Europe Launches New Antitrust Probes

European regulators have begun two new antitrust probes into Microsoft’s business practices: one will explore whether Microsoft illegally bundles Internet Explorer (IE) with Windows, while the other investigates whether Microsoft has properly revealed interoperability information for Office file formats, unspecified server products, and the .NET Framework. The announcement, which came less than four months after a court decision strongly upheld sanctions from an earlier European investigation, underscores that antitrust litigation will be a chronic problem, particularly in Europe, as long as Microsoft maintains its dominant market share in OSs and productivity applications.

Complaints from ECIS, Opera

On Jan. 14, 2008, the European Commission (EC), which oversees antitrust and fair competition enforcement for the European Union (EU), announced that it had initiated two formal investigations against Microsoft.

Interoperability. One investigation responds to complaints by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), a trade group that includes Microsoft competitors Adobe, Corel, IBM, Linspire, Nokia, Opera, Oracle, RealNetworks, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. The ECIS first complained in Feb. 2006 that Microsoft’s insistence on using proprietary file formats in Office, rather than the royalty-free OpenDocument format, was hampering interoperability between Office and other productivity products. Since then, Microsoft has introduced a new file format, Open Office XML, in Office 2007, and has attempted to get that format accepted as a standard by various bodies. (So far, Ecma has approved it, but the International Standards Organization, or ISO, has not.) The EC says it will investigate whether Open Office XML is sufficiently interoperable with competitors’ products. The EC is also investigating interoperability concerns with other unnamed Microsoft server products and with the .NET Framework.