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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."
He wasn't stealing it. He just wanted to check how difficult it is to carry the TV around, in order to make a more informed purchase decision.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
If Microsoft were based in Europe this wouldn't be happening.
I doubt that. Many european companies have been fined by the EU for illegal business practices.
New things are always on the horizon
It's monopoly abuse. Windows has a desktop monopoly. What Ubuntu or Apple does is not that important, they don't have a monopoly. If you do want to talk about the situation of Ubuntu and comparing it to Windows. Windows comes with IE and only IE or now maybe no browser at all (even less choice). Ubuntu comes with several terminal programs on the CD/DVD and you can install an other just and just as easily remove the one that was default.
New things are always on the horizon
This is a GOOD THING. I can't believe all the rabid anti-EU postings here. Somebody finally has the courage to stand up to Microsoft, and you people want to sting them up!
Look: Microsoft has obtained their monopoly by unethical means. They have maintained that monopoly by illegal means. They are illegally leveraging their monopoly to extend their dominance into other markets.
Thank goodness the EU has the guts to fight this.
negative, read groklaw for instance and the commissions statements:
roughly: "we want the users to have more choice, not less"
Microsoft does the ONE thing that will hurt innovation in the long run and increases the chance that users will end up getting IE instead of an alternative browser, by not providing any method at all to chose an alternative browser easily. You can bet your ass that "Microsoft Windows without IE" will have big fat "INSTALL IE NOW" icons on the desktop and popups appearing randomly.
The European commission is 100% correct for condemning this move.
Frankly, I couldn't care less if IE is integrated in the OS but able to be disabled, which is far less harmful than this move of Microsoft.
It's not that they bundle a browser. It's that they bundle IE, which through MS's previous law-breaking, spawned an ecosystem of non-standard, IE-only websites. These days, those 'websites' are largely web-based corporate functions (like time tracking systems and incident tracking systems). Those packages have been able to continue down their IE-only garden paths on the assumption (supported by Microsoft marketing) that IE will already be there on 95% of computers sold, and if a business standardizes on Windows, 100%.
That has contributed to Windows lock-in, which was the basis of the original IE antitrust action. So, while it'd be okay if Microsoft were to bundle Firefox or Chrome, bundling IE is still problematic. Now, they could remove all the non-standard stuff from IE and then bundle it relatively harmlessly. But, of course, the non-standard stuff is the reason Microsoft built IE in the first place - so they could extend their monopoly position to the web, making non-Windows desktop systems that much less viable. And it would've worked, except for Firefox, which being open source was not 'killable'. As it is, the web has gravitated towards standards despite IE. But that'd have been much harder to do without a first-class browser like Firefox able to survive in the vacuum created by IE. And without firefox, there probably never would've been Safari, iPhone, Android, etc.
Still, even though Microsoft hasn't been as successful as they'd have liked in monopolizing the Internet, they still have had some success, especially in the corporate arena. So what's the EU to do? Nothing?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...