Basically, this covers search labeling and scraping, as expected. It’s trying to set a more level playing ground for how Google treats its competitors, and to address some of the ways it may have abused its power in the past — like by including Yelp reviews in its own local search in a way that discouraged people from ever visiting Yelp.

You can see in the illustrations here that Google will include a little lowercase “i” with a circle around it next to results from its own properties, and will also sometimes encase them in a “sponsored” box:

As part of the agreement, Google also conceded some limitations it had put on its advertisers, similar to the deal it made in the U.S. The commitments don’t include anything related to concerns about use of patents.

Competitors now have a month-long “market test” to comment, then Google has to implement the changes for five years throughout Europe.

So why is this different and stronger than the mild hand-slap that Google received in the U.S.? Well, first of all, European laws are stricter, and Google is much more dominant than it is in Europe, with search market shares above 90 percent.

But, second, competitors are already saying that this won’t go far enough.

ICOMP, an organization representing Google’s competitors, immediately fired off a round of comments today about how labeling something as wrong doesn’t fix the fact that it’s wrong.

“If the proposals don’t clearly set out non-discrimination principles and the means to deal with the restoration of effective competition, plus effective enforcement and compliance, it’s very difficult to see how they can be satisfactory,” ICOMP said in a blog post. “[I]t is clear that mere labelling is not any kind of solution to the competition concerns that have been identified. Google should implement the same ranking policy to all websites.”

Said a Google spokesperson, as usual, “We continue to work cooperatively with the European Commission.”

Embedded below is the text document of Google’s commitments, which contains a bunch of images showing how the proposed labeling will look:

Google’s EU commitments for competition market test

palpitation/Shutterstock

What happened since then? A task force meeting with Google in March, and not much else.

“No change has been seen,” the French CNIL said in a press release today. “After this period has expired, Google has not implemented any significant compliance measures.”

So, what now? Additional investigations and inspections by the Europeans, but this time they’re being called “enforcement actions,” and they’re being conducted by each country individually.

Six countries — France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom — launched actions today based on their own laws. The investigations and inspections could result in fines and restrictions, but it’s not yet clear that those would be significant.

Google sent a statement, “Our privacy policy respects European law and allows us to create simpler, more effective services. We have engaged fully with the DPAs involved throughout this process, and we’ll continue to do so going forward.”

Coincidentally, Google’s director of privacy for product and engineering, Alma Whitten, just retired. She’ll be replaced by another longtime Google engineer, Lawrence You.

Several European operators have submitted concerns about their contracts with Apple to the EU antitrust watchdog over the past months, two people familiar with the matter said Friday. French carriers led the charge, but companies from other EU countries were also involved, the people said.

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Apple, which in 2011 was fined $1.2 million for allegedly upselling its Italian customers into AppleCare extended warranties despite their overlap with the standard two-year product warranty required by European law, on Tuesday was singled out by EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding as evidence of the need for better cooperation on consumer protection issues across the EU. Last fall, Reding sent letters to the EU’s 27 member states asking them to review Apple’s warranty practices. She wasn’t at all pleased with the result.

“This case and the responses I received since I sent my letter have highlighted rather clearly just why the commission cannot sit on the side-lines on enforcement issues,” Reding said. “The approaches to enforcement in these types of cases turn out to be very diversified and inconsistent at a national level. In at least 21 EU member states Apple is not informing consumers correctly about the legal warranty rights they have. This is simply not good enough.”

In other words, there’s no coordinated enforcement of EU consumer rules. Different EU countries have different practices and sanctions for violations of consumer protection law. The problem here, of course, is that most consumer protection powers in the EU are held at the national level. The EC can’t come after Apple for its warranty practices. It can only take legal action against countries that fail to enforce EU rules.

Which of the following scenarios has regulators in Europe issuing hundreds of millions in new fines this week?

1) Google has released a laptop that consists of nothing more than its browser, thereby severely foreclosing opportunities for competition on any number of fronts.

2) Apple, which for years wouldn’t allow iOS apps to compete with its built-in programs, still won’t allow access to its fastest browsing engine, forcing rivals to use slower technology.

3) Microsoft, which used to have a dominant browser and operating system but has been losing share for years, has failed to live up to the terms of a deal over that fading monopoly.

If you guessed No. 3, you might have a job waiting for you at the European Commission.

While everyone else has turned their attention to mobile — an area where Microsoft trails badly — European regulators have remained doggedly focused on making sure consumers have plenty of choice of browsers when they bother to boot up their desktop.

The issue seemed passe when the EU revisited it back in 2009 and seems all the more so four years later.

Windows and Internet Explorer have continued to lose share over those four years on the desktop itself, and the real growth in the Internet is from billions of mobile devices.

To be fair, Microsoft did agree to offer European consumers the option of a ballot to choose which browser they wanted. Even Redmond admits it made a mistake.

“We take full responsibility for the technical error that caused this problem and have apologized for it,” Microsoft said in a statement. “We provided the (European) Commission with a complete and candid assessment of the situation, and we have taken steps to strengthen our software development and other processes to help avoid this mistake — or anything similar — in the future.”

But, at this point, might regulators want to turn their attention elsewhere?

Consumers certainly have. Even RealNetworks, Opera and the other outfits that initially complained about Windows have, too.

Reuters reports that the European Commission plans to sanction Microsoft for failing to comply with a mandate to offer Windows users in Europe a choice of Web browsers beyond its own Internet Explorer. And sources familiar with the matter have confirmed to AllThingsD that this is indeed the case at this time. No word yet on the size of the fine, but given EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia’s public threats over the misstep, penalties could be severe. Whatever they are, sources say the EC will likely announce them sometime in March.

Under the terms of Microsoft’s 2009 antitrust settlement with the European Commission, the company was to present Windows users with a ballot screen offering them an opportunity to swap out Internet Explorer for one of 11 other browsers. And Microsoft did do that — at first, anyway. But when an update to Windows 7 rolled out in February of 2011, the company unwittingly eliminated the ballot screen, and didn’t realize it had done so until last summer.

In July of 2012, the commission opened an investigation into the matter, despite Microsoft’s apologies for what it claimed was a “technical error.” And by fall it had filed formal charges against Microsoft. “If companies enter into commitments, they must do what they have committed to do or face the consequences,” Almunia said during an October news conference. ” [They] should be deterred from any temptation to renege on their promises or even to neglect their duties. This is why, when this happens, the commission has the power to impose fines.”

And in this case it seems the agency plans to exercise it. That’s potentially bad news for Microsoft, which has already been fined about $1.28 billion by the EU. If the commission follows through on its current plan to sanction Microsoft, it could slap the company with fines equivalent to 10 percent of its fiscal 2012 revenue. That’s about $7.4 billion.

Microsoft declined comment.

“We can reach an agreement after the summer break. We can envisage this as a possible deadline,” European Commission head of competition Joaquin Almunia said today at a conference, according to Reuters.

Marilyn Volan/Shutterstock

The slow turnaround comes as a bit of a surprise after Almunia had put pressure on Google to submit its proposed remedies to concerns about anticompetitive actions in search and advertising by the end of January — which the company did.

But it’s really not that shocking after repeated lags in the European antitrust investigation of the company, which started way back in 2010.

Critics of tech industry regulation charge that the pace of government moves much slower than that of innovation. The Google case is now becoming a textbook example — especially as search transitions to mobile, which was a consideration but not the focus of the antitrust investigation.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission already settled with and declined to bring charges against Google, under the leadership of Chairman Jon Leibowitz, who is stepping down.

As we’ve reported, it’s likely that in Europe Google will agree to better labeling of its own properties in search results, as a concession to the claims of competing vertical search engines. That would make it a stricter deal than in the U.S., but it wouldn’t radically alter how Google does its business.

France’s privacy watchdog said Monday it and an unspecified number of other European regulators want to coordinate a “repressive action” against Google, after the company had failed to give “precise and effective” answers to a warning that all 27 EU national regulators issued in October. The full group of privacy regulators, known as the Article 29 group, is scheduled to vote on the proposal at the end of February.

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On March 1, an amendment to the EU’s Information Technology Equipment Safety Standard will go into effect, rendering the Mac Pro noncompliant. Evidently, the machine’s fan guards don’t meet the updated standard and, rather than redesign them, Apple has opted simply to stop shipping the Mac Pro to EU member states.

“Apple resellers can continue to sell any remaining inventory of Mac Pro after March 1,” the company said in a message to resellers first published by 9to5Mac. “Apple will take final orders for Mac Pro from resellers up until February 18th for shipment before March 1 2013. Countries outside of the EU are not impacted and Mac Pro will continue to be available in those areas.”

The Mac Pro has long been a niche product for Apple, so pulling it off the market in the EU will have minimal impact on the company’s bottom line. And the company has been working on its successor — “something really great,” in the words of CEO Tim Cook — with an eye toward launching it sometime this year. With that machine in the pipeline, it likely made far more sense to halt sales of the current Mac Pro than scramble to retrofit them into compliance.

The European Commission, which acts as the EU’s competition watchdog, is investigating whether Samsung’s past use of injunctions against Apple Inc. prevented competition.

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European officials are now debating whether to take the next step: an investigation that would risk igniting a trade war with Beijing.

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On both sides of the Atlantic, the government agencies that have conducted antitrust examinations of Google over the past two years seem to have trouble keeping their own timetables.

The funny thing is that all of this is entirely self-imposed. Almunia, for instance, said in May that Google had just “a matter of weeks” to offer remedies. It’s clearly more than a few weeks later.

The latest news from Europe is a vague push-back on that timing. Almunia said today, “On our side, this process of conversations with Google to try to reach a settlement agreement … we are not yet there but we work quite intensively. So one day, I don’t know when, I will come here to tell you how these conversations have been concluded.”

In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission is less public and press-conferency about its demands, but there have also been widely reported timing ultimatums.

The FTC would like to close the investigation before the end of the year, and the time crunch is quite obvious because one commissioner’s replacement has already been nominated and Chairman Jon Leibowitz has widely known plans to step down himself. In November, Leibowitz had also given Google a couple weeks to respond with a settlement offer before calling for a vote on a formal complaint. That deadline has passed, too.

One question is whether the FTC and the EC will stumble their way into a jointly coordinated timeline. Almunia and Leibowitz met on Monday to discuss that. Almunia said today, “Our services are working in very good coordination.”

As for Google, it’s getting very used to saying the same thing. A spokesperson for the company today reiterated, “We continue to work cooperatively with the European Commission and are happy to answer any questions they may have.”

Google CEO Larry Page

It’s not necessarily clear that there are any teeth behind these recommendations, though the French National Commission for Computing and Civil Liberties talked up sanctions and enforcement at a news conference in Paris earlier today, where 27 European data protection authorities signed onto a letter sent to Google CEO Larry Page. As of today, there was no finding of illegality and no imposition of a fine.

Google’s official statement on the matter from Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel is: “We have received the report and are reviewing it now. Our new privacy policy demonstrates our long-standing commitment to protecting our users’ information and creating great products. We are confident that our privacy notices respect European law.”

Here’s a sampling of the requests:

• Google should be clearer about what data it is collecting and give users better control of it. Data collection should “remain proportionate to the purposes pursued.”
• The EU specified multiple levels of detail it wants and suggested Google create a better user experience for its privacy policy. For instance, it ever-so-politely states, “The ergonomics of the Policy could also be improved with interactive presentations.”
• Google should put all its opt-outs together, and make it easier to opt out of new services and combinations of services.
• The company shouldn’t combine user data meant for different purposes, like security and advertising.
• Google should provide clear timeframes for data retention.
• Some countries are particularly concerned about facial recognition and want better warnings about collection of biometric data.

The letter is embedded below, and you can find the full recommendations here.

20121016 EU Letter Google Article 29 FINAL

In a letter to European Union member states, first obtained by Bloomberg, EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding asked if Apple has been properly notifying customers of the minimum two-year warranty they are entitled to under European law. “Apple prominently advertised that its products come with a one-year manufacturer warranty but failed to clearly indicate the consumers’ automatic and free-of-cost entitlement to a minimum two-year guarantee under EU law,” Reding wrote. “These are unacceptable marketing practices.”

Like Italy’s antitrust authority, Reding is concerned that Apple has been upselling EU customers into AppleCare extended warranties without properly explaining the two years of free assistance they are already entitled to under the EU Statutory Warranty.

Now, as I’ve noted here before, Apple disagrees with this characterization. It maintains that AppleCare is a different beast entirely from the mandatory EU warranty. AppleCare covers product defects that occur after a product is purchased. The EU warranty covers only pre-existing defects present at the time of sale and doesn’t guarantee consumers access to Apple telephone technical support and, for some products, express replacement service. And, importantly, Apple does describe the differences between the two on its Web site. The question the EU seems to be asking, though, is does Apple proactively explain consumer warranty options at the time of sale.

Apple has not yet responded to a request for comment.

According to EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia, the software giant is scrambling to reimplement in Windows the Browser Choice Screen that it accidentally removed with a February 2011 update to Windows 7. That screen was a requirement under Microsoft’s 2009 antitrust settlement with the European Commission, and it was intended to present Windows users with a ballot screen offering them an opportunity to swap out Internet Explorer for one of 11 other browsers from rivals like Mozilla, Apple, Opera and Google.

In the face of Almunia’s public threat of severe penalties for the misstep, Microsoft has reportedly claimed it is working hard to address the EU’s antitrust concerns. Said Almunia, “In my personal talks with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, he has given me assurances that they will comply immediately regardless of the conclusion of the antitrust probe.”

News of the remaining data got out because the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office published a statement about it that included the full text of Google’s Friday email.

Google said it was “in touch with other data protection authorities in the European Union” on the same topic.

Other countries affected include Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Australia. Google had collected the data between 2008 and 2010.

Google today apologized for this latest error, which it said was discovered in a recent inspection of its Street View disks. The company said it would like to delete the remaining data, but gave local authorities the option to look at the data before it was destroyed.

And, in fact, the ICO’s head of enforcement Steve Eckersley replied to Google today that his organization would like to examine the data Google had found.

The ICO had reopened its investigation into the issue in June, after it became clear that user data had been collected deliberately — a fact that hadn’t previously been public. Remember, this was news about the “rogue engineer” who designed Google Street View cars to suck up payload data from open Wi-Fi networks as it was driving around.

Google has for years rather unsuccessfully tried to downplay the incident. In April 2010, Google denied that it had collected any payload data; then it later admitted it had collected data “mistakenly.” Then the company and the U.S. Federal Communications Commission released a report that showed the wardriving system was knowingly built by a Google engineer, and it sailed through internal approval processes without thorough review of the privacy implications.

Google has been cleared of wrongdoing in the incident by various authorities, though it was fined $25,000 by the FCC for impeding its investigation.

Update: Additional countries are speaking out. Ireland’s Deputy Information Commissioner Gary Davis told the Associated Press the prolonged data retention was “clearly unacceptable” and he is asking Google for answers by Wednesday.

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A settlement between Google and the EU could provide a blueprint for how the company might deal with similar antitrust probes in the U.S. and elsewhere while avoiding the kind of fight with regulators that Microsoft Corp. endured in the late 1990s and 2000s, along with multibillion-dollar fines.

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After widespread protests in the wake of the defeat of SOPA and PIPA in the U.S., four of the major European parties now publicly oppose ACTA. But the largest, the conservative European People’s Party, is now saying it will ask tomorrow to delay the vote until the European Court of Justice verifies that ACTA is legal. That ruling could take up to a year.

EPP announced this new tactic via tweet this week:

#EPP will ask during tomorrow’s debate on #ACTA for a postponement of the vote until we have ECJ’s ruling.

July 2, 2012 10:00 am via Meltwater BuzzReplyRetweetFavorite

@EPPGroup

EPP Group

ACTA would set up an international framework under which ISPs could be asked to block access to content, and companies could be fined for the somewhat vague notion of “commercial-scale” infringements.

Five out of five EU committees, including the international trade committee, have recommended that the European Parliament vote against ACTA.

While Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s letter isn’t public (yet), the company said it addresses the Europeans’ four areas of concern. “We continue to work cooperatively with the Commission,” said a Google statement.

European competition commissioner Joaquín Almunia had given Google a chance to try to settle the investigation, rather than extend litigation and incur restrictions and potentially billions of dollars in fines.

Almunia’s four concerns are that Google:

1. Gives preferential treatment to its own vertical search engines.
2. Displays content such as user restaurant and travel reviews that is copied from competitors’ sites.
3. Gets effective search advertisement exclusivity on partner sites.
4. Disallows AdWords partners from easily transferring Google’s search ads to the systems of search advertising competitors.

Analysts such as Search Engine Land had seen this as a relatively weak set of claims compared to what the EU had considered.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission has hired former Justice Department prosecutor Beth Wilkinson to lead its own antitrust litigation.

In a ruling, judges reduced the fine to €860 million ($1.07 billion) from €899 million, but said they rejected all the arguments proposed by Microsoft. The software giant had argued that the Commission wasn’t justified in imposing the penalty for failing to meet orders four year earlier to open up the software market to rivals.

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That’s the day Microsoft will learn whether anything has come of its challenge to the $1.14 billion penalty the European Union slapped it with eight years ago for failing to comply with its antitrust decision.

In just over a month’s time, the EU’s General Court will rule on Microsoft’s appeal of the fine, the culmination of a long, contentious legal battle over interoperability. Issued after it was determined that Microsoft had failed to comply with a 2004 antitrust judgment that required the company to charge fair and reasonable rates for its interoperability protocols, the $1.14 billion fine was the largest ever imposed by the EU against a single company, and the very first to be meted out for noncompliance with an EU court order.

It was also, in Microsoft’s opinion, “unnecessary, unlawful and totally disproportionate.”

“This case would not have arisen if the commission had been as explicit with respect to rates which it wanted Microsoft to charge as it had been with all other terms of licensing proposed by Microsoft,” Microsoft’s attorney Jean-François Bellis told the EU General Court at the time the company filed its appeal. “How can the Commission fine Microsoft for failing to apply reasonable rates from June 2006 to October 2007 when the final parameters were only determined on October 22, 2007?”

In short, Microsoft says it failed to comply with the order because EU regulators didn’t give it the guidance it needed to do so. Interesting argument, but will it carry any weight with the EU General Court?

Some initial reactions to the proposal, which was pre-announced at the DLD conference in Munich and then published on Wednesday, were harshly critical.

Writer Jeff Jarvis was armed and ready to rebut European Commissioner Viviane Reding’s opening address on “the right to be forgotten” at DLD, having criticized her data protection stance in his new book “Public Parts.”

“I very much fear Reding’s ‘right to be forgotten’ and its impact [on] free speech and the right to know,” Jarvis wrote.

A European Microsoft executive was also quick with the skepticism. “We have been pushing for harmonisation of privacy laws for several years, but we are concerned that these proposals may be too prescriptive,” Ron Zink, who is Microsoft Europe’s chief operating officer and associate general counsel, told the Financial Times.

Analysts and industry groups called Reding’s ideas “draconian,” “prescriptive,” “onerous” and expensive.

But now that Reding has formally proposed her legislation, Web companies seemed more measured in their response. Though they didn’t endorse the bill, they seemed willing to work with it. Of course, they’d prefer to avoid walking into fines of up to two percent of their revenue.

In statements emailed to AllThingsD, Google asked for a “simple” solution, while Facebook continued to talk up its positive impact on European jobs.

Said Google: “We support simplifying privacy rules in Europe to both protect consumers online and stimulate economic growth. It is possible to have simple rules that do both. We look forward to debating the proposals over the coming months.”

A Google executive at a conference in Brussels further questioned how, exactly, third-party sites could be responsible for deleting all instances of data online after it had been posted.

Here’s Facebook’s extended statement:

The revision of Europe’s Data Protection framework is an important opportunity to develop regulation that both protects privacy and supports the creation and growth of modern services over the global Internet. We welcome the move towards more harmonization of Data Protection laws in the EU which will help create legal certainty and confidence for companies to operate.

We agree with the recent statements made by Commissioner Reding that the new regulation should foster growth and job creation. Services like Facebook already contribute significantly to economic activity in the EU and can be a major driver of growth and new jobs in the future.

We will continue to work closely with politicians and regulators in the EU in order to share our experience and expertise and contribute to achieving sound privacy regulation and a thriving digital sector.

Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik, whose company offers what could be seen as “the right to be forgotten” as a paid service to customers, said he didn’t necessarily support Reding’s proposal but he disapproved of industry hysteria around regulation of the Internet.

“I think that light regulation is often a stimulant to innovation,” Fertik said.

“Right now the absence of law supports the incumbents of the Internet, which are advertising businesses,” he added. “But what’s bad for Facebook today may be good for a thousand companies tomorrow. The biggest promise of the right to be forgotten is it’s going to enhance the trust of the Internet, which could be a boon to e-commerce.”

As for some other major Web companies in the business of identity and user-generated content, Twitter declined to comment on EU data protection policy, while Tumblr — which had been especially active in fighting SOPA — did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers on Thursday expressed concerns about Google’s new unified privacy policy.