EC To Pursue Antitrust Despite Microsoft's IE Move

snydeq writes "The European Commission will proceed with its antitrust case against Microsoft regardless of Microsoft's decision to strip IE from Windows 7 in Europe. Europe's top antitrust regulator said the EC would draw up a remedy that allows computer users 'genuine consumer choice,' noting that stripping out IE from Windows 'may potentially be positive,' but 'rather than more choice, Microsoft seems to have chosen to provide less.' Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera, whose complaint to the European Commission at the end of 2007 sparked the initial antitrust investigation, said Microsoft is 'trying to set the remedy itself by stripping out IE. ... Now that Microsoft has acknowledged it has been breaking the law by bundling IE into Windows, the Commission must push ahead with an effective remedy,' he said."

Comments

Re:Okay, enough already

[Blakey Rat]

EU want MS to include a choice in the Win7 installer that gives a user the choise to install either EI, Firefox or Opera. Instead MS just went out to remove the choice of having a brower entirely.

That's the worst idea I ever heard. Hey, I just wrote a browser called BlakeyBrowse, how do I get in on this gravy train? It's a wrapper around MSHTML, but mine includes 15 animated ads on every page load! Since it's built into the Windows installer, and customers don't understand this choice when they make it, I'll get thousands of installs even though it's a piece of shit. Woo!

Why should Microsoft have to support Firefox and Opera? That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life.

Even if Microsoft is forced to stop their anti-competitive practises they still don't give the user the choice of a different browser.

Microsoft *never took that away* from the user. Ever. Nothing EVER stopped you from installing Mosaic, or Netscape, or Opera, or Firefox, or Safari. Never in the history of Microsoft have they taken away the "choice of a different browser."

You're either completely full of shit, or completely delusional. I don't know which.

I hope they'll bleed. And stop whining about the EU only wanting to make money because their fines are a tiny drop in the financial ocean.

The only press we in the US see about the EU summarizes as:
* EU sues highly-successful American company for dubious reasons, imposes gigantic fines.

What are we supposed to believe the motive is?