IBM and AT&T, two of the biggest tech firms across several industries, are both facing serious antitrust allegations.  And Big Blue is taking the heat in the European market.

The EU launched an investigation into how IBM operates in the $4.1 billion European mainframe market, and specifically whether or not it used it to intentionally impose “unreasonable supply conditions” on its competitors.  Today WSJ reported that IBM is offering a settlement.

The company has undertaken to make spare parts available and to provide technical information over five years, the commission’s antitrust arm said.

“IBM has put in place certain…parts-ordering procedures, and we look forward to that providing the basis for the final resolution,” the company said in a statement.

What’s interesting is that this investigation, the second of its kind, followed antitrust complaints from a number of competitors including TurboHercules, T3 Technologies and Neon Software.  This latter case was eventually dropped thanks to some aggressive measures credited to IBM’s legal team that we covered here.

Mobile carrier AT&T is also involved in an antitrust investigation looking into its plan to acquire T-Mobile, which, if carried out, would make it the biggest carrier in the U.S. AT&T’s case is a bit different than IBM’s though, and the carrier may have bitten off more than it can chew.

Not long after a different review looking into the acquisition of spectrum from Qualcomm was merged with the T-Mobile one, AT&T is taking a somewhat unusual approach to try and increase its odds by getting support from smaller players.  They hope to do that by offering these companies “prize” spectrum access, but this has not been going very smoothly thus far.  Cellular South filed court papers protesting against the deal, claiming that the potential gap that could be created in the competitive space by the new AT&T would indirectly impact smaller players’ sales.