Google is facing antitrust charges from the European Commission over its search engine practices, but the problems don’t end there – the EC has also initiated a formal investigation into Android, and whether it places anti-competitive burdens on the operating system’s adopters. Nothing short of the search giant’s ability to generate revenue from its widely installed platform is at stake. This puts Google in the invidious position in which Microsoft found itself more than a decade ago, over the bundling of its Internet Explorer browser, a case which changed the direction of the browser wars and also set important broader precedents in the evolving web industry. The Android case is more complicated, because the basic software is open source and…