Microsoft Hands Over Docs To EU

hankwang writes "Reuters reports that Microsoft has handed over technical documents to the EU in order to enable the competition to make interoperable software. So far, the EU has imposed fines of €497 M and €280 M onto Microsoft for abuse of its monopoly. The deadline for this documentation was today. According to Microsoft, the documentation is over 8500 pages."

Comments

How do you get this documentation

[Timesprout]

Is it to be made publically available or do you have to request it from the commission?

Re:Nobody To Cheer For

[jandersen]

What it means is that your illusion of the free market is broken, simply. If you start out with a market with no restrictions at all, you will most likely get a few companies that are immensely powerful. These companies will use their power to keep others out, thus creating a non-free market.

Morale: The free market is at best an unstable and short-lived artifact. Besides, I don't think anybody actually want a *free* market - what most want is a *fair* marketplace; one where everybody has equal opportunities, so that if you are clever and hardworking, you can achieve financial success. But this requires some sort of regulation - ie. government intervention in most cases. Legislation is, after all, a form of government intervention.

Apart from that, the EU Commission is not a government of a country - the EU is not a state or nation in any sense. It is 'a supranational and intergovernmental union of 25 independent, democratic member states' - to quote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU

Re:How to get them

[Daddy_was_a_donkey]

That's been one of the funniest things about the whole dispute; Microsoft list, EU pick, expert said Microsoft's docs where shite, Microsoft "attack Mr. Barrett's competence and accuse him of colluding with its rivals". Marvelous
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