The European Commission is looking into how mobile Internet providers are managing data across their networks, opening up a new storm of debate around the idea of net neutrality. The review is in part gearing up for a new European telecommunications law, which takes effect May 25.

Ars Technica's Nate Anderson writes that there's a reason for interested parties to be concerned about the issue,

As today's Commission report noted, throttling of file-sharing and video streaming traffic has been reported in France, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and the United Kingdom. Blocking or charging extra fees for VoIP has been reported on mobile operators in Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Romania.

It's not clear that the new law will give sufficient guidance. PCWorld's Jennifer Baker writes,

There is no set definition of "net neutrality" in the European Union, but it will be a legal requirement when the new Telecoms Package comes into force on May 25. This new law, which sets out rules on transparency, quality of service and the ability to switch operator, must be applied in a way "that ensures open and neutral Internet principles are respected in practice." However, it does not specify how member states may achieve this, leading to confusion in some countries about how to adopt the law.

Some companies and organizations are complaining that there are already big problems with how European carriers treat data traveling on the mobile Internet, writes the New York Times,

Advocates of network neutrality criticized the inquiry as insufficient, saying that the fact-finding mission was superfluous and ignored obvious, continuing problems with the mobile Internet. Operators, for example, do not connect Skype calls over their networks because the Internet calling company's services would siphon revenue from their own businesses.

"The European Union appears to be alone in the developed world in tolerating on such a wide scale these types of arbitrary restrictions on Internet use," said Jean-Jacques Sahel, the director of government and regulatory affairs for Skype in London. "It has to cease and we look to European authorities to unambiguously protect consumers."

Though the European Union is well known for the hard line it took with Microsoft in its antitrust investigation, it's not yet clear how the Commission will position itself in this case. In a press conference, Neelie Kroes, European vice president for the digital agenda, toed a careful line between the interests of the operators and those of their opponents, saying,

Today's report shows a general consensus that traffic management can be useful. For example, it is important to keep video calls running smoothly even if that means an email is delayed by a few seconds. Consumers have the right to choose services, and operators have the right to deliver services, that can meet these expectations. I do not like the blocking or degrading of certain services. But if there is such blocking or degradation, then the customer needs to be clearly informed in advance so that they can make an informed choice about the operator that gives them what they want. It is clearly not OK to block or degrade lawful services by stealth, without informing the customer.

"It's amazing to me that we still use QWERTY keyboards," says Juan Pons, General Manager of the eastern branch of Swype, a company that makes an alternative input system for text. "At Swype, we are hoping to address and change this."

Though the keyboard is a familiar device, Pons is quick to point out that it was designed for an entirely different scenario than most people find themselves in today. The QWERTY keyboard worked well for typewriters--the layout of its keys optimized to keep the machine from getting tangled when a user typed quickly.

These days, however, people often use touchscreens, type with one hand or even one finger, and hold their devices at odd angles while they enter data. Swype hopes to create a system that fits those devices better, while still offering users enough familiarity to make them comfortable trying it out.

Pons spoke today at Blur, a conference in Orlando focused on the changing nature of human-computer interaction. He was one of many speakers aiming to take down the humble keyboard.

To use Swype, a person rubs a finger or stylus over the letters of the word she wants to type. The software's algorithms figure out what word the user intends, and inserts spaces and proper capitalization. If the software is uncertain, it offers the user a box of choices.

"You don't have to be very accurate--you can miss a lot of letters," he says.

Pons says the software works in 50 languages, and comes preloaded on nine out of ten Android phones today. The company has also made it work on devices ranging from tablets to the Wii.

The Cr-48 boasts world-mode 3G. A must for any device that does everything via the Web. Credit: Technology Review.

One way to summarize Google's week so far is to say that it picked fights with two of the biggest computing companies on the planet. On Monday it unveiled a bookstore that competes with Amazon's Kindle line. Today it took the wraps off an attempt to displace Microsoft from the provider of the most popular operating system.

"With Chrome OS we have a viable third choice for OS on the desktop," said CEO Eric Schmidt at the launch event in San Francisco, drawing a comparison with Windows and Mac OS. He spoke after a lengthy demonstration that showed off a new vision of the computer that strips away pretty much everything except the browser.

Fresh out of the box, a Chrome notebook boots up in a few seconds. After connecting it to the Internet, you log in with a Google account and are pitched into the Chrome browser. At that point, the setup is over. Chrome OS is little more than Chrome the browser.

In this new world you get all your applications through the Chrome webstore, an app store on the now familiar model (check this link later today to browse the Chrome Web store using the browser on an existing OS). You can browse, search, read reviews and click to install. Some are paid and some are free. Examples shown today included a version of EA's puzzle game PopIt, a tablet-style NPR app that lets you drag and drop shows to build a custom playlist, and one from the New York Times that lets you choose alternative "skins" for the paper's content.

Those apps can be powerful because of features built into Chrome that make it faster than any other browser, boasted Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google. Many—including most games and the app from the New York Times—can also work offline because they are cached by the browser, a feature that will soon appear in Google's online Microsoft Office competitor, Google Docs.

It adds up to an experience that looks compellingly simple. "Since 2004 it is very hard to name a new application outside the Web that has scaled to hundreds of millions of users," said Pichai, "people live within their browsers on the Web but most of the code and complexity on their systems has nothing to do with the browser and the Web." Chrome OS strips all that away, even updating itself without user input.

Very soon, certain users of the Chrome browser and fans of it on Facebook will get the chance to try that for themselves when they are invited to join a pilot program. They'll receive a notebook commissioned by Google to test its new OS. Notebooks made by Acer and Samsung—built with Intel chips—will go on sale globally in mid 2011, although pricing hasn't been announced. All of those devices will see battery lives in the region of eight hours while in active use, and weeks on standby.

It's possible to overdose on simplicity, though, as evidenced by some things Chrome OS currently lacks. A "Cloud Print" service that will allow use of network-connected printers is not yet done, for example, and although the devices will have USB ports it is not yet possible to plug in, say, a camera and download photos.

Building Chrome was not just an exercise in subtracting from the conventional OS experience, though. It also introduces some technologies not seen before. One is a feature called verified boot, which sees the initial chunk of the OS installed on a part of the device that cannot be modified without physically taking the computer apart. "Every time you boot we use that safe part to cryptographically check every other part of the OS and we keep a known backup copy that we can revert to," said Pichai. "We are very confident that it will be the most secure consumer OS shipped."

Ultimately, though the core promise of Chrome OS is familiar: it's an attempt to deliver on a suite of ideas and concepts about cloud computing and the Web that have been circling for years. Schmidt in particular has been here before. In the late 90s, in a previous life as CTO of Sun Microsystems, he pushed the "Network Computer," a diskless notebook that relied on the cloud for everything. "Our instincts were right 20 years ago but our technology wasn't mature," he said today. "This time it does in fact work."