Rivals Invited to Review Proposed Google Antitrust Settlement

The European Commission said that it had begun so-called market testing to see whether the remedies addressed complaints that Google favors its own products in search results.

The step also signals that Google, having avoided antitrust charges in the United States, has offered concessions that are acceptable to the commission and that would allow the company to avoid a guilty verdict and a huge fine in Europe.

“Now we have concrete proposals on the table which meet the necessary standards for us to submit to the public and to seek feedback on,” said Antoine Colombani, a spokesman for the European Union’s competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia.

The testing would last a month, and a final settlement — which both sides have been working toward since late 2010 — could be agreed upon after the summer in the best case, Mr. Colombani said.

Google could still face a fine of as much as 10 percent of its global annual sales, which were nearly $50 billion last year, if it broke its promises. But the deal would allow Google to escape the long, expensive antitrust battles that Microsoft fought in Europe over its media player and server software. It paid large fines and agreed to regulatory oversight and changes in products.

A major element of Google’s offer to settle the case is to show links to the Web sites of competitors who offer specialized search services. In cases where Google sells advertising next to results for specific industries like restaurants and hotels, Google would provide a menu of at least three options for non-Google search services.

In addition, Google would label results pointing to its own services — like Google Maps, if they display local businesses — as Google properties and separate them from general search results with a box, though they would still appear in the normal list of results.

Before it reached a deal with the commission, Google was under pressure to make more concessions. A prominent consumer group and groups with links to Microsoft condemned Google for not making sufficient changes, and some companies asked for a longer period of market testing.

Some complained that the new rules would apply only to Google’s national domains because Google users in Europe can also use the company’s global Web site, which ends in .com, rather than .fr in France. Google does not plan to make any of the changes to the site ending in .com, so users in the United States will not see them.

Asked whether the current offer by Google was final, Al Verney, a spokesman for the company, said only, “We continue to work cooperatively with the commission.”

Google’s agreement would be legally binding for five years, and a third party approved by the commission would be put in place to ensure compliance.

During market testing, other companies in the industry will be permitted to comment on the proposal. Google’s rivals, including Microsoft, are expected to submit comments. Any settlement can be appealed to the commission. Some major technology rivals have demanded a longer period of market testing before the commission closes the case.

“Google has taken a year to develop the proposal released today,” said Thomas Vinje, chief lawyer for FairSearch Europe, a group of Google competitors including Microsoft, Nokia and Oracle. “We think it’s only fair that outside experts have more than a month to help the commission market test the long-lasting effects of Google’s proposal on consumers and innovation.”

Mr. Vinje said the changes did not go far enough. “Google’s own screen shots in its proposal shows it seeks approval to continue preferential treatment for its own products,” he said.

Other rivals took an even tougher line, and seemed likely to demand more concessions.

“Instead of promising to end its abusive practices, Google’s proposal seems to offer a halfhearted attempt to dilute their anticompetitive effects by labeling Google’s own services and throwing in some token links to competitors’ services alongside them,” said Shivaun Raff, a co-founder of Foundem, a British comparison-shopping site that was one of the original complainants in the case. “Neither measure will make a dent in Google’s ability to hijack the traffic and revenues of its rivals.”

Claire Cain Miller contributed reporting from San Francisco.

A Coding Standard to Track Media Assets Is Proposed

For advertisers and media companies, keeping track and organizing the tonnage of media assets — from video clips to commercials — can be a challenge, particularly online. On Thursday, a media industry organization announced the findings of a two-year study that uses a coding system to monitor these assets, similar to how U.P.C. labels track consumer products from shipping to purchase.

The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, the industry group, advocated for the widespread adoption of the new system at an event in New York, saying it would allow media companies to earn additional billions of dollars in revenue while saving millions of dollars on back-end processing systems currently used to track media.

Companies that tag their ads and their videos with these standardized codes will also be better able to determine where, when and how the content is viewed.

Some of the companies involved in the test phase include NBCUniversal Media, Viacom, Turner Broadcasting, Starcom MediaVest Group, ESPN, Hulu, ABC, Nielsen, Arbitron and comScore.

“Brands, advertisers and networks produce more content than ever but, unfortunately, the industry still lacks the ability to accurately identify and track assets across all distribution points,” said Jane Clarke, the managing director for the coalition in a statement.

Janice Finkel-Greene, the executive vice president of buying analytics at MagnaGlobal, said the coding system would also help advertisers manage the sheer amount of data available to them from sources like social media and research companies like Nielsen.

“We wind up with all of this wonderful data but we have difficulty putting it together,” Ms. Finkel-Greene said.

The coding system would help advertisers more precisely tailor ads to a particular audience, she added. The system would also help companies automate what can be a haphazard often manual process of coding content.

Such a system would allow media companies “to spend less time putting the data together and more time doing analysis,” Ms. Finkel-Greene said.

Charles Kennedy, a senior vice president of research at ABC, said the media industry had been “hampered by the labor intensity and the complexity” of keeping track of digital media. Using a standardized coding system would help the company show the right ads to the right people, especially those who view content online. If a consumer watches an ABC show days after it has aired on television, ABC would be able to show the viewer updated ads — and profit off the ad that is shown.

“It will help us move into the world where we have dynamic ad insertion,” Mr. Kennedy said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 18, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the organization proposing a new way to track and monitor media assets. It is the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, not the Coalition for Media Management.

Facebook Responds to Anger Over Proposed Instagram Changes

Jeremy Pinnix, a 40-year-old app developer in Spring Hill, Tenn., has been a regular user of the photo-sharing service Instagram since it was introduced in 2010, posting pictures of his family, local scenery and favorite moments.

But when he learned this week about changes to the company’s terms of service that would apparently allow his photos to be used as advertisements, he didn’t hesitate. Mr. Pinnix deleted his account and has not looked back.

“Many of the photos I take are of my wife and kids,” he said. “The idea that those could be used in ads without my consent is disconcerting.”

This has been a common sentiment on social networks this week as Instagram users react to the coming changes, part of a push by Facebook, which now owns Instagram, to make money from the service.

On Tuesday evening, the complaints prompted some action. Kevin Systrom, a co-founder of Instagram, wrote a blog post saying the company would change the new terms of service to make clearer what would happen to users’ pictures.

“We’ve heard loud and clear that many users are confused and upset about what the changes mean,” he wrote. “I’m writing this today to let you know we’re listening and to commit to you that we will be doing more to answer your questions, fix any mistakes, and eliminate the confusion.”

Eric Goldman, an associate professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law, said the latest skirmish between Facebook and its users was part of the sometimes uncomfortable dynamic between companies that offer free online services and their eventual need to turn a profit from them.

“The interest of the site is never 100 percent aligned with the users, and the divergence inevitably leads to friction,” said Mr. Goldman. “It’s unavoidable.”

When it announced the changes on Monday, Facebook provided few details on how it would integrate ads and photos, other than to say that when the changes went into effect on Jan. 16, they would not affect any photographs uploaded to the service before then.

That did not prevent unhappy users from threatening to take their portfolios of photographs over to rival services. Many, including Mr. Pinnix, eyed a return to Flickr, the former king of photo-sharing services, which is owned by Yahoo. In a stroke of lucky timing, Flickr recently released a shiny new application for the iPhone that has drawn praise from users.

The operators of services like Instaport.Me and Instabackup, which let people create copies of their Instagram photos, said they were seeing higher than average volume.

Linus Ekenstam, who helped found a service called Copygram that lets people back-up their Instagram accounts and order physical prints of their favorite snaps, said demand for the company’s free exporting tool had skyrocketed.

“It’s a thousand percent more activity than we’re used to,” he said. “Today is crazy.”

He estimated that roughly 15 people per minute were using the exporting tool, and around half a million photographs had been backed up.