The European Commission said Motorola’s actions ultimately harmed consumers, after the company sought court injunctions against Apple over the use of its patents, instead of properly licensing the technology to its rival. Motorola now has eight weeks to reply to the so-called statement of objections.

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In a proposal to the European Commission, Pearson, Penguin’s British media group parent, said it will terminate its “most-favored nation” contract with Apple, scrapping a policy that barred rival retailers from selling e-books at prices lower than those of the iPhone maker.

Penguin’s proposed agreement is essentially identical to the one proffered by Apple, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster last fall. If it’s accepted, it will effectively end the “agency” pricing model Apple used to launch iBooks, one that allowed the publisher, not the retailer, to set prices. It will also bring to an end the EU’s antitrust investigation into the matter. A similar investigation by the U.S. Justice Department continues, however, with Apple its sole remaining target. That case is expected to go to trial in June.

The 17-member Fairsearch.org coalition, which includes Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle, TripAdvisor and Expedia, said that Google “uses deceptive conduct to lockout competition in mobile.”

The organization complains that Google gives away Android for free, but then forces those who want its maps or YouTube or the Google Play store to then preload other Google services.

“Google is using its Android mobile operating system as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to deceive partners, monopolize the mobile marketplace, and control consumer data,” coalition lawyer Thomas Vinje said in a statement. “We are asking the Commission to move quickly and decisively to protect competition and innovation in this critical market.”

Google representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Brought by Linux group Hispalinux, the complaint claims Windows 8’s UEFI Secure Boot — a feature designed to protect Win 8 machines by only booting operating systems signed with a trusted certificate — is really just an anticompetitive “obstruction mechanism.”

“[UEFI Secure Boot] is a de facto technological jail for computer booting systems,” Hispalinux said in its complaint. “[It makes] Microsoft’s Windows platform less neutral than ever.”

Harsh words, but are they valid? Tough to say. UEFI Secure Boot clearly makes it more difficult to run anything other than Windows on Windows machines. That said, back in February the Linux Foundation in collaboration with Microsoft did release some software that enables Linux to work with machines running the UEFI. It’s not a perfect solution by any means. But it is a solution. And, as Microsoft has repeatedly noted, UEFI Secure Boot can be disabled. “We designed the firmware to allow the customer to disable secure boot,” Microsoft’s Tony Mangefeste wrote in a February blog post. “However, doing so comes at your own risk.”

Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.

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.

But it’s also a warning to other companies with which the agency has regulatory issues — one in particular.

Google.

The EC has been investigating the search behemoth over its alleged dominance of the search market since 2010 and earlier this year squeezed a settlement proposal out of it. That proposal is said to be largely similar in content to the one Google agreed to with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, though with a few more teeth. The EC hasn’t yet commented on the proposal, other than to confirm that it has received it, and it’s unclear whether it will demand more concessions still from the company.

What is clear, however, following the fines levied against Microsoft today, is that the EC is quite serious about demanding significant changes from companies that violate its antitrust laws and is entirely willing to drop the hammer on those that fail to follow through on them.

As EU competition commissioner Joaquín Almunia said today, “Legally binding commitments reached in antitrust decisions play a very important role in our enforcement policy because they allow for rapid solutions to competition problems. Such decisions require strict compliance. A failure to comply is a very serious infringement that must be sanctioned accordingly.”

A pat explanation for the EC’s sanctions against Microsoft, but also a clear “feeling lucky, punk?” warning to Google: Don’t make empty promises. Because the financial implications can be staggering: Fines of up to 10 percent of the company’s annual global sales. In Google’s case that’s potentially billions of dollars.

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.

That’s up 2.26 percent from the day’s opening price of $758.20. The company’s previous high was $774.38 in October.

Google seems to be benefitting from broader bullishness as the Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed 14,000 for the first time since 2007 based on the latest U.S. jobs report.

Google beat expectations (well, mostly — Motorola complicated things) with its fourth-quarter earnings report on Jan. 22. And the tech sector overall is having a good earnings season, with strong reports from Qualcomm, Facebook, Yahoo and Apple, among others.

The company also submitted a proposal to the European Commission about antitrust concerns yesterday. As we reported, a source familiar with the content of the submission said it was only marginally stronger than the deal Google and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced to a month ago.

Put together, that could mean Google is likely to scoot away from the threat of major regulatory battles on multiple fronts.

Google also said today that it had created a €60 million fund to support digital publishing innovation in France as part of the resolution of its disputes with French news sites.

Google’s revenue in the fourth quarter of 2012 was $11.34 billion, up from $8.13 billion in 2011. Google reported a non-GAAP profit of $3.57 billion in the fourth quarter, up from $3.13 billion a year before.

The company submitted a proposal regarding what it is willing to settle earlier today, said sources, after negotiations in Brussels went to the wire.

The big question is whether the EC extracts more concessions from Google than the U.S. According to a source familiar with this week’s active negotiations, the proposal is quite similar to what Google already agreed to in a parallel case with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, over scraping information to include in search results and sharing information through advertising APIs.

However, there are likely to be a few key differences. One source said that the European agreement won’t address patents, and it will likely include instructions to have better labeling in search — a topic that wasn’t touched by the FTC agreements.

Perhaps most significantly, as in the U.S., Google won’t have to admit wrongdoing.

Neither Google nor the EC are confirming that the submission happened. “We continue to work cooperatively with the European Commission,” said Google in a statement, while the press office of European competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia did not reply to a request for comment.

Almunia had announced in December that he expected Google to submit a “detailed commitment text” in January 2013, and had reiterated that deadline in recent comments.

The settlement agreement as Almunia has laid it out would be under Article 9 of the EU Antitrust regulation. That’s important, because it’s a different and newer law than what was applied in Europe to Intel and Microsoft. Most critically, it wouldn’t include the substantial fines associated with the traditional European antitrust enforcements.

Though both the timeline and the substance of the European negotiations have been made public many times, those involved seem to be trying especially hard to keep details of the submission under wraps. I was able to glean some information from a source familiar with the situation in Brussels, but wasn’t able to confirm it elsewhere as yet.

However, other outlets, including the subscription regulatory outlet MLex, are also reporting that Google finally made its submission.

So, what would this settlement mean? For Google to better label its own products in search results makes sense, but it’s not one of the stronger remedies preferred by the search giant’s competitors, who don’t like Google using its overall strength to help its own vertical search properties, and have hoped that regulators might put a stop to that.

Many people I’ve talked to who are familiar with discussions in the case cite an open letter written by Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land as a guideline to better disclose paid inclusion and content promotion.

The next step in the process, if Almunia’s office accepts Google’s submission, will be to test it in the market for effectiveness — another aspect that would be different from the U.S. agreements.

Update: In the wee hours of February 1 out here in San Francisco, we received a statement from Almunia’s spokesperson, Antoine Colombani: “We have received proposals by Google which we are now analysing.”

Because it’s barely launched yet and not fully fleshed out, financial analysts are saying today that they don’t see Facebook’s new search product as a big competitor to Google, for now.

But the fact that Facebook has finally made its search intentions known could actually be really good for Google. That’s because regulators — especially those in Europe, who are in the thick of deciding whether to settle with Google over antitrust — now have the prospect of additional search competition to consider.

Google has about 70 percent of the search market share in the U.S., but it has 90 percent of the market in many European countries, where Microsoft’s Bing is not much of a player.

By contrast, people all over the world actively use Facebook — and if those Graph Search queries eventually add up, it could impact the way people view the search market. Social search may be different from general Web search, but if you’re trying to find a restaurant or a dentist or a product, there is absolutely overlap.

Plus, Facebook’s notion of search — which ends in people and pictures and recommendations — lends credence to Google’s defense that modern search is about answers to questions, not simple links to Web pages.

“Facebook’s entry into the search market with a dynamic new product is clear evidence that the search market is competitive,” said Daniel O’Connor, who directs public policy and government affairs at the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which includes both Google and Microsoft but leans toward Google’s point of view in the antitrust case. “Facebook is a large, savvy company that clearly thinks that they can cut into Google’s search market share.”

He added, “It gives Google a better hand in negotiations with the European Commission, as market entry is an important consideration in the commission’s antitrust analysis.”

Google has privately told regulators that it was concerned about Facebook’s intentions in search, according to multiple sources close to the situation. Of course, talking up the merits of potential competition is something companies only tend to do when they’re being questioned. Google also talked up Amazon’s strength in shopping, the emergence of Apple’s Siri for voice search on the iOS platform, and even little startups like the privacy-conscious DuckDuckGo.

Facebook’s search launch didn’t arrive in time to factor into the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s investigation of Google, but Google was essentially cleared on those charges.

Almunia’s position doesn’t appear to be different from when he expressed it via statement in December, but he elaborated a bit in an interview with the Financial Times about which areas of Google’s business he finds troubling.

The interview comes on the heels of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission essentially clearing Google of search abuse claims in an antitrust settlement announced Jan. 3.

Google has more than 90 percent of the search market in Europe — significantly more than in the U.S. — where Bing is not as significant a player in many languages. European laws are more friendly to competition, and Almunia has more unilateral power than the FTC to exact punishment and fines.

The FT suggests that one of Almunia’s proposed punishments will be for Google to label its own services, which is not seen as a particularly strong remedy by Google’s competitors.

Basically, Google would have to more clearly show that it is referencing its own mapping, local, travel search and shopping-vertical search properties, similar to how it visually labels advertisements as such. But a bigger change would be to restrict Google from preferencing its own services over those of competitors.

Almunia said he is more or less in line with the FTC’s three restrictions on Google: No more scraping (a practice Google had already stopped), allowing advertisers to share data between Google and other services, and limitations on injunctions over standards-essential patents.

Though many details of the FTC investigation leaked out before they were announced officially, Almunia has openly discussed his process, having published his list of demands on Google last May. However, his repeated public discussion of the issue makes it that much more evident that various deadlines have been pushed back multiple times.

Asked for comment, a spokeswoman for Google said, “We continue to work cooperatively with the European Commission.”

The FTC had seemed ready to agree to a non-binding settlement with Google in late December, but it pushed back a decision after it seemed that the European Commission was still in the fight for a stricter deal.

Now, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz is behind a charge for the FTC’s five commissioners to vote on the same issue this week.

What’s changed? Well, the Senate confirmed George Mason law professor Joshua Wright late Tuesday to replace Commissioner Thomas Rosch. Rosch’s last day is Friday. Due to a previous relationship with Google, Wright will recuse himself from the case.

But then again, Rosch was not expected to vote against Google, especially given that he said last month that the company’s competitors should take their antitrust claims to court rather than “free-ride on the government.” So the number of votes needed hasn’t really changed at all.

The other thing that’s evolved in the past month is that after descriptions of the Google-FTC settlement leaked, it was perceived as weak compared to what Europe was still negotiating.

The proposed U.S. settlement includes a resolution about scraping content for use in Google’s search “snippets,” a requirement for AdWords data to be portable onto other platforms and restrictions about when injunctions can be sought over standards-essential patents.

These so-called “voluntary commitments” seemed markedly weaker than the “binding” and later to be “market-tested” agreement that EC competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia said in a public statement he was still hoping to get from Google before the end of January.

Not wanting to hurt its leverage in future cases, the FTC took a step back to think about how this was being perceived, sources said.

But if a vote were to come this week, it would most likely be on the same deal as was proposed before the holidays.

The anti-Google contingent continues to be upset with Leibowitz, saying the decision comes back to him losing leverage because he let it be known he wants to leave public office himself soon.

“People at all levels of the agency, senior staff and management, believe that FTC has every reason to wait and see what’s offered up in Europe,” said a person familiar with the negotiations.

“The chairman and the chairman alone controls timing, and he seems to be determined to cram this down their throats. There’s an opportunity for consensus but nobody can convince him to push the pause button.”

But another way to view the case is that the FTC had a “weak hand” all along, as one legal expert put it, especially compared to competition laws in the European Union. Because Google doesn’t charge consumers for search, and there are alternatives, it would be hard for the FTC to prove that Google’s search practices actually hurt consumers.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, one of the biggest critics of Google, continues to complain about ways it feels it’s getting shafted by the search giant. Today, one of the company’s senior lawyers charged that Google executives have blocked the company’s YouTube unit from providing the support necessary to build a full-featured YouTube app for Windows Phone.

The FTC will likely push its deliberation on Google’s competitive practices into next year so it can continue to study the matter, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are reporting, and we have confirmed independently.

That news follows a statement today from the European Commission that it was also working to settle with Google, but for a firmer agreement than what the FTC was reportedly getting.

After meeting today with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt in Brussels, EC competition chief Joaquin Almunia had said he expected Google to submit a “detailed commitment text” in January. He said he hoped the process would lead to a binding decision that was “market-tested” and would include remedies for the alleged bias in Google’s search results toward its own offerings.

The FTC, which had let it be known it wanted the matter finished before the end of the year, was getting none of those concessions.

The FTC’s would-be settlement was widely reported to have been a) voluntary and non-binding, b) not available for a public comment period as it would have been with a consent decree and c) over different issues than search bias, which is the most crucial and controversial topic.

A bad situation for the FTC was made to look worse when Europe claimed it was extracting bigger concessions from Google. Plus, sources said, the state attorneys general in the U.S. were none too happy about being cut out of the proposed deal.

Google declined to comment on the matter, as did the FTC.

At least according to close observers of the case, public attention to the matter seems to have been a significant factor in the decision to reopen it. “The last thing you want to do is call attention to a weak settlement,” said one source.

So now it’s back to the drawing board for the FTC, which had imposed on itself an urgency in the case that seems to have hurt its ability to negotiate.

But the clock is still ticking on the FTC for a couple of reasons. New FTC commissioner nominee Joshua Wright, who is waiting to be confirmed to replace Thomas Rosch, has already said he will recuse himself from Google-related cases for two years because some of his research has been funded indirectly by the company. In addition, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, who has led the charge against Google — but weakened his case by making it known he expected to leave office soon — still probably wants to leave office soon, but hopefully with his legacy a bit more intact.

So even if the FTC has given itself a reprieve to negotiate further, it’s unlikely to be a very long one.

Image credit: jcsmilly/Shutterstock

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.”

The European Commission said LG Electronics Inc. along with Philips and Samsung participated in both cartels, while Panasonic, Toshiba Corp., MTP — a Panasonic subsidiary — and Technicolor, formerly Thomson, participated in the cartel for television tubes.

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The European Commission today handed Microsoft a statement of objections, accusing it of failing to comply with its pledge to offer Windows users a choice of Web browsers.

Under the terms of a 2009 antitrust settlement with the EC, Microsoft was to present Windows users with a ballot screen offering them the chance to replace Internet Explorer with an alternative browser. And it did do that, initially. But, with an update to Windows 7 issued in early 2011, Microsoft unwittingly killed the ballot screen, and didn’t realize it had done so until it was alerted by the EC on July 2. And while the company corrected the error and apologized profusely for it, that hasn’t done much to ease the EC’s ire.

“If companies enter into commitments, they must do what they have committed to do or face the consequences,” European competition commissioner Joaquín Almunia said today in remarks to the press. “Therefore, companies should be deterred from any temptation to renege on their promises or even to neglect their duties.”

Hence, the EC’s statement of objections, which is another step toward a possible fine — one that could be as high as 10 percent of Microsoft’s global annual revenue.

Little wonder, then, that Microsoft is doubling down today on its apology.

Someecards

“We take this matter very seriously and moved quickly to address this problem as soon as we became aware of it,” the company said in a statement. “Although this was the result of a technical error, we take responsibility for what happened, and we are strengthening our internal procedures to help ensure something like this cannot happen again.”

“Microsoft has not kept its promises,” Almunia told reporters at an event in Warsaw. “We will have to consider taking the next step in this case. The next step is to open a procedure to determine a breach to our settlement. Since Microsoft has admitted it, I hope it will not take long.”

Bad news for Microsoft, which has already been fined about $1.28 billion by the EU. If things really go south for it here, this misstep could see it slapped with fines equivalent to 10 percent of its fiscal 2012 revenue. That’s about $7.4 billion.

“We take compliance with our decisions very seriously,” EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said Tuesday. “And I trusted the company’s reports were accurate. But it seems that was not the case. If following our investigation, the infringement is confirmed, Microsoft should expect sanctions.”

Under the terms of a 2009 antitrust settlement with the European Commission, Microsoft was 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. And it did do that, initially. But with an update to Windows 7 rolled out in February of 2011, Microsoft eliminated the ballot screen, and didn’t realize it had done so until it was alerted by the EC on July 2.

“Due to a technical error, we missed delivering the Browser Choice Screen (BCS) software to PCs that came with the service pack 1 update to Windows 7,” Microsoft said in a statement. “… While we believed when we filed our most recent compliance report in December 2011 that we were distributing the BCS software to all relevant PCs as required, we learned recently that we’ve missed serving the BCS software to the roughly 28 million PCs running Windows 7 SP1.”

Microsoft says it is scrambling to address the error, and has offered to extend its BCS compliance period by another 15 months to make good on it. But it remains to be seen whether that gesture will fly with the EC. After all, this is not the first time the group has taken Microsoft to task for noncompliance, and Almunia said today that if the EC investigation confirms the company’s failure to comply, there will be “severe consequences.” The EC can impose fines of up to 10 percent of annual revenue.

“This is in my view a very important case to ensure all the citizens and all the companies operating in the market that competition law requires a real serious enforcement,” Almunia said. “[We will] use all legal instruments with all the capacity to deter and to punish.”

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?

In a letter to Google chairman Eric Schmidt, European competition commissioner Joaquín Almunia outlined four specific antitrust concerns identified during the EC investigation.

The first: Google may be unfairly exploiting its market position by giving preferential treatment to its own services in its search results. The second: The company may have copied material from rivals’ Web sites. The third and fourth relate to search advertising and allegations that Google requires sites “to obtain all or most of their requirements of search advertisements from Google, thus shutting out competing providers of search advertising intermediation services.”

These are just preliminary conclusions, but because Google has been pushing for a settlement, Almunia is offering the company a chance to resolve them before the EC pushes ahead with what would inevitably be a protracted and unpleasant probe.

“I offer Google the possibility to come up in a matter of weeks with remedies,” Almunia said. “If Google comes up with an outline of remedies which are capable of addressing our concerns, I will instruct my staff to initiate the discussions in order to finalize a remedies package.”

Reached for comment, a Google spokesperson said the company has “only just started to look through the commission’s arguments.”

“We disagree with the conclusions, but we’re happy to discuss any concerns they might have,” the spokesperson said. “Competition on the Web has increased dramatically in the last two years since the commission started looking at this, and the competitive pressures Google faces are tremendous. Innovation online has never been greater.”

In a ruling issued moments ago, ITC Judge Thomas Pender found that Apple infringed the first four claims of Motorola patent # 6,246,697 — “Method and system for generating a complex pseudonoise sequence for processing a code division multiple access signal.”

“We are pleased that the ALJ’s initial determination finds Apple to be in violation of Motorola Mobility’s intellectual property, and look forward to the full commission’s ruling in August,” Motorola said in a statement to AllThingsD. “Our commitment to innovation is a primary reason why we are an industry-leader in intellectual property, and our focus continues to be on building on this strong foundation to enhance the user experience.”

But Apple says this ruling isn’t much of a victory for Motorola. For one thing, the ITC ruled in its favor on only one out of four disputed patents. For another, the patent it did find Apple to have infringed is a standards-essential one that the iPhone maker alleges Motorola refuses to license under fair and reasonable terms. And Motorola’s standards-essential patent licensing policies are currently under investigation by the European Commission.

“We’re glad the court ruled in our favor on three of four patents patents being considered,” Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet told AllThingsD. “The fourth covers industry-standard technology which Motorola has refused to license to Apple on reasonable terms. A court in Germany has already ruled that Apple did not infringe on this patent, so we believe we will have a very strong case on appeal.”

The European Commission’s approval marks a coup for Sony, which has averted a lengthy in-depth second probe. However, European Union authorities set several conditions, telling Sony it must divest several assets.

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