Microsoft loses appeal
This morning, the European Court of First Instance announced that it would uphold the European Commission’s decision that Microsoft has abused its dominant market position.
The Court ruled that Microsoft did this by refusing to supply and authorise the use of interoperability information and by tying together the Windows client PC operating system and Windows Media Player. Although the court essentially upheld the Commission’s decision, it did annul certain parts relating to the appointment of a monitoring trustee, which it say have no legal basis in Community law.
ORG welcomes the Court’s decision, which is good news for consumers and business alike. As ORG advisory council member Ian Brown points out over at Blogzilla:
“The network effects in many digital markets make competition law more vital than ever if we are to see vibrant free markets. A loss today for the Commission’s competition directorate would have been disastrous, forcing them to tread much more carefully in regulating digital monopolists.”
Groklaw has good analysis and pointers to reactions from the Free Software Foundation, Samba and others. Text of the full judgement is available here; initial reactions from Microsoft are available here.
ORG’s Becky Hogge will be on the BBC1’s one o’clock news today discussing the decision with the their technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones.
September 17th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
[...] Peter wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThis morning, the European Court of First Instance announced that it would uphold the European Commission’s decision that Microsoft has abused its dominant market position. The Court ruled that Microsoft did this by refusing to supply … [...]
September 17th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
(Microsoft) Abused it’s dominant market position?
A key question is why is it dominant.
Consumers benefit from competition, yes, but is there any other OS in the market competing head to head with Microsoft’s?
Instead of 9 years spent in fighting to access Microsoft for interoperability,9 years could have been invested in the development of alternate OS’s to compete with Microsoft at the same level. It sounds rather unfair to Microsoft.
September 17th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
BBC News video featuring Becky is here.
September 19th, 2007 at 10:52 am
[...] It was very satisfying, in a twisted way, to be ranting about Microsoft again the other day. It’s been too long. It was even more satisfying, though, to discover that we won. Stick that in your proprietary codec and smoke it. [...]
October 24th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
[...] to pick apart Neelie Kross’s announcement that Microsoft have accepted the conditions of the European Commission’s 2004 ruling on abuse of market position. The European Commissioner for Competition Policy stated at a press [...]