Slashdot Mirror
MS Faces Hard Sell in EU Antitrust Case
juicy_pants writes "The software giant emerged virtually unscathed in November from an eight-year battle with U.S. federal and state authorities over how its violations of antitrust laws should be rectified. But it may not fare as well in another major antitrust case, now entering its final phase at European Union headquarters in Brussels."
MS will be found guilty and given the biggest fine ever. MS appeal - and the appeal process takes forever - RealPlayer fades away (nobody notices or cares)- Bill Gates donates $100M to fight AIDS in eastern Europe and is lauded as Europe's hero, a selfless white knight whose moral integrity should never be questioned again.
:)
Whoa! Slow down there, Mystic Meg!
I think you're getting a bit ahead of yourself. Sure, the EU beaurocracy is slow, but I think that in this case there may be more effort going into the proceedings. And Real ain't going away anytime soon, either. As for Bill's charitable activities, well good for him, but it won't make him a white knight if the press in Europe have any say in the matter... *grin*
-MT.
I'm 100% Italian blood. Believe me when I tell you that if you think the US government is screwed up, it's nothing compared to the Italian government. The Italian government is a mess of political parties with all kinds of special interests, including a fascist faction that still has some clout in government, although luckily not as much as earlier periods, and is kept in check by others who strongly revile them.
You need to do a little research before you make such statements.
I don't know if it is still true, it probably is: If you are an Italian citizen up to a certain age and are male, you'll have to serve in the Italian Army. I know relatives who live in the US who almost made the mistake of visiting their home country while a young adult, and would have been forced to serve in the military because they made the mistake of visiting relatives at their age. This is for Italian citizens, but if you emigrate there, it's possible you'd also be obliged to serve.
btw, if you want to publish a web site in Italy, you need a permit from the government first. The leader of Italy made his fortune, and still is an international publisher. Think about that for a while.
Funny, of the EU vs. US disputes in the WTO, US has lost most of them. You won the bananas, I'll give you that.
And what about the steel? US is using illegal tariffs to shield it's lame steel-industry from foreign competition. In Europe we had a wave of consolidation. Lame companies disappeared, healthier companies merger, alot of money was invested in production-facilities. In US that has not happened. You have old and inefficient steel-mills, companies that are stuggling under debt. That is why they can't compete and that is why they went whining to Washington.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I realize this belongs back in the Opera story, but apparently a bunch of people missed this.
Take an old copy of Opera (6.0). Load up www.msn.com in it with the special MS "broken" style sheet. It looks great. Now, Remove the hack that msn.com put in there if it sees "Opera" in the User Agent. (set that -30 to 0 or something). *Poof* Broken looking page.
Yes, if they put a hack like that in there after the release of 7.0 they should have tested again to see if it was still necessary and refined their filter to only catch the known buggy version, but come on guys...
They actually made an effort to make the page look right on something other than IE, AND went so far as to detect a competitor's browser that wasn't rendering the page right (due to a bug in Opera - or at least a very creative interpretation of the HTML spec) and give that browser a style sheet with a workaround in the style sheet.
I agree it caused problems later when Opera 7.0 came out, and they probably should have found/fixed it by now, but I'm betting once the right person hears about it it'll be fixed, if it isn't fixed already.
Microsoft has done some truly crappy things in the past, but this was not one of them.
I hope that the EU does adopt some pretty severe structural remedies, but I have to say that it is pretty unlikely for political reasons.
For the most part the US and EU have had a practice of letting each other determine anti-trust policies with respect to their own corporations. In other words if two US companies want to merge, and US anti-trust regulators think its OK, then EU regulators give it a pass as well. This doesn't always happen - the EU did sink a big US merger a while back - but it usually happens for one very good reason. The US and the EU do not want to get involved in any kind of tit-for-tat trade war over this kind of stuff.
That does not mean that the EU will let MS off the hook. It just means that whatever remedies are handed down are likely to be on the less severe side (pay some fines, promise not to do it again) rather than the more severe side (break up etc).