nathris

The thing is I don't believe that they are breaking the law, the whole complaint is vague at best, and many of the problems they are having with MS could be applied to numerous other businesses (like Apple to name one) and the whole thing reeks of a corrupt organization that is trying to exploit it's power to make some easy cash. If you walked around the streets of Europe asking random people what they thought about how the EU was fining Microsoft large sums of cash for including a firewall and integrating it's media player to make Vista safer and "unfair business practices".


The EU is attacking Microsoft in every way it can find to try and increase the fines. They could care less about what MS is doing. In fact, other companies are trying to take advantage of this:
So european based Opera is trying to say that Windows shouldn't come with a web browser, or that MS should provide different packages containing different web browsers. I honestly don't know, the whole request is so ass-backwards that I can't even begin to understand it.

What I really can't understand is why they are soloing out Microsoft in this, isn't Opera available for OSX and Linux? While they are at it why don't they sue Apple and, say, Canonical for not including Opera in their operating systems?

These double standards are 100 times worse than anything Microsoft is allegedly doing.

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Highly-Annoyed

Whatever your or my opinions about the laws the EU are enforcing, they are still laws that have to be enforced. The opposite is anarchy.

As you've already been told in this thread, MS weren't fined 14% of their annual profit (1.4bn) right away, they were fined a much smaller amount first, and asked to comply with regulations, which they then decided not to. This is why the fine is higher now. If they'd just done as asked and paid the original fine, they wouldn't be in this situation now.

MS draws more attention, because it is, for all intents and purposes, a monopoly. Monopolies are, inherently, anti-competitive. The laws MS is breaking are designed to regulate competition, so it can be maintained and stimulated.

Try to remember, the capitalism we love so much, relies on healthy competition to survive. Without competition, we don't have true capitalist economies. MS is the antithesis of competition. It doesn't seek to compete, it seeks to destroy. MS is terrified of competition, which is why it tries (and succeeds) to snuff it out before it can get a foot hold. It does this in three main ways:

1. It tries to buy the potential competition.
2. It tries to tie the potential competition up in expensive litigation.
3. It tires destroy any custom for the potential competition, by exerting it's influence over the computer industry and creating circumstances where taking up the potential competition is undesirable.

MS seeks to destroy competition, as it has effectively done in the main markets it operates within. The whole computer industry is warped around the MS gravity well. MS has enormous influence in virtually every sector of computing and that influence is ever expanding outwards towards other markets as well.

This is why MS (and other monopolies and quasi-monopolies) are given more attention by the EU when they trade within it. Not because they are American, or because they are rich, but because they represent the biggest threat to healthy competition (as defined by EU law) within EU markets. It's really that simple.

I state it once more: If you want to trade in the EU, you have to abide by EU law, regardless of if you think that law is fair or not. Likewise, if you want to trade in the US, you have to abide by US law, regardless of if you think that law is fair or not. Different regions of the world have different laws. If you don't want to abide by them, either don't operate where those laws are in force, or expect to be fined.

Highly-Annoyed

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