Microsoft Facing European Sanctions

Shakrai writes "CNN and Money Magazine are reporting that a draft decision by the EU committee overseeing the Microsoft investigation appears to recommend fairly severe sanctions against our favorite software company. The article states that the ruling will likely force Microsoft to offer a second version of Windows without 'built-in audiovisual software' (Windows Media Player) for EU customers. While this sounds like a good thing, the article also mentions that Microsoft has an appeals process and will likely get an injunction against enforcement while they pursue said appeal, which may take years."

Comments

But who wins in the end?

[Manip]

I personally don't like Microsoft... but you have to ask yourself if Media Player is removed who is affected by this in a negative way?

I think the 'normal users' will be hit hardest, a lot of them just want their media to play and in my opinion it is the place of the Operating System to provide the functionality. We might install something better, but it doesn't hurt us to have it there even if we don't use it. I think the same is true with IE.. it has helped the new users a great deal even if it is bug ridden and crappy.

What about linux distributions??

[Anonymous Coward]

Many distributions ship with software such as XMMS, mplayer and the gimp. Should Mandrake, SuSE, Debian and the like be fined for carrying this software?

Re:What about linux distributions??

[Anonymous Coward]

have you missed the last n discussions about this? microsoft, as a monopolist who digs anticompetetive practices likea fat kid loves cake, is subject to different rules than other companies. what about OS X. which ships with quicktime player? nothing - they aren't using their market position to squish other media players.

Media player an essential part of the OS???

[Serious Simon]

Microsoft says Windows Media Player is an inherent part of the operating system and cannot be stripped out.

Who are they trying to fool? When they said this about Internet Explorer I could imagine how this could be true, but what parts of Media player might be essential for other applications???

Re:Media player an essential part of the OS???

[Dr.Zong]

The other companies *did* have a foothold in the market, or maybe you are too young and brainwashed to remember the glory days.

You're right it *isnt* MS's job to help out other rivals. But it is their job to keep their monopoly from crushing others. read: Anti-competitive tactics are a no-no.

Problem is that once MS started bundling IE, WMP, etc. into the OS, it gave users little reason to go out and find another. They have done it with IE and were convicted of it in the States, albeit weakly. Once you have a single defacto player/browser/pick your software on the desktop, which a monoploy has created and abused, the end user, ie: mom and pop, have no need to go out and get another, forcing the rivals out of business or out of money. Don't forget, Microsoft no longer cares about IE. The only reason they care about WMP is that they are now trying to leverage the dominance into other markets such as digital distribution of movies and whatnot. That sir, is anti-competitive behaviour. I'm just glad the EU has the balls to do something about it.

Re:Why wouldn't I want windows to play back videos

[frs_rbl]

Want Microsoft DRM, non-compliance to standards, and who-knows-what in the future too? It's to avoid this that these sanctions are being applied.

Sounds sensible to me

Re:Why wouldn't I want windows to play back videos

[eraserewind]

I'm sure many businesses would love to be able to only purchase the parts of windows that they wanted.

If M$ were really smart..

[ganiman]

they would start development on their second OS right now. I don't live in Europe, but from what I read and hear on IRC, I get the feeling that M$ is not going to win any appeals, and eventually will be forced to sell their cut down OS. It would save them time and money. Why drag it out in court, when you're probably going to lose anyway?

DRM

[pandrijeczko]

I'm no Microsoft fan but I personally don't see any reason to stop Microsoft bundling WMP with Windows, purely from a player perspective.

After all, lots of people seem to use it and if there are better (commercial or OSS) alternatives, then it's up to Windows users themselves to go find them and decide.

However, this is good from a perspective of slowing down DRM. No matter what anyone says, DRM is creeping "in through the back door" and WMP is one of those "Trojan Horses" transporting DRM to the desktop. By the time Longhorn comes out, DRM'ed codecs will be the norm (if MS has their way) and we can say goodbye to MP3s on our portable players and PCs.

I would hope the EU goes a stage further and makes MS publish clear disclaimers and warnings that on downloading WMP, you will be subject to DRM restrictions on all the media that you play with it.

In the meantime, it's a good opportunity for makers of "free" (="non-DRM") players to get ready to push their software in the hope that this sanction goes through.

Re:Removing the Player Isn't the Good Part!

[FrostedWheat]

But that information may still remain proprietary. MS could share the information and at the same time sue any up and coming rivals for patent violations or something equally silly.

"sanctions"?

[Mostly a lurker]

That would go further than the steps Microsoft had to take when it settled an antitrust case in the United States in late 2001.

Not exactly difficult. The so called "sanctions" taken against MS in the U.S. were meaningless to the extent that most observers believe there was a secret backroom deal. Frankly, I cannot see what the Europeans propose having much effect on MS's monopolistic practices either.

Re:stinks of hypocrisy

[dolphinling]

This has nothing to do with Free software and freedom. This is anti-trust legislation, and is about keeping the free market free.

Gaaah, I used "free" too many times in that post.

Kind of sad...

[bob670]

that it takes the EU to reign in our rogue corporation, makes me sad the DoJ didn't go further.

And I'm not sure why anyone would post that this isn't fair, if you can't see MS is once leveraging it's desktop monopoly to control yet another market, you are blind or at least obtuse. Do we really want another Netscape on our hands, it's taken 5 years for the likes of Mozilla, FireFox and Safari to revive browser innovation while IE 6 has remained a stagnant, insecure and non-compliant piece of junk. Killing competition in browsers hurt the web, although it will be years before the useless business analyst get around to acknowledging this. We don't want the same thing to happen in media players/codecs, instant messaging or a raft of other technologies. Time to stop MS now. And vote with your damn wallets, if you don't like what MS does then switch to Mac OS X or Linux and put your money where your mouth is!

Standard oil

[IgD]

Looking back at history I'm thinking about Rockefeller and Standard oil. How is that situation any different from Gates and Microsoft? Standard oil was broken up by the government why shouldn't we do the same now to Microsoft? Its irrefutable that Microsoft controls software for the personal computer from the operating system, office applications to now digital media/rights. Even before the SCO/Microsoft fiasco it was obvious that Microsoft devoured its competitors to preserve its stranglehold on the industry.

Re:Standard oil

[EvilTwinSkippy]

The long and the short of it. Rockefeller controlled tangible things: Railroads, oil rigs, distribution centers. Microsoft exists soley as a bunch of really restrictive contracts. It has mind-share going for it, and that is about all.

Computer can and do run without Microsoft. They are a brand. A company can decide, at will, to no longer purchase Microsoft.

Now, a good deal of that has more to do with anti-trust tussels between the DOJ and Microsoft in the past than a lack of trying on Microsoft's part.

The legal puzzle is thus. Microsoft is de-facto standard. People equate their crap with computers. To the mundanes out there Microsoft is to computers what gas is to cars. They have done a tremendous marketing job. You really can't build a case based on consumer buying habits. People do choose to buy Microsoft Products. It may not be a particularly wise choice, or even an informed choice, but the path to destruction is often wide and well paved.

Courts are loathe to step in and tell the average man how to live their life. Where Microsoft does get into trouble is in their dealings with computer makers. One of the things to come out of the Seatlement was that Microsoft was not longer permitted to have a different pricing structure for each supplier. Nor were they permitted to charge a license fee for every computer produced, whether or not windows ships with it.

As for Microsoft's stranglehold on industry, at this point it's more like those hitchiking seeds that velcro themselves to your trousers after a walk through the woods. There are a bunch of reasons people cling to them, all annoying, and all easy to pick off one by one.

Microsoft is the architect of their own destruction. They spend their time polishing shiny things, rather than sitting down and hammering out reliable products. By reliable I mean something that runs for 3 or more years without having to be completely reformatted and re-built.

Windows needs 'distributions'!

[OwlWhacker]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

Microsoft should not be allowed to sell Windows with any additional apps whatsoever.

With Linux you have different distributions, why can't Windows work on the same principle?

You don't get Mandrake saying "Oh, we're not going to put into our distro, why should we put other people's apps in our distro's?"

The whole point of distributions is that you get loads of apps from loads of developers, and you get to select exactly what you want from the best available apps.

Having Windows distributions is the only way I see of overcoming Microsoft's anti-competitive monopoly.

Microsoft can easily get out of this.

[GarbanzoBean]

Whenever you visit the Microsoft webpage (windows update), they will have a video of how to install patches. This video will be only available in media player format. A few other pages on the web like this (through partnership) and it will not dent the "market share" one bit.

A plea for relief from Microsoft's escalating ...

[NZheretic]

A plea for relief from Microsoft's escalating anti-competitive tactics.

An open letter to antitrust, competition, consumer and trade practice monitoring agency officials worldwide.

The role of trade practice and antitrust legislation is to provide the consumer with protection from abusive business practices and monopolies. In one of the most serous cases of monopolization in the information technology industry, the agencies charged with protecting the competitive process and the consumer have utterly failed to stem the offending corporation's anti-competitive practices.

The Microsoft corporation has been under continuous investigation by antitrust policing agencies since 1989. Despite this scrutiny, the Microsoft corporation, using covert and overt anti-competitive business tactics, has maintained an unabated campaign against alternatives to Microsoft Windows operating system platforms and Microsoft applications.

For years the Microsoft corporation has earned around 70% to 80% net profit from sales of its operating systems and application software. Only in areas like Thailand where Linux on the desktop has just begun to gain a foothold has Microsoft stated that it will release versions of its operating system platform and application software at a lower price to Original Equipment Manufactures (OEMs) and retail consumers than is available in the rest of the modern world. Consumers benefit where real competition exists.

The world desktop operating system market remains predominantly monopolized by Microsoft. Over the last decade, Microsoft continued to lever its desktop platform monopoly to the point where it now holds a dominant position worldwide in the application office suite and web browser software markets. On its own, the current USA Department Of Justice (DOJ) settlement with the Microsoft corporation has failed to bring about any restoration of serous competition to the desktop operating system market. Microsoft continues to use similar anti-competitive business tactics in an attempt to monopolize the digital media player and the desktop services server markets. Competing vendors increasingly find that they can no longer compete with Microsoft if they limit themselves to only the traditional closed source model of software development.

In the last six years information technology vendors have adopted techniques and resources from two existing movements geared toward the construction of software. The newer open source movement, represented by the non-profit Open Source Initiative (OSI) corporation, emphasizes the licensing of software in a manner which encourages its collaborative development in an open environment. The older free software movement, represented by the non-profit Free Software Foundation (FSF), focuses on the ethical issues surrounding the licensing of software. The free software movement emphasizes freedoms which are often taken for granted outside of the field of software: the freedom to use, study how something works, improve or adapt it and redistribute.

The Free Software Foundation offers two software license schemes which are compatible with their own goals and those of the Open Source Initiative: The GNU General Public License (GPL) and the GNU Library General Public License (LGPL). Essentially, the GPL and LGPL licenses grant the recipient extra rights than that granted by copyright law. Both licenses insure that a contributer or distributer of a GPL or LGPL licensed work may not further impede downstream recipients the rights granted by the same license. Many developing software in an open source manner have realized that this benefit offered by the GPL and LGPL licenses outweigh any potential losses. The licensing also insures that no contributing or distributing vendor or group of vendors could potentially monopolize the market, insuring that real market competition dictates price. Just as the automotive industry can commonize on standards for the production

Re:On top of existing EU sanctions

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe this is marked as insightful. For the record:

The EU decided to impose sanctions on the U.S. for giving tax preferences to exporters after the World Trade Organization repeatedly ruled this out of bounds.

The tax breaks, now known as the extraterritorial income exclusion, were designed to offset the perverse effects of U.S. high tax rates and system of world-wide taxation. This system handicaps U.S. firms competing against foreign counterparts whose governments tax only their home income.

Even though the Europeans themselves rebate value-added taxes on their exports, they decried the U.S. tax breaks as unfair and won their case at the WTO.

That decision was disturbing on several levels, not least because it is part and parcel of a wider European effort to stifle tax competition..

Re:Why wouldn't I want windows to play back videos

[CPlusPlusOwnsYou]

What is the point of an operating system if it doesnt come with software.

What if windows didnt come with iexplore.exe or ftp.exe, etc.. How would you download mozilla?

What if windows didnt come with any programs at all, u had to find ur own calc.exe and notepad.exe tool.

Sounds pretty silly to me.

Lets provide a Linux dist, with no cp, mv, ls, rm, etc. etc..

The point is, Operating systems need bundled software if they want to be useful.

Re:this actually is bad if not specified correctly

[Sycraft-fu]

Because these things do more than you might think, and are more integrated than you might think. Media player itself is just an interface, that calls the actual audio/video playback engine. That's why a program like Media Player Classic can playback all the formats of WMP with such a small size: it's just another interface (with less garbage). Well there's lots of stuff that relies on this engine being present. Games use it, DVD playback software, consumer and pro audio software, video editors, etc. All of them, that I've ever seen, make use of the DirectShow API, which is what actually handles audio/video encoding/decoding/filtering.

So you could get rid of the WMP exe, that doesn't really do anything. That just gets rid of the interface. If that's all that they want MS to do I don't have a real problem with that. However to actually strip out the playback engine is to break many applications, including almost all 3rd party media players.

It's somewhat analogus to the X-Windows system (though X-win is more directly comparable to the GDI, we'll use it since I can't think of a better analogy in UNIX at this point). X-Windows provides a set of functionality for programs to build on, and they rely on it. WMP and other media players are like window managers. You can use whichever you prefer, they all have a little different features, but they all use the same fundimental system so your apps still run. However to rip out that low level is to destroy the apps that rely on it.

Re:Removing the Player Isn't the Good Part!

[FrostedWheat]

Using Windows' APIs would not open up for MS legal action, and even if it did the competition authorities would strike swiftly down upon that as anti-competitive behavior.

So would this stop what happened to Virtual Dub? The author added support for the ASF (or something similar, been a while) file format and Microsoft forced him to remove it. And this is a Windows program.

API availability

[motown]

The advisory committee is expected to approve a remedy requiring the U.S. firm to share more of its protocols with rivals, charging a reasonable royalty. It will be left to Microsoft to work out the precise solution, with close oversight by the Commission, the sources said.

If Microsoft is still allowed to demand royalties for sharing API's and protocols (no matter how 'reasonable'), the sanctions will still be useless to Open Source and Free Software developers. What good is this to the SAMBA team? And you can forget about Red Hat finally adding NTFS-compatibility to its distributions! >:(

Re:No wonder everyone's getting outsourced!

[spectecjr]

MPlayer plays back more video types than Windows Media Player, and also is more fault-tolerant, uses less resources, is easier to use, and is more stable. ... and is more illegal, as it uses pirated software that they don't have permission to redistribute to do so.

Double Standards

[buzzoff]

One more duality in the Linux vs. Microsoft war.

Hard-core Linux advocates won't waste a second telling you how Linux is superior to Microsoft in EVERY way. They say Linux will beat Microsoft in the end because of its superiority.

Then you have some (probably the same people) influencing litigation against Microsoft, trying to tear them down.

So which is it? Is Linux going to win by superiority of product or superiority of political/legal influence?

It is detrimental to the Linux world if the focus is on Microsoft. The focus should be on Linux! Why would we want those choosing Linux doing so because they dislike Microsoft.

This way of thinking could get us in trouble in the current election campaign here in the U.S., where people hate Bush so they embrace Kerry. Why would someone want to endorse a product on the basis of a negative relationship with some other product? This way of thinking just doesn't make sense. Actually, I would say this isn't thinking at all, but pure emotional reaction. If this is the case with Linux, then those responsible need to reevaluate their direction.

Re:Dupe!

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this a dupe? This article says that the commission is going to impose sancations. The one you referenced said they might impose sancations.

I would call this new news. Your post is informative? Please.

Re:As the Man in Black would say:

[BBird]

The issue is not to make "anti-MS zealots happy". It is to protect our future. For all of us. The argument is narrow, but again Al-Capone was arrested for tax evasion on the first place. Somebody must start somewhere, and the US Government clearly didn't.

What's next?

[Oloryn]

I noticed for the first time the other day that WinXP bundles CD-R burning functionality. I wonder how long until the makers of software like Nero start finding their market disappearing because the functionality that their software provides is now bundled into Windows already?

I wonder what other markets M$ is on its way to kill in the same way?