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EC Sends Statement of Objections To Microsoft For Violating Anti-Trust Agreement
dkleinsc writes "Three years ago, Microsoft came to an agreement with EU regulators that required them to provide users with a choice of web browsers. Last July, they found Microsoft in breach of that agreement. Today, they announced that this will result in charges, potentially resulting in fines as large as $7 billion."
Microsoft gets one last chance to defend itself.
The only way to make corporations behave is to make the fine firstly remove all profits from the nefarious acts and then add enough on top that the risk/reward ratio is larger than 1 so that they don't do bad things on the chance that they're not caught often enough to matter.
In other words, the fine must really hurt otherwise it's just the cost of doing business (c.f. the paltry 1bn that intel had to spend for years of blatantly illegal market fixing).
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I admit it's hard to feel sorry for microsoft. Anytime you see a company that's been as consistently evil as someone like MS has been finally get taken down by an even bigger, meaner bully you can't help but feel a little gleeful.
Have the standards for posting comments gotten so low that people don't even completely read the submission title? (I already know nobody reads the article or the whole summary even...)
Here's a quick (rough) overview for you and the mods who put you at +5:
1. Microsoft was accused of unfairly using its monopoly in the OS market to get people to use IE over Netscape.
2. Microsoft and the EU came to an agreement that Microsoft would offer a choice of browsers to users., or be punished.
3. Microsoft is now accused of breaking that agreement.
The fact that firefox, opera and safari are easily reachable with a Google search is completely irrelevant. Microsoft made an agreement with the EU and broke it.
And one more thing: No, most computer users do not go and download a browser. You can call them lazy and/or stupid all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that many people just don't care what browser they are using. They turn on the computer, and they start using the internet. The browser is completely irrelevant to them. In the context of Microsoft's OS monopoly in the 90s, it makes perfect sense for users to be asked what browser they want to use up front.