EU Official Labels Microsoft's Behavior Unacceptable

InfoWorldMike writes "EU commissioner Neelie Kroes has lashed out at Microsoft in comments to European parliamentarians Thursday, saying it is 'unacceptable' that the company continues to gain market share using tactics that were outlawed in the Commission's 2004 antitrust ruling against the software vendor. 'Three years later Microsoft still hasn't complied with the main demand imposed by the European antitrust ruling: that the company share interoperability information inside Windows at a reasonable price to allow rival makers of workgroup servers to build products that work properly with PCs running Windows.'"

Comments

So what?

[Gerzel]

Looking through the article I don't really see the EU taking any more action against MS that will actually make them comply. This seems to just be a single guy saying MS is abusing its power, a standard course of action.

Re:So what?

[tsa]

Neelie Kroea is a woman. Or should I say, and iron lady?

Re:Sigh.

[stox]

Don't have successful tech companies???

I guess I must be hallucinating when I look at the Siemens DSL modem I have, and then the Alcatel DSL equipment that fills the remote terminal down the street. I'll also have to ignore the Nokia cell phone. There is a lot of tech that comes out of Europe, and much of it is better than the American tech it is competing with.

Re:Market Share

[geekoid]

MS starting giving away their browser to compete for Netscapes, whose browser was NOT FREE.
It became free as an attempt to compete with MS's illegal monopoly practices.

Both browsers were a piece of crap then, but the is irrelevant to the discussion.

Using you monopoly power to destroy a competitor is illegal. The reason it is illegal is that it gives no chance of competition for the consumer to take advantage of. The fact that the consumer has no real option is why the consumer keeps buying the product. Hell, a consumer may not know that a company is abusing it's onopoly and that's why there is no, or very little competition. in other words, they don't know enough to not buy the product.

Re:Sigh.

[ciggieposeur]

I'll respond only because I've got 10 minutes to waste...

European countries use Windows for the same reason Americans do: MS rode the wave of personal computing and then began setting up illegal business deals to catapult itself into a monopoly position. They use Windows for the same reason you use Canadian, Venezualan, and OPEC oil: you have to. OTOH, they are taking the lead in moving away from Windows unlike many of their American counterparts.

Second, the Internet was NOT paid for by the USA. The current protocols were developed with DoD research dollars, but they were informed by experimental networks in Britian and elsewhere. The actual network hardware was purchased by them for their own networks, and for the most part that was all manufactured in Asia.

And BTW I am an American enrolled at a prominent Texas university in a top-tier engineering graduate program that has 90% international students.

Re:You call this -standing up-?

[Anonymous Coward]

The EU is 'standing up' to Microsoft the way the UN 'stands up' to the problems in the middle east and Africa.

Perhaps the UN would be more effective if the US were to not use their veto to block resolutions such as preventing countries from meddling in the internal politics of other countries? You know, something that would have made Operation Ajax, for example, an illegal event.

It's been 21 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment

Re:USA/EU corporate style

[Gorath99]

1The notion that *only* USA companies would be sued for that is totally bogus and plainly untrue. It may be that USA-ones *seem* to happen more because:

1)It gets a higher profile when one is sued, because they make more fuss about it (together with the 'look, it's the EU against USA' attitude)

2)USA corporations are more prone to anti-competitive behaviour (maybe due to the inherent strong corporatism in the USA where one easily buys politicians)

3)EU-corporations are as bad as USA ones, only they can cover it up better


You're very close with number 1, but the biggest reasons (IMHO) are:

1) US news only reports when the EU fines a US company.
2) Slashdot only reports when the EU fines an IT company and most of them are from the US.

For those who truly feel that the EU is specifically after US companies: do some searching on European news outlets on companies fined by the EU for anti-competitive behavior. Many, if not most of them, are from the EU itself. For instance, in the past year Siemens (German) has been fined 397 million euros, Akzo Nobel (Dutch) has been fined 25.2 million euros, Solvay (Belgian) 167 million euros, Total (French) 78.6 million euros, Edison (Italian) 58.1 million euros.

And those are just from the first 2 cases I found on a quick search. Hardly a month goes by that I don't read about another big case.

Sources (in Dutch):
http://www.nu.nl/news/955922/32/rss/EU-boete_drukt _winst_Siemens.html
http://www.nu.nl/news/725210/32/rss/Akzo_krijgt_ka rtelboete_van_EU.html

Re:Sigh.

[NoOneInParticular]

The day that Real Networks has a big lobby in the EU is the day that monkeys will be flying out of my ass. No American company has a more significant lobby in the EU than Microsoft, save for IBM. Microsoft has been breaching all boundaries that exist for companies, and Real Networks is simply a reason to get these pirates under control again.

Re:Market Share

[arevos]

I think the thing that is hard to understand is that the law in this case is almost perversely refusing to say what it is that they *actually* want Microsoft to do, and continually just telling Microsoft: "That's not good enough". The EU has never refused to say what they want Microsoft to do. They've been crystal clear from the first. Allow me to quote from the court orders:

The first type of abusive conduct by Microsoft, described at recitals 546 to 791 to the Decision, consists in Microsoft's refusal to provide its competitors with 'interoperability information' and to allow its use for the purpose of developing and distributing products competing with Microsoft's own products on the work group server operating system market from October 1998 until the date of the Decision (Article 2(a) of the Decision). For the purpose of the Decision, 'interoperability information' means 'the complete and accurate specifications for all the Protocols implemented in Windows Work Group Server Operating Systems and ... used by Windows Work Group Servers to deliver file and print services and group and user administration services, including the Windows Domain Controller services, Active Directory services and Group Policy services, to Windows Work Group Networks' (Article 1(1) of the Decision). 'Protocols' are defined as 'a set of rules of interconnection and interaction between various instances of Windows Work Group Server Operating Systems and Windows Client PC Operating Systems running on different computers in a Windows Work Group Network' (Article 1(2) of the Decision). Microsoft has yet to provide anything close to complete and accurate specifications. This isn't just the opinion of EU lawyers not understanding technical documentation, it's the opinion of prominent developers, like Andrew Tridgell, the creator of the Samba project.

What's more, Microsoft has had 2 years to document it's protocols, and it claims it has 300 engineers are working "day and night" on the problem, but despite that, little documentation has been forthcoming, and what there has been, has been smothered under a layer of restrictive licenses and NDAs.

It seems to me that a company as large as Microsoft should have at least some idea of how its network protocols work, and if not, is capable of finding out. You'd have thought that a company that prides itself on technical innovation and "Developers developers developers" would know how to write technical documentation. So either Microsoft is entirely incompetent, or it's flaunting the law. Whilst the former is tempting to believe, Microsoft didn't get where it is today by being staffed by morons, and so one has to conclude that they're deliberately disobeying the law. Hence the fine. It's that simple.

Re:Two reasons: gutless and clueless

[Mordaximus]

The rest of the world, except the EU (it seems) doesn't really care because they are too primitive to to realize that being dependent on a single US company is a problem.

Either primitive doesn't mean what you think it means, the EU is smaller than you think it is, or your world view is smaller than a typical American. You think Australia is primitive? Japan? Canada?

Re:Sigh.

[dajak]

The maximum fines for antitrust law violations have recently been increased very considerably by European Parliament. The next fine will probably be an order of magnitude bigger than the last two, and will hurt even Microsoft.