European Union regulators took the final step Thursday toward an antitrust settlement with Google, which has offered to modify for five years its Internet search engine in Europe to give competitors better representation in search results.

The decision by the European Commission is intended to address complaints from competitors concerned that Google favors its own results over theirs. By announcing the start of market testing, the commission allows others in the industry to weigh in.

The commission said it needed to intervene because “Google has had a strong position in Web search in most European countries for a number of years now” and because it “does not seem likely that another Web search service will replace it as European users’ Web search service of choice.”

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Google is facing a new antitrust complaint in Europe, this time over its software for mobile devices, as regulators on this side of the Atlantic continue their scrutiny of the U.S. tech giant.

The disclosure comes as Google takes the final steps aimed at resolving European Union charges that it abused its dominance of the Internet search field, the European Union’s competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia, said in an interview Monday.

It also comes as the U.S. Treasury secretary, Jacob J. Lew, met with the Union’s officials in Brussels in part to discuss a free-trade agreement. Antitrust issues are not expected to be part of those talks, but European regulators have historically taken a harder line on technology companies than their American counterparts.

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Instead of facing one European investigation into its privacy policy, Google now has to contend with at least six of them.

Data protection agencies in Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands said on Tuesday that they were moving to take action against Google over the policy, which the company introduced last year. They joined the French regulator, which had initiated a European Union inquiry on behalf of its counterparts across the 27-nation bloc.

While the regulators have repeatedly threatened the company with tough talk of a united front, the news on Tuesday reflects the reality that privacy laws are fragmented across the European Union, giving Google little incentive to yield.

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European regulators today fined Microsoft €561 million (or $732 million) for failing to offer Windows users a choice of Web browsers as the company had been required to do.

A previous antitrust agreement required Microsoft to present users a choice of Web browsers in addition to its own Internet Explorer, such as Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari. Microsoft did so for most versions of Windows, but an apparent accident caused the browser ballot to be stripped out of Windows 7 when its first service pack was released.

Microsoft admitted to the mistake last year, attributing it to a “technical error.” The browser ballot screen was missing on Windows 7 from May 2011 until July 2012, although users could still change their default browser in Windows settings. Microsoft confirmed the mistake and distributed a software fix after EU officials notified the company of reports that users weren’t being offered the browser choice.

» via ars technica

Google says it not currently looking to create funds to support digital publishers outside France. Google’s comments follow calls last week by Francisco Pinto Balsemao, head of the European Publishers Council, for Mountain View to pay media companies across Europe for displaying their content.

Google has been fighting publishers in European courtrooms for several years, with publishers in Belgium and France bringing copyright cases against it for displaying and aggregating snippets of content in search results and on services such as its Google News aggregator.

ztech» via TechCrunch

A German data protection body has ordered Facebook to end its policy of making members use their real names.

The policy violates German laws that give people the right to use pseudonyms online, said the data protection agency in Schleswig-Holstein.

The agency has issued a decree demanding that Facebook let people use fake names immediately.

Facebook said it would fight the decree “vigorously” and that its naming policy met European data protection rules.

» via BBC

European Union regulators ended an antitrust probe into e-book prices on Thursday, accepting an offer by Apple and four publishers to ease pricing restrictions on Amazon and other retailers.

The decision hands online retailer Amazon a victory in its attempt to sell e-books cheaper than rivals in a fast-growing market publishers hope will boost revenue and customer numbers. Reuters first reported in November that the Commission was accepting the settlement offer.

The European Commission said on Thursday the concessions from Apple and the publishers soothed concerns that their pricing deals curbed competition.

» via Yahoo! News

European data stored in the “cloud” could be acquired and inspected by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, despite Europe’s strong data protection laws, university researchers have suggested.

The research paper, titled “Cloud Computing in Higher Education and Research Institutions and the USA Patriot Act,” written by legal experts at the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Information Law, support previous reports that the anti-terror Patriot Act could be theoretically used by U.S. law enforcement to bypass strict European privacy laws to acquire citizen data within the European Union.

» via CBS News

Google’s imprint on daily life is hard to ignore in Europe, where it reportedly has 93 percent of the Internet search market, more than in the United States. Yet when it comes to its lobbying of lawmakers, Google prefers a low profile.

That all changed this week when Google fired a rare public broadside against a proposal that would force it and other online aggregators of news content to pay German newspaper and magazine publishers to display snippets of news in Web searches.

The proposed ancillary copyright law, which is to have its first reading Friday in the lower house of Parliament, the Bundestag, has ignited a storm of hyperbole pitting Google and local Web advocates against powerful publishers including Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Bild and Die Welt.

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