Microsoft, EU Reach Antitrust Accord

alphadogg writes "Microsoft appears to have reached an agreement with the European Commission that concludes an antitrust battle that has lasted a decade, Europe's top competition regulator said today. A proposal the company offered in July to address charges of monopoly abuse were dismissed as insufficient by the Commission, as well as by rivals in the software industry. But the latest iteration appears to have mollified the EC's regulator. 'We believe this is an answer,' said competition commissioner Neelie Kroes in a press conference. 'I think this is a trustful deal we are making. There can't be a misunderstanding because it is the final result of a long discussion between Steve Ballmer and me.' The new settlement offer addresses charges that Microsoft distorted competition in its favor in the market for web browsers, by giving its Internet Explorer browser an unfair advantage over rivals." The Register points out this interesting quote from the materials Microsoft released on the subject: "Microsoft shall ensure that third-party software products can interoperate with Microsoft's Relevant Software Products using the same Interoperability Information on an equal footing as other Microsoft Software Products."

Comments

Re:I wonder if the real harm was ever recognized

[erroneus]

I'm not confused in the slightest. There are ties between html and http. Those ties include but are not limited to what the client on the other side of the server is expected to be capable of doing.

While the technical divisions between http and html are pretty obvious to the technical crowd, it is the expectation of the users out there that really link them together. Technically, nearly anything can be transported across from client to server using http, but when the "http://" is placed in front of a URL, the OS and indeed the users expect that this is a web page coming next... a web page in the form of html. And when that html doesn't look right to them, the user perceives a problem. This is the core of the harm of broken html handling causes. It creates confusion in the public perception that something that is standards compliant is broken even when the opposite is actually the case.

To avoid that confusion between real, standards compliant HTML and that which is expected by MSIE something like "brokenhtml://" or "msie://" should be used at the front of the URL instead of "http://" for standards compliant browsers. This could serve a wide variety of benefits not the least of which are the ability for web servers to actually have two distinct sets of code depending on whether or not MSIE is being used and it would remove the end user confusion about what is broken and what isn't. Technically, this is not so different from using "ftp://" in a URL where a web browser could easily answer up to such URLs, much of the expected functionality is not available through typical clients and so proper FTP clients can be called when ftp:// protocol is designated.

What I am saying is that the protocol part of the URL does more than specify the protocol to be used, but also the expectations of the client that is being served. If the client that is called by the OS is broken or otherwise incapable of processing the data passed to it properly, correctly and/or accurately, then it is breaking the client-server standards model of the very protocol.

Re:Typical Ignorant Poster

[tjstork]

Yeah, because when I'm being protectionist I implement policies that promote four US companies in addition to one european one that isn't a member state of the European Union I work f

That blurs the issue. Opera is getting a free thing. Whether or not other browsers are getting it, doesn't matter. Opera filed the legal complaint, and they are getting free ads for doing so.