Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Cancels EU Antitrust Hearing
bahstid writes "The NY Times reports that Microsoft and the European Commission have canceled the only hearing planned in an antitrust investigation into the company's tying of Internet Explorer into Windows because of a dispute over the attendance of European regulators serving as advisers. As a result, the commission will reach its decision and levy a fine based on written statements from Microsoft and its adversaries. Microsoft decided against the opportunity to give oral evidence in the case after it was unable to persuade the commission to move the meeting, scheduled for June 3rd through 5th, so that it did not conflict with a global antitrust conference in Zurich that draws European antitrust regulators."
So they'll be forced to unbundle IE from Windows in the EU, that only applies to the installation DVD, OEMs will still have to install A browser on the PC before the customer buys a license to use it. What's the betting we'll see an army of Microsoft reps at the OEMs making them "offers they can't refuse" to ensure IE is their "independent choice". Nudge nudge, wink wink ;) Just keep the deal under you hat and keep marking "...... recommends Windows" on all your marketing stuff.
Big mountain? But Nauru's only 21 square km (less than the area of a 5 km x 5 km square).
http://www.sprol.com/2005/08/nauru/
Finding of facts III.35:
http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm
Microsoft possesses a dominant, persistent, and increasing share of the world- wide market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems. Every year for the last decade, Microsoft's share of the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems has stood above ninety percent. For the last couple of years the figure has been at least ninety-five percent, and analysts project that the share will climb even higher over the next few years. Even if Apple's Mac OS were included in the relevant market, Microsoft's share would still stand well above eighty percent.
So the relevant market is Intel-compatible PC operating systems, not including valid alternative operating systems.
Netscape had the market volume and could easily have survived a few bad versions with their market share. However Microsoft made sure that didn't happen.
Microsoft was not in a position at the time to bury Netscape. They did it themselves.
Way back in April, I wrote that Netscape made the "single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make" by deciding to rewrite their code from scratch. Lou Montulli, one of the 5 programming superstars who did the original version of Navigator, emailed me to say, "I agree completely, it's one of the major reasons I resigned from Netscape." This one decision cost Netscape 3 years. That's three years in which the company couldn't add new features, couldn't respond to the competitive threads from Internet Explorer, and had to sit on their hands while Microsoft completely ate their lunch.
Unless your bank uses an ActiveX plugin like all Korean banks are required to.
I guess the Live CD might still be the safest way, but only in the "the safest computer is the one with the network cable unplugged" sense.
Put identity in the browser.
Question: How many major EU corps have been hit with these "super fines"? Because I'm starting to smell a "let the stinky Americans pay for our bills!" tax here.
Lots, but unsurprisingly it doesn't make the news in the USA.
http://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/cases/
Frankly the BS is getting thick.
It would stop if Microsoft complied with the law.
And unless someone can produce a list where they have also hit EU corps with big fines
See the link. For instance, here is a €1.3bn fine against three EU firms and a Japanese one (it's just the first one I clicked).
These fines are peanuts compared to the E.U. and E.U. member states budgets, and you know it because the U.S. of A. is a comparable '1st world' economy with comparable government spending (although it might lay emphasis on different topics) ... We're talking about multiple hundreds of billions of euros here, per larger country of the E.U. (U.K., France, Germany) and 120 billion euro (in 2007) of budget for the E.U. itself. Combined it could be a few trillions, allthough I'm guessing here... So to see the 1 billion euro fine for iNtel and what's to come for Microsoft as a significant 'monopoly tax' or '"Let the Americans pay our bills" tax' is a bit of an exaggeration.
Now for companies fined by E.U. anti-trust laws; We are talking about the multinationals out here. Local companies breaking these laws are punished nationally (like, in recent history, half the building sector in the Netherlands, the 'Bouwfraude' scandal which triggered a parliamentary inquiry)
This is a list of some of the more significant cases:
iNtel: 1.06 billion euros. (Illegal sales practices)
Otis, Kone, Schindler, ThyssenKrupp: 992 million euros. (Cartel of installation and maintaining elevators)
Hoffman-La Roche (and others): 790 million euros. (Price fixing of vitamin products)
Siemens, Toshiba (and others): 750 million euros. (Cartel of gas insulator switches)
(nine oil companies): 676 million euros. (Price fixing of parafine wax)
Bayer, Shell, Dow (and others): 519 million euros. (Price fixing of synthetic rubber)
Microsoft: 497 million euros. (Monopoly abuse)
Saint Gobain (and others): 486 million euros. (price fixing of flat glass)
Akzo Nobel, Solvay (and others): 388 million euros. (price fixing of hydrogen peroxide)
(five producers): 344 million euros. (price fixing of acryllic glass)
Heineken, Grolsch, Bavaria: 273 million euros. (Dutch beer market cartel)
Sources are all over the web, but I used this one because it had a nice list with fined amounts and company names and checked the data here.
This is a log of recent (this year) cases As you can see, the list is quite diverse but indeed does include both iNtel and Microsoft. Quite a few cases involve whole industrial sectors, not individual companies. Understandable if you know that anti-trust includes discussing set prices with your competitors. A link at the bottom of that page points to earlier cases.
In the end, this is the risk of doing business in the E.U.. You should play by the E.U. anti-trust rules. If you don't, you can be caught, and just like me when I'd be speeding or ignore a red traffic light you can be fined an amount appropriate to the offense.
No one ever said Microsoft had a monopoly on all PCs.
In previous court cases MS was ruled to have monopoly influence on the "desktop operating system" market.
In fact, Apple has quite a sizable share of the PC market.
The PC market is not monopolized. There is Dell and HP and Lenovo and Apple and a hundred others. Unlike the US case, the EU market definition potentially includes OS X in the relevant market. This doesn't matter for two reasons. First, Apple doesn't have a big enough chunk for Microsoft to lose monopoly influence (by a very large margin). Second, Apple does not sell OS X into the relevant market, refusing to license it to consumers (consumers in this case being mostly OEMs like Dell and large corporations buying site licenses).
When the user needs a PC, they aren't only looking for the Windows PC with the features they want.
This is true, but not really relevant to this case. This case is about MS having tons of power because OEMs have no viable choices other than Windows when buying an OS to preinstall. It's about them using that power to push other products from separate, preexisting markets thereby undermining free trade in those markets.
So it doesn't matter that you come up with the best OS ever. If you are competing against Microsoft in the Windows PC market space, you are taking on the entrenched monopoly and will lose.
Will, Microsoft doesn't actually make a PC so it is hard to take them on at all. It is nearly impossible to win in the desktop OS space. In numerous other markets like Web browsers, it is very hard to compete because MS illegally uses their Windows monopoly in ways that make it so that even if your browser is far superior to Internet Explorer (and really what browser isn't), you're unlikely to achieve the same level of market share. That's the illegal thing here and what is detrimental to the industry and market.
Acorn was shipping machines that had a nice GUI, multitasking, built on a solid RISC architecture at a fraction of the price of a comparable Windows 95 machine.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Hey, you can mark me flamebait and troll ALL you want. Notice how in your OWN link we are talking 1.3B for THREE firms PLUS a Jap one? Show me ONE where they have been hit with the frankly outrageous "superfines" that MSFT and Intel has.
The fine is of the same order of magnitude as the Microsoft ones, that hardly makes theirs a "superfine". The glass fine wasn't split equally, the French company paid €800M because they were a repeat offender -- just like Microsoft. (source).
And do you want to know why it is a tax and not a fine?
It's a fine because they broke the law. You're pretty dumb if you don't understand that bit. Almost all other companies, American and European, manage to comply with it.
because if it was a fine at least a token amount would go to those that had actually been "hurt" by these actions.
That's called "compensation", but this was a criminal case, not a civil case. IANAL, but maybe the companies can sue. The Fox story says "Kroes could not say how far the cartel had hiked car prices but encouraged customers to seek damages from the glass suppliers through the national courts"
Nope, because the cash went right into the EUs pockets and NOT the supposed "victims".
Hooray, I'll pay 0.000001% less tax as a result! This money hardly registers on the EU budget.
Gives the EU a pretty damned good reason to be finding bogymen under every rock in a dead economy, don't it?
These cases were started long before the economy faltered.
That is the way they want to describe it but trust me, the argument is riddiculous.
We request a hearing
We claim (unrelated) observers would participate in event B instead.
We say: no.
Commission says, fine, so no hearing?
Microsoft has no right whatsoever to schedule the hearing.
Microsoft had the opportunity to reply to the Opera complaint and did so. Additionally it had the opportunity to state its opinion at the hearing.
What is a violation of antitrust law is determined by the authority. If you disagree Microsoft can feel free to go to court (as last time haha).
Why do you constantly lie in favor of Microsoft?
Clever signature text goes here.