EU's Anti-Trust Investigation of OOXML Continues

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Since January, the EU has been investigating whether Microsoft broke anti-trust laws while advocating OOXML. That investigation continues following its passage as a standard. Meanwhile, the ISO approval of OOXML is being appealed, so Microsoft hasn't won just yet."

Comments

Appeal?

[BACPro]

After having RTFA (sorry), I don't see where anybody is appealing the decision, yet.

IBM issued a broad support statement so as to leave all doors open.

FSFE said this must not happen again...

Nobody issued a statement indicating an appeal had been filed.

Re:Appeal?

[Ngarrang]

Give it some time. The Groklaw article did state that there is a 2-month period for appeals to be filed.

Re:Appeal?

[oliderid]

The risk here is that the EU is going to look at this from a protectionist point of view. They have an opportunity to establish some non-tarrif trade barriers here and there is little opportunity for the US to complain.

European anti-competitive laws are mainly aimed at European countries/companies.

There are still strong protectionnist tendencies amongst european countries against each other.

For example, last week, the Italian state can't refund the nearly bankrupted Air Italia because of these laws. They are almost "forced" to sell it to Air France/KLM (privately held)

Anti-trust laws are also mainly aimed at European companies.

So basically the European union is the only body in Europe promoting/reinforcing free/fair trades. Its main mission is to guarantee fair play amongst its members. American companies having European acitivites experience it from time to time. Here on slashdot microsoft makes headlines.

I noticed few months ago that Novell (I think, anyway It was an American company with open source based services) won a mid sized European Commission contract against european companies. Adobe is well established in the European commissions and it is making a lot (really a lot) of money.

If you play fair, you are welcome. If you don't you get fines.That's quite simple really.

Thanks, we have several

[Nursie]

There was this one started by some Finnish guy named torvalds that seems to have taken off pretty well. Some of our governments use it now.

I hope MS gets rebuffed harshly

[gweihir]

Standards are a major pillar of a modern technological society. Attempting (whether successfully or not) to sabotage the standardization process of a well-respected source of standards, amounts to attempting to destabilize society. This is clearly utterly unethical. The potential damage is inconceivable.

MS did this evil thing either because they do not care at all about anything except their short-term profits, or because they are scared out of their wits. In either case they need to be contained fast, before the world is without a credible (read: of high integrity and producing high quality syandards) standardization organisation.

Re:I hope MS gets rebuffed harshly

[seeker_1us]

As several have commented on Slashdot before, MS also benefits from the discrediting of the ISO process in general. Then there are no "standards" just what MS makes, what MS wants, and no pesky people complaining about them not being standards compliant.

Re:I hope MS gets rebuffed harshly

[gwait]

Exactly. Microsoft have won this hands down.
Notice how the mainstream press are reporting Microsoft's OOXML ISO approval, without mentioning the dirty tricks (illegal or not) that they used to get it "approved".
So for Government programs that state that documents MUST be based on an open standard, Microsoft have won, and for anyone who mentions ODF is also an ISO standard, they can say "Who cares? ISO is a disorganized and easily corrupted organization, nothing they rubber stamp means anything!".

It's not at all surprising that Microsoft went after this whole hog, handcuffing customers to MS Office is the source of their income and power. All else (windows monopoly, etc) follows.

Re:I hope MS gets rebuffed harshly

[Eternal Annoyance]

Microsoft did this to discredit ISO. Think about it, Microsoft sabotages the voting process and everyone "inconviniently" discovers the voting fraud. As a consequence ISO isn't trusted anymore.

What happens? Everyone scrambles to consolidate "their" (read: Microsoft's) idea of standard. "Unfortunately" this will mean that each and every standard breakable by Microsoft will be broken in such a way that it's very convenient for... Microsoft.

Microsoft is pushing OOXML simply to sabotage ISO and not to provide a "competitor" to ODF, that's only the front.

At this point criminal prosecution of the Microsoft execs responsible for this would be very desirable (corruption, fraud and forgery of documents (yes, it might just apply here)).

The companies aiding Microsoft in the irregularities deserve to get punished severely over this.

Interesting quote from groklaw link

[firefly4f4]

PJ posted a link to http://government.zdnet.com/?p=3745 in her latest update on OOXML, and it contained an interesting quote from news.com:

Microsoft's general manager of standards and interoperability Tom Robertson said that Microsoft, too, has been queried as part of the investigation.

He said that Microsoft will "fully cooperate" with any investigation from the Commission. In response to the accusations of stacking committees, Robertson said that IBM and other competitors have done exactly what Microsoft is accused of doing. For example, an employee from Google, which opposed Open XML standardization, joined the Finnish national committee only three days before a vote.

"It seems that one of the main concerns that people have raised about the process is the broad-based participation in the standards body deliberation," he said. "I think it's ironic IBM is complaining about new members in national standards bodies when they have been working around the clock to get people to join."

Two wrongs do not make a right, and if IBM and other companies were wrong as he suggest, then so was Microsoft if they did the same, and it just goes to support the argument that the process was tampered with and the results discarded. By making that statement, he actually argued against his own position that everything went fine.

Note: I work for IBM, but this opinion is my own

Difficulty of Appealing

[Adaptux]

After having RTFA (sorry), I don't see where anybody is appealing the decision, yet. The main problem with appealing is that at the ISO/IEC JTC1 level you cannot really file an appeal about the decision-making processes in the national standardization bodies. The reason for this is that the national standardization organizations are not branches of ISO. The power structure is the other way round: ISO is an international cartel of national standardization bodies.

You could try to appeal at the ISO/IEC JTC1 level based on the differences between what the ISO/IEC JTC1 directives say and how things were actually done. I have written up an analysis in which I come to the conclusion that an appeal which is based only on this kind of discrepancies will not be successful.

What I suppose could be done with some chance of success is to file an antitrust lawsuit as well as an appeal and demand in the appeal that ISO/IEC shall defer to the result of the antitrust lawsuit. (Trying to get the standardization organization officials to decide the antitrust concerns themselves would not be a good idea IMO, since standardization organizations are really not equipped for resolving legal conflicts).

Re:Does it even matter if it's a standard?

[R2.0]

It matters because it is a long held practice of governments to specify a "standard" product so that they cannot be accused of choosing proprietary products. If OOXML had not become a standard, governments may not have been ALLOWED to use it according to their own internal rules. Of course, this process is often abused - specifications are often written so that only one product or company qualifies, even though they are not named. So now all governments need to is say "File formats shall comply with standard XYZ and - lo and behold - only MS office qualifies.

ISO

[Ariastis]

International Sell-Out