These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week

Happy Friday! This week, Tech.eu tracked 26 technology M&A transactions and 57 funding deals (totalling €318 million) in Europe, Turkey and Israel.

Like every week, we listed every single one of them in our free weekly newsletter, along with interesting news regarding fledgling European startups, tech investors old and new, a number of good reads published elsewhere, government and policy news, as well as an overview of interesting lists, facts and figures from a wide variety of sources.

You can subscribe to our newsletter below to receive all this information in your inbox every Friday afternoon for free, but here’s an overview of the 10 biggest European tech news items for this week:

1) “The European Commission has informed Google of its preliminary view that the company has, in breach of EU antitrust rules, abused its dominant position by imposing restrictions on Android device manufacturers and mobile network operators” – boom! Also, here’s why Facebook has the most to gainfrom the Commissions’s crackdown on Google, according to Fortune’s David Meyer.

2) In related news, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has lodged a fresh antitrust complaint against Google in Europe.

3) Spain’s Cabify raised $120 million in funding from Rakuten and others to rival Uber in Latin America and Europe, marking the largest ever single financing round for a private Spanish tech company on record.

4) Opera’s latest browser for developers features a built-in, free and unlimited VPN client, which is cool but also interesting because the company may soon be fully owned by a consortium of Chinese Internet firms.

5) Apple is reportedly hiring automotive experts for a secretive ‘iCar’ lab in Berlin.

6) In related news, German carmakers Daimler and BMW have ended talks with Apple over a cooperation deal on an electric car, Handelsblatt has learned from industry sources.

7) Yoox Net-a-Porter, a European e-commerce group that calls itself the “world’s biggest luxury fashion store” has sold a 100 million-euro stake to a retail giant from the Middle East.

8) The European Commission unveiled its long-awaited strategy to support the digitalisation of industry, aiming to mobilise around €50 billion by 2021 to help manufacturers catch up in the global race for the fourth industrial revolution.

9) Also, the EU Commission plans to create a new ‘European Open Science Cloud’ that will offer Europe’s 1.7 million researchers and 70 million science and technology professionals a virtual environment to store, share and re-use their data.

10) Avery Dennison, a packaging and labelling giant that puts labels onto products from brands like Nike, Adidas and Hugo Boss, has struck a deal with “Facebook for things” firm Evrythng to create unique web identities for at least 10 billion pieces of apparel over the next three years.

Bonus link: The Minecraft Generation: How a clunky Swedish computer game is teaching millions of children to master the digital world.