end of June, when its term of office ends. Â
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The European Parliament urged the European Commission Tuesday to propose a law that would force the dismantlement of the current method of distributing online copyright fees to songwriters and musicians in Europe.
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Credit cards issuers may face penalty from the regulators as credit cards solicitation is not as reliable as they are said. Consumers sometimes are not given the whole information about the possibly imposed
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The European Central Bank signalled Wednesday that eurozone interest rates were set to rise in the coming months as the financial markets bet on a move as early as next week.
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Updated competition guidelines mean more outsourcing deals in Europe may have to go to the European Commission for approval.
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A cap on roaming fees is to be introduced later this summer.   The legislation means that callers will have better information on hidden charges they face when they make calls from another part of the EU.