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EC Suspends Microsoft Sanctions Due to Appeal
An anonymous reader writes "The European Commission has suspended sanctions against Microsoft stemming from a ruling that the group had abused its dominant market position."
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The beginning of the EU caving in to M$ and the US. It is the one of the last bumps in the road before the EU goes the US route of worshipping big corporations at the exclusion of all else. Corps can do NO wrong.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
The law is too slow - let the market decide.
The entire point of these sanctions was to punish Microsoft for NOT letting the market decide. Anti-competative practices and monopolising in any situation is bad for a free market, even if the product meets the peoples needs.
They've realized the product cycles of the software world are smaller than the amount of time it takes to run a court case. This basically means you can violate whatever laws you like, and no one will do anything, because they can't stop you until winning a court case; but by the time they manage to run the court case to completion, the company you were violating said law against is bankrupt, the product you were doing it with has been replaced, the violation is no longer relevant to what you're doing currently, and no one seems to care so much about punishment because what's happened is in the past...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I am not at all surprised MS is making progress on this appeal. The ruling was really a piss poor way for the EU to flex its collective muscle against a US corporate giant. Not that MS doesn't deserve to be investigated for anit-competitive business practices. In particular the recent (or not so recent for some) revelations that MS has been funding nearly all of the so called independant studies showning MS products as better, faster, safer and even cheaper than open source. The problem here is much like the problem with the Kyoto protocal. It's the right idea but so poorly drafted that it renders it completely meaningless. It is about time someone put MS in its place, but if you are going to use bull**** allegations to do it then you are going to fail in the end.
"Take that Lisa's beliefs!" - Homer Simpson
Actually, the EC is doing the wise thing from the model slashbot's point of view, even if he or she doesn't realize it.
Microsoft has a very strong case for a temporary restraining order, and the court was overwhelmingly likely to have granted one if the EC had tried to play hardball. No, make that "the court would have granted one" -- the court of the first instance needs to decide whether or not there's going to be irrevocable harm in enforcing the EC order before the order is allowed to come into force. Because the order would have come into force tomorrow, the court would have had to grant a TRO until after the motion to set aside the penalties had been heard and decided.
If a TRO is granted, the EC loses control over the penalties; it has to go to the court and grovel if it wants to threaten MS with them. This step makes it less likely that a TRO will be granted prior to the first hearing, which leaves the EC with at least a little leverage. Worse, if the EC had chosen to play hardball here, the court would likely have looked askance at any attempt to reactivate the sanctions -- any judge would look at the EC's representative and ask "How do I know you won't try to railroad this court again?" That's not a question any attorney wants to be asked by any judge anywhere.
No, the EC made a wise strategic choice here. It's better to make a tactical retreat than make your strategic position infinitely worse.
Many government detractors think it's bad for the federal government to meddle in business, tamper with the marketplace, and otherwise get in the way of Business doing what it does, best.
They're right, it's bad.
But there's something worse - when the opposite happens, when business meddles in the business of government, which despite all detractors, Government does governing better than business does.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
What's needed is legal recognition of when something has become "standard". It needs to be the kind of law that recognizes 'de-facto' instead of or in addition to 'de-jur'. As long as you're not a legally recognizable "standard" in this fashion, you can keep things as secret as you want. As soon as you pass the test, you MUST open the formats/protocols.
Another type of "standard" that could be forced open: Any communications between the government and its agencies and the general public will be in formats that are free, openly, publicly documented, and free of patent encumbrance. That means, for instance, any data available from a government-operated system (including, but not limited to websites) without some form of specific access control such as login. It excludes things like contractor communications.
It's pretty clear that MS Office format, SMB, and a few others would pass the litmus test for "standard" by these definitions. So would pdf and ps, for that matter. Word Perfect might, too. (common in legal usage)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Jeez, if I were Microsoft I'd really be careful about how I play things right now. They're not fighting a case against Sun or IBM or something here, or against the government of their home country even, they're fighting a foreign government who really don't like them very much at the moment. They need to be careful about their actions throughout this appeal, because if it looks like they are trying to get out of it by using delaying tactics until Longhorn is released or something like that then they could definitely get bitten on the arse.
I mean think about it for a minute, what government is going to tolerate Microsoft taking the piss out of them and trying to worm out of punishment in this way? Okay, the US government (no flamebait intended), but at least you can see their point of view... MS is a large, profitable US company, and hurting MS could also hurt the power of the US. However, this time we're talking about the EU, and although MS may employ many people in Europe or whatever, they are essentially a foreign company, and I do not think the EC really gives as much of a shit if it hurts MS or not.
Anyway, I am no expert on international politics or legal proceedings or anything, but I am just imagining myself as a politician who is looking at Microsoft defying the legal judgement of my government and having a big old hearty laugh about it. I'd be pretty pissed off, and I'd be wanting to do something about it.
So there it is. Like the Americans, we oh-so-superior Europeans now know that we too have the best 'justice' that money can buy.
Julia Cameron
Oich ù agus hiùraibh éile