Antitrust & Competition : The European Union, the United States, and Microsoft: A Compa... - 0 views
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Gary Edwards on 01 Sep 09Interoperability through antitrust - is there a legal foundation in place capable of pulling this off? This article is a lengthy study and comparative analysis of the legal foundation in the USA and Europe. Microsoft is of course the target. Excerpt: Microsoft has incorporated products, such as browsers and media players, into its operating system, behavior that again amounts to technological tying. It has also improved its server software by heightening the degree to which servers employing that software can interact. By raising the level of interaction among servers equipped with its software, Microsoft has so integrated work group servers as to enable groups of small servers to approach the capacities of mainframe computers. The European competition-law authorities see both matters as problematic. The integration of the media player has been condemned as tying; and the heightened server interaction has been faulted for failing to provide the interoperability that rival server software requires in order to participate on an equal footing with Microsoft server software in Windows work groups. Microsoft’s integration (at least in the view of the European antitrust authorities) also raises issues of essential facilities, and of the role of antitrust in achieving interoperability. . We have now reached a moment in time in which both the American and European laws are sufficiently developed to warrant reflection and comparison. That is the task approached in this article. Three part study: Part I -The European approach. Part II-USA decisions regarding Microsoft tying. Part III-comparison of USA and European approaches to product integration (tying).