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.

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