Microsoft Loses EU Anti-Trust Appeal

Kugrian writes "Microsoft has lost its appeal against a record 497m euro (£343m; $690m) fine imposed by the European Commission in a long-running competition dispute. The European Court of First Instance upheld the ruling that Microsoft had abused its dominant market position."

Comments

This isn't justice: too little, too late

[jafoc]

While the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) which fought for this long and hard can justifiedly rejoice (FSFE press release), overall, I'm still very unhappy about the state of antitrust "justice".

The biggest problem is that it took 10 years to get to this point, and Microsoft still hasn't disclosed the specs for how to make interoperable products. We're fortunate that the Free Software way of doing things is rebost enough to survive in spite of this, but profit-oriented companies simply can't hold out long enough for this kind of legal system to really help.

What we need is clear legal rules that vendors with dominant market positions must adhere to genuinely open standards for all protocols and document formats, and of course we also need a genuinely non-corrupt standardization organization Microsoft doesn't sell us something as an "open standard" which really isn't.

Re:This isn't justice: too little, too late

[jkrise]

The problem with this idea for policy is defining the point at which a company becomes dominant and what happens if they get there with closed proprietary systems that are not anti-competitive in nature when they are created...

There is no problem even in that case. There are close to a billion computers right now; and Microsoft software runs on well over 80% of them all. So what if they weren't a monopoly 20 years ago? The protocols in use RIGHT NOW must be open for public access.

By any yardstick, it is very clear that Microsoft IS A MONOPLY in the massive worlwide PC market.

Re:This isn't justice: too little, too late

[spectre_be]

Finally, justice one could say.
But the big winner is still microsoft of course, no way the fine undoes the years taking advantage.
I guess the software / IT market is still growing up slowly / steadily & things like this were bound to happen.
Let's hope it never has to come to that again.

Re:This isn't justice: too little, too late

[imr]

By any yardstick, it is very clear that Microsoft IS A MONOPLY in the massive worlwide PC market.
It is also clear that they maintain their monopoly by abusive practices and that the US government doesn't do anything to fix this. See the outcome of the microsoft US trial.
So it's now clear that microsoft is used as a leverage by the us government and other governments have to step in and protect themselves. Which is happening.

Re:This isn't justice: too little, too late

[Tom]

Though I do wonder what level of fine it would take for Microsoft to really change it's way of doing things 50% of their cash, with a promise that you take the other half if they don't shape up by the deadline.

Unfortunately, you can't do that anymore. Liberals may not win any elections, but they sure won one part of the "small, powerless government" agenda, and it ain't the "small" one. There's very little a government can do nowadays about large corporations. The problem, as others have pointed out, is that the justice system just takes too damn long. If a corporation can afford the fine, it can afford to simply wait out, because by the time the judgement comes down, it'll be mostly meaningless.

So fines don't cut it, unless you go to extremes like in my first sentence.

You need something equivalent to what we consider totally normal if the criminal is an individual: Lock him up during the trial, so he can't kill/rape/rob someone else in the meantime.

If MS were in danger of being shut down until the case is closed, I'm pretty sure they would be much more enthusiastic of following what's essentially their probation conditions.

Least important part of the judgement...

[Anonymous Coward]

...given the size of MS coffers.

Of more significance is the fact that MS will be forced to release more code to allow competitors to compete on a level playing field with MS applications...

Re:sheeeit.

[nutshell42]

The idea was to create a level playing field for MS, Apple, Real and others to convince OEMs to include their media player.

Just like the browser wars any competing media player had to fight against one that was installed on just about every PC anyway. An advantage MS used to sell their WM tech. Unfortunately as somebody already pointed out, it was too little, too late and more of a symbolic gesture. Other parts of the ruling (documenting the APIs) were more important.

XP(N) was just a side effect that MS milked for propaganda purposes (Look at those stupid eurocrats! Noone wants a crippled Windows, they just want to punish a successful company, stupid socialist French, yaddayadda)

Re:Quel surprise!

[Bogtha]

Surprise surprise, a European court decided to rob an American company of half a billion dollars

Surprise surprise, a European court punished a company for breaking the law. Don't blame the EU for not slapping them on the wrist like the USA did. Perhaps if the USA enforced its own laws properly then it wouldn't have been necessary for the EU to pursue this case.

Re:legislating market share?

[Marcion]

It a mainstay of classic economic thought that competition is good and monopolies are bad, the classical definition of monopoly was actually 25%. The problem with having companies have more than that is that they start to wield control over the rest, their size allows them to game access to customers and suppliers.

You argument seems to stem from the misbelief that Operating System software is a competitive market and that Microsoft got to 90% by competing fairly. If so then you would be very wrong.

If you read today's judgement, you will see that Microsoft has regularly abused its' position by bundling, threats, bribes, agreements with OEMs and so on.

Operating Systems is not a competitive market at all, if you use Linux then you will know that the biggest problem is not Windows itself but the fact that it is so dominant. As soon as you use Linux you find that shops, ISPs, firms, manufacturers and so on treat you as a second class citizen. This needs to be broken for the social good.