European Union Heads Down Slippery Slope with Microsoft

      by Wyatt Walter

Microsoft has been battling monopoly charges from the European Union for some time now and might find itself distributing Windows with alternative browsers than Internet Explorer. Microsoft has been found by the EU to be harming the browser competition by bundling its own browser with its operating system. The question becomes now, how are they to be punished? One possible answer that the EU has come up with is to force Microsoft to bundle other browsers with its OS. This answer really doesn’t help anything at all.

The court battle came to the right conclusion: by bundling IE with Windows, Microsoft gave its browser an advantage in the marketplace. Unfortunately, it runs much deeper than that. It’s not the fact that the browser is included with the OS that makes it anti-competitive. If I go to HP’s website and order a new computer from them should I expect to be able to choose the brand of CD drive that comes in it? Of course not, it’ll have HP’s logo on it. The problem lies in the inability to remove the browser from the OS. Uninstalling IE from a Windows computer is like ripping the heart out of a human. If I brought that same HP computer home and replaced the CD drive with another brand drive, the computer would continue to function. Other operating systems allow you to remove the default browser without consequence, but not Windows.

Whether or not they missed the point on why IE has an unfair advantage in the marketplace, they’re heading down a very slippery slope. Where would this bundling of software stop? Do they need to include a copy of OpenOffice.org and Wordperfect with every copy of Office that’s sold? What browsers are included and what aren’t included in the bundle? Couldn’t one argue that the ones not included are being monopolized upon by the others that are? Should other operating system makers be forced to do the same? Or is having some sort of repository (similar to the way Linux package management works) be good enough (it seems to be plenty for Linux..)? The EU is trying to create a more level playing field for browser makers to compete in and hopefully keep web standards alive, but in doing so they seem to have just brought in more politics which will slow the innovation game down which is what will keep the competition healthy in the long run.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (3) : Jan 28th, 2009

3 Responses to “European Union Heads Down Slippery Slope with Microsoft”

  1. Mozilla Doesn’t Want Firefox to Be Bundled With Windows | What a n00b! Says:
    February 10th, 2009 at 10:01 am

    [...] ideas on what to do with Microsoft since it found Microsoft guilty of anti-competitive practices by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. The problem for Mozilla lies in the fact that, should this happen, Firefox would become everything [...]

  2. Internet Explorer Will Finally Be Able To Be Uninstalled | What a n00b! Says:
    March 4th, 2009 at 9:04 pm

    [...] the exception of the rendering engine, MSHTML.DLL). Microsoft has been challenged in courts in Europe over creating a monopoly in the browser market by not allowing the browser to be uninstalled in the past and this very well [...]

  3. Opera, Google Want More Than Just An Uninstaller for IE | What a n00b! Says:
    March 12th, 2009 at 7:19 pm

    [...] the European Union wasn’t heading down a slippery slope, Opera and Google seem to want to be. After its loss in the courts in Europe, Microsoft added [...]

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