We’ve not filed any official complaint, a Symantec spokesperson said. We’ve responded to a request for information from the European Commission… we were not proactive, they came to us.

Microsoft announced last week that it will offer an enterprise desktop security package comprising antivirus, antispyware, firewall and centralized administration. That’s in addition to its OneCare consumer offering, currently in beta.

Both of those areas are Symantec’s stomping ground. Symantec’s spokesperson said the EC wants information on the security industry and Symantec’s position in it and said she did not know if other firms were approached. She assumed they had not.

The security industry has been on notice since the middle of 2003, when Microsoft first signaled its intentions to get into security. At that time, the company acquired GeCAD Software, a Romanian antivirus software developer.

Since that time, the company has also picked up Giant Software for antispyware, Sybari Software for email server-side antivirus, and FrontBridge Technologies for hosted email security managed services.

Its strategy has indicated a cautious approach to entering the space, one that could indicate that it is well aware of the antitrust concerns the security market could have.

For example, the company did not launch an antivirus product until two years after the GeCAD deal, and yet it launched into antispyware — a much less mature market with no dominant players — almost immediately after closing the Giant acquisition.

The antivirus leaders have had plenty of time to reduce their exposure to the client antivirus market since Microsoft’s intentions became clear, and most of them have done so, some more obviously than others.

Symantec bought Veritas, which launched it into the storage management market overnight, dramatically reducing the importance of its consumer business. It has also picked up several other smaller security firms, boosting its enterprise footprint.

McAfee Inc started signing OEM hosted security deals with ISPs, a means to take the desktop out of the equation, and focused on intrusion prevention in the enterprise. Trend Micro Inc headed deeper into the enterprise network, partnering with the likes of Cisco.

The announcement last week of Client Protection, Microsoft’s enterprise desktop security software, came at the same time as the announcement of a vague new Microsoft-led consortium of security vendors, the SecureIT Alliance.

SecureIT smelled like the kind of move that Microsoft would not have even considered prior to its antitrust defeats in the US and Europe. It promises members, all of which have to be certified Microsoft partners, early access to Microsoft roadmaps.

The Alliance has 30 or so members, but it is in an extremely early stage, and most of the participants are not completely clear what it will entail.

Younger companies and companies that will not compete with Microsoft in the client security space were more enthusiastic about the Alliance than the traditional antivirus leaders, most of which declined to comment on their participation.

It’s still not completely clear how either of Microsoft’s desktop security products will be delivered, how deeply integrated into the operating system or Microsoft servers they could be, and how they will be priced.

If the company were to use the same model as it did with Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer, bundling it with the OS, it’s pretty clear the EC would have a problem with that, and the new kindler gentler Microsoft would likely not even try it.

That said, OneCare promises functionality relating to operating system performance, such as disk cleanup tools, that are already an in-built part of Windows.

Symantec, for one, says it does not want to sue Microsoft, although there may be a caveat to that promise.

We say today what we’ve said in the past, Symantec will compete with Microsoft in the marketplace and not in court, as long as there’s a level playing field, a Symantec spokesperson said.

And chief executive John Thompson said earlier this year: We firmly believe we have a better chance of winning than anyone who has competed against them before.