FT.com reports: “Under the proposal, Google would put its brand on any of its own maps, stock quotes, airline flight details or other pieces of information returned with search results.”

But that likely won’t appease complainants in the case.

Recall that it was sparked when Microsoft’s German price comparer Ciao.de, UK price comparer Foundem.co.uk and French legal search site Ejustice complained that results for their own specialist sites were appearing far lower than for Google’s own equivalent services.

The European Commission’s inquiry is centred on three claims. One is this apparent demotion of rivals, but two others relate to advertising –  that Google prohibits partners from placing certain ads on their sites and that it restricts moving ad campaign data out of Google ad systems to rivals’.

Making clear that the top result – when someone searches for “maps”, for example – is Google’s own Maps will go a little way to satisfying one of the three complaints. But it won’t tick the other two boxes, and won’t the lower prominence given to rivals in search results.

Google will likely need to work harder on its offerings to EC competition commissioner Joaquín Almunia if it is to avoid formal charges toward year’s end.

The issue of which search results come top of engines’ pages is especially prescient because, since the EC inquiry was opened, search engines have begun to answer more users’ queries by supplying information on pages themselves, not just acting as signposts to third-party web pages.

Following the EC’s ruling, the US Federal Trade Commission took  voted 5-0 to close its inquiry in the proposal, judging that there were no competition issues.

But the EC said the deal “would have increased Universal’s size in a way that would likely have enabled it to impose higher prices and more onerous licensing terms on digital music providers” and “this could have negatively affected the possibilities for innovative providers to expand or launch new music offerings”.

To overcome the concern, Universal has agreed not to include “most-favoured nation” clauses in its contracts with digital services — stipulations under which it could have demanded it strike equally favourable deals with such services as other labels have.

And it has agreed to divest Parlophone, Sanctuary, several national EMI imprints and many others that are home to Blur, Gorillaz, Pink Floyd, Kylie Minogue and other well-known acts. Full list here.

Explaining the commitments imposed on Universal, the EC said that, even though a large music service like Apple’s, which dominates digital sales, might have been able to front up to price hikes from a newly-enlarged Universal, ”there are many other smaller, particularly innovative, music distribution players, such as streaming platforms or mobile operators that offer music together with telephony subscriptions (which) would be particularly vulnerable to a price increase or other types of worsening of licensing terms by Universal“.

Merlin, the so-called “fifth major” group representing indie labels, re-iterated its ongoing opposition to the deal following approval, saying Universal would enhance its market-leading position.

“We now have to face the possibility that the digital market could be dictated and controlled by two super majors (Universal and Sony), which would not be a healthy outcome,” CEO Charles Caldas said (via MusicAlly).

“That said, the concessions Universal has had to make to get this deal through are significant, and must make this a very different deal to the one Universal originally envisioned.”

Some of Merlin’s largest members could be candidates to buy divested Universal imprints.

In contrast to the EC, the FTC said it “did not find sufficient evidence of head-to-head competition to conclude that the combination of Universal and EMI would substantially lessen competition”.

The FTC said Universal’s repertoire was mostly of new artists while EMI’s was older, adding that little competition exists between Universal and EMI in interactive streaming services because such services would require both contracts, and those of all major labels, to be comprehensive.

However, the FTC’s decision noted that the remedies Universal will have to enact to satisfy the EC will also have the effect of mitigation against concentration of ownership in the US.

The EC cleared Sony/Mubadala’s proposed acquisition of EMI’s music publishing business in April.

Why does @virginmedia buffer so bad on Xbox? Does it crap out on everything and i just don’t notice?

— Robert Andrews (@RobertAndrews) July 13, 2012

Rival BT complained to the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), claiming the ad “misleadingly implied that Virgin Media broadband customers would not experience buffering, because they understood that was not the case”.

Virgin, in its defence, gave the ASA a tepid excuse: “Virgin said they considered the claim ‘I want everyone to say bye-bye to buffering’ to be puffery…  statement of intent.”

But the ASA has upheld the complaint, ruling that Virgin exaggerated the ad: “Because we understood that users of the service might still experience buffering, we concluded that the claim was misleading.”

It has been ordered to stop running the ad, but a similar version starring David Tennant is still airing, making stronger claims about “bye-bye buffering”…

In a second adjudication released by the ASA on Wednesday, Virgin Media was also found to have misled its website visitors by claiming average download times for a range of media content without substantiation or explicit reference to peak-time throttling.

The UK’s telcos routinely trade ASA complaints against each other’s marketing claims.

In many countries, printed books and other content artefacts enjoy reduced VAT rate exemptions for cultural reasons. But digital equivalents are mostly not exempted.

This year, France moved e-books outside the country’s standard 19.6 percent VAT bracket, putting them on a footing with physical books’ seven percent rate. Luxembourg also reduced e-book tax from its 15 percent countrywide rate to just three percent.

But the European Commission has now begun investigating the countries for potentially breaching “infringing EU law”, saying:

“This situation is creating serious distortions of competition that are damaging to economic operators in the other 25 Member States since digital books can easily be purchased in a State other than the one where the consumer resides…

“Local actors in the electronic book market have complained that some of the dominant players in this market have reorganised their distribution channels to benefit from these reduced rates, which has apparently had a serious effect on the sale of books (both digital and traditional) in the other Member States in the first quarter of 2012.”

The EC’s technocratic action creates a rare anomaly in which it appears to be acting against consumers’ wish to buy books as cheaply as possibly across borders – something EC digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes’ agenda has specifically set out to achieve in her aim to create a single European digital content market.

And it is an issue that is more widespread than just books. Digital newspapers, for example, typically do not benefit from the special VAT reductions applied to their printed forebears, putting them at a price disadvantage with old-line products.

The EU allowed member states to reduce book VAT in 2006. This week, however, the EC said: “Downloading of digital books … is not included in this list and cannot therefore be taxed at the reduced rate.” In truth, the EU’s 2006 mandate did not specifically disallow digital book reductions, and was absent of any distinction between physical and digital at all. No wonder individual countries are deciding, for themselves, “a book is a book”, regardless of medium.

This kerfuffle may be short-term. The European Commission says it will put forward proposals by the end of 2013 for making printed and digital book rates equivalent. For now, however, individual countries that act sooner may be deemed lawbreakers.

Two English football players have fallen foul for these tweets for Nike…

My resolution – to start the year as a champion, and finish it as a champion… #makeitcount gonike.me/makeitcount

— Wayne Rooney (@WayneRooney) January 1, 2012

Jack Wilshire, whose account is now suspended, tweeted: “In 2012, I will come back for my club – and be ready for my country. #makeitcount.gonike.me/Makeitcount”.

Nike, which has been running the #makeitcount hash tag campaign widely, had wanted the footballers to prompt followers to tweet their 2012 goals using the hashtag.

But a complainant to the Advertising Standards Authority questioned whether the tweets were clearly identifiable as advertising.

Nike, in defence, said “both footballers were well known for being sponsored by Nike, as were the teams for which they played”. It also tried arguing the presence of a Nike URL and the #makeitcount hash tag in the tweets suggested their paid status.

But the ASA disagrees, ruling Nike has broken its advertising code because the URL and hash tag may be missed and because not all followers would be aware of the footballers’ prior association with Nike.

“In the absence of such an indication, for example ‘#ad’, we considered the tweets were not obviously identifiable as Nike marketing communications and therefore concluded they breached the code,” the ASA ruled.

This is the tip of an iceberg. There is a growing number of sport stars out there acting as multi-platform “brand ambassadors”, and that includes tweeting on brands’ behalf.

Marking those tweets as ads would sort of defeat the purpose of the surreptitious tactic as far as those brands might be concerned.

“We conclude, therefore, that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.”

That is one damning conclusion in the report in to whether a committee of 10 cross-party parliamentarians was mis-led during its hearings in to phone hacking at the News Of The World newspaper.

MPs’ disagreement

But the report’s authors are riven along party lines over this conclusion, which was inserted by Labour MP Tom Watson. Despite agreeing to several other conclusions, four Conservative members voted against the report as a whole because they could not agree with Watson’s addition regarding Murdoch.

“It was stuck in on the basis of no evidence whatsoever,” committee member Louise Mensch, a Conservative MP, told a remarkable press conference. “We all felt that was wildly outside the scope of a select committee. It will correctly be seen as a partisan report. It’s not for this committee to advise News Corp shareholders.”

The headline-grabbing line was proposed by MP Tom Watson, the most dogged of News Corp’s parliamentary pursuers, who is publishing a book on the whole affair, and who said: ”More than any individual alive, he (Rupert Murdoch) is to blame.”

Due to the disagreement, the committee is referring the report up for endorsement by the House Of Commons itself.

Committee member Damian Collins, a Conservative, said the matter of Murdoch’s fitness should be left to UK media regulator Ofcom, which is deliberating whether BSkyB and News Corp are fit to hold a broadcasting license.

James’ competence ‘astonishing’

The committee concluded unanimously it had been misled by former News International and Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton, former News Of The World legal manager Tom Crone, former News Of The World editor Colin Myler and by News International corporately.

It did not find evidence it had been misled by Rupert or James Murdoch. But it does make a slur on James’ executive abilities whilst he helmed News International: “We are astonished that James Murdoch did not seek more information … this clearly raises questions of competence on the part of News International’s then Chairman and Chief Executive.” That line was voted against by just two of the 10 committee members.

What happens next

Don’t bet on this ending any time soon:

• Committee chair John Whittingdale conceded matters are now in uncharted waters. Perjury charges for misleading parliament cannot be ruled out.
• Accountability to parliament. “There is precedent for an offender to be called before the House (Of Commons) and be admonished,” Whittingdale said.
• Despite not being unanimously agreed, the slur on Rupert’s fitness may play negatively with News Corp shareholders.
• James has already stepped back from several related board seats in an early attempt at damage control.

Final Report VOL I News Int and Phone-Hacking

The report by the FTC, which in recent years has become the country’s de facto privacy czar, is a response to consumer alarm over how companies collect information about what they do online.

Despite recent calls for “Do Not Track” legislation, the FTC did not recommend new laws to forbid advertisers from gathering personal information. Instead, it praised recent efforts by the ad industry to regulate itself and advocated a “Privacy by Design” system that makes it easier for consumers to control their data.

The most significant part of the report may be the agency’s new focus on “data brokers.” These companies compile data about consumers from a variety of sources — shopping purchases, property records, court documents and so on — and sell it to third parties.

Data companies mentioned in the report, like Choicepoint or LexisNexis, are not household names like Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and other tech firms that have been at the center of media storms over privacy. But in many cases, the data companies control a far deeper pool of information.

The FTC report asks them to step into the spotlight by forming a “centralized website where data brokers that compile and sell data for marketing could identify themselves to consumers and describe how they collect consumer data and disclose the types of companies to which they sell the information.” The agency also suggest the data brokers allow consumers to obtain information about themselves.

The shift of focus away from the online advertisers means it’s unclear how the ongoing fuss about so-called “tracking cookies” will get resolved. These are programs that record information about computer users as they move around the internet, allowing advertisers to serve specialized ads to each user.

Advertisers say this “behavioral targeting” is useful because it means, for example, that a lipstick ad isn’t shown to a sports jock. But critics say the practice is invasive and open to abuse. Experts like Stanford’s Jonathan Mayer believe that eliminating behavioral targeting would not seriously harm advertisers.

The ad industry has responded to privacy concerns with a program that is supposed to let consumers identify which companies are tracking them and that gives them instructions to stop. The industry says the program, which is symbolized by a blue triangle, is a success that has been adopted by ninety percent of advertisers. But the program may be too complicated for unsophisticated computer users and contains a number of loopholes.

The FTC flags several of these loopholes and suggests ways for the ad industry to close them: “choices offered should be persistent and should not be overridden if, for example, consumers clear their cookies or update their browsers.”

Overall, the report does not appear to poise any immediate threat to the way that companies like Facebook, which rely on providing rich online platforms in exchange for personal information, do business.

The agency also said it would host an upcoming workshop on how “mobile privacy disclosures can be short, effective, and accessible to consumers on small screens.”

One of the four FTC commissioners who took part in the report dissented from the findings on the ground that many of its proposed privacy safeguards were inefficient.

Ofcom, which handed the role of VOD co-regulator to ATVOD in 2010, will conduct its first biennial formal review of the agency, to assess whether ATVOD is “an appropriate regulatory authority”, whether it is meeting its obligations and whether there are any problems.

ATVOD executes the European Commission’s 2007 Audio-Visual Media Services directive, which said “TV-like” services “must not contain any incitement to hatred based on race, sex, religion or nationality”; “must provide appropriate protection for minors against harmful material” and “sponsored programmes and services must comply with applicable sponsorship requirements”.

But the body has proved controversial:

• Three quarters of ATVOD’s planned £426,388 first-year running costs had to be met by the very services ATVOD wanted to regulate, meaning it set out to identify a specific 150 services to regulate, all of which had to self-identify themselves.
• Large national publishers must pay between £10,350 and £25,000 a year to come under ATVOD’s auspice.
• Small-scale operators complained at being crippled by ATVOD’s first-year rates, but they won concessions for year two.
• ATVOD believed it had to regulate the web video activities not just of broadcasters but also of publishers whose core activity is not video. After being admonished by ATVOD for not self-identifying, newspaper and magazine publishers who post some videos online complained strongly.

After all, the legislation under which ATVOD was handed responsibility states: “The scope of this Directive should not cover electronic versions of newspapers and magazines.”

So ATVOD agreed an about-turn on the issue after News International won on appeal to Ofcom.

Now Ofcom has opened a consultation ending May 31, and it specifically wants to hear from those publishers which ATVOD thinks it regulates.

In latest cases, MTV last month lost an appeal against ATVOD’s decision that its Viva music channel’s web video should pay to be regulated, and an adult website called Bootybox.tv was told it must screen out access by under-18s.

Today, it increased its footprint in the media sphere by launching a new Twittter account and a blog devoted to technology issues.

The blog’s author is the FTC’s Chief Technologist, Ed Felton, who writes that the goal of the blog is to offer an informal chatroom for technology issues:

Our goal is to talk about technology in a way that is sophisticated enough to be interesting to hard-core techies, but straightforward enough to be accessible to the broad public that knows something about technology but doesn’t qualify as expert.

It’s too early to tell if any serious policy discussions will emerge on the site but for now the FTC deservers a tip of the hat for opening up the conversation. Too often, government discussions on technology take place in dry documents written in agency speak.

It will be interesting to see if Silicon Valley responds to the agency blog. The conversation could be awkward as the FTC is now holding a sword over many technology companies in the form of privacy and antitrust investigations.

The Twitter page for the agency’s new blog carries a warning that Twitter may use persistant tracking and suggests users read the company’s privacy policy.