Microsoft 0, EU 670,000,000

Man, if the EU court that stuck it to Microsoft this weekend and Mr. and Mrs. Slowsky were in a race it would probably go off the board for betters. It's. Taking. For. Ever. The crime is Microsoft shutting out competitors by bundling Windows Media Player with Windows, which, to us at least, seems like an ancient issue. What are they going to go after Microsoft for next? Attaching round wheels to an axle? We were all about this issue when it was browsers that were being shut out of Microsoft operating systems, but for some reason we can't get all that excited about media players. Real Player? QuickTime? Fuck 'em. More troubling to us are the protocols that Microsoft has refused to open. Standards; there is a point to it, after all.

Microsoft lost its appeal this morning to the tune of $670 million. Todd Bishop's blog at the P-I has a good rundown of industry reaction.

Here's the Wall Street Journal:

But on the two factual issues of alleged wrongdoing, the court seemed, as EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes put it, to set "an important precedent in terms of the obligations of dominant companies to allow competition, in particular in high-tech industries." The court backed the commission's judgment that Microsoft's refusal to supply the interoperability specs was "abusive." It rejected the company's claim that the Committee's remedy -- forcing Microsoft to share that information but not far-more sensitive source code -- would let rivals clone or reproduce Microsoft's products. And it rejected the argument that Microsoft would be sacrificing intellectual-property rights to the extent that the company's incentives to innovate would be hurt. Without the ability to work with the Windows domain architecture, rivals' software just can't be viably marketed, the court said. "The absence of such interoperability has the effect of reinforcing Microsoft's competitive position on the market and creates a risk that competition will be eliminated," the court added.