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Microsoft fined $731m by European Commission over web browser choice

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Microsoft fined $731m by European Commission over web browser choice

#81

Post by lifeisstillgood »

brg1007 wrote: post #40
tomp wrote: post #4

I think more companies should be fined like this, as a percentage of their anual revenue. Except that I would further increase the percentage - up to 50% or even 100%. It's very simple: citizens go to jail, companies can't; so we have to make them pay, a lot. When fines are a fixed amount, the corporations have to simply earn more by committing the crime than they would have to pay if caught; banks are very adept at…

This fine is plain stupid. Why EU doesn't fine Google for the same thing on Android. Android is in a monopoly position in EU and I do not saw any broswer choice screen when I first start my Android phone.

The browser choice option was merely one agreed solution to the problem that as owner of the ecosystem (windows) MA was not letting any other browsers in.

The highly competitive marketplace for mobile devices gives you as a consumer a wide variety of choices of operating system, and each operating system (apart iOS) is adjusted by the operator to best fit their idea of market

You can choose devices, you can choose different versions and setups of android. There is a competive market

The fact that its not free as in speech is not the problem (it should be but)

Re: Microsoft fined $731m by European Commission over web browser choice

#82

Post by masklinn »

ioulian wrote: post #39
mmahemoff wrote: post #32

What does this mean for ChromeOS or Firefox OS? I'm seriously curious how the legal system considers them in light of this and why MS hasn't mentioned them (to my knowledge) in their defence.

That's indeed my thought, why only Microsoft? Apple should also give that choice to their OSX users.

> That's indeed my thought, why only Microsoft?

Abuse of a natural monopoly.

> Apple should also give that choice to their OSX users.

Stuck at 10% global marketshare (probably below that in the EU), there is no risk Apple will be able to leverage a dominant OS position they don't even remotely have into market distortions in related domains.

Re: Microsoft fined $731m by European Commission over web browser choice

#83

Post by martinced »

brg1007 wrote: post #40
tomp wrote: post #4

I think more companies should be fined like this, as a percentage of their anual revenue. Except that I would further increase the percentage - up to 50% or even 100%. It's very simple: citizens go to jail, companies can't; so we have to make them pay, a lot. When fines are a fixed amount, the corporations have to simply earn more by committing the crime than they would have to pay if caught; banks are very adept at…

This fine is plain stupid. Why EU doesn't fine Google for the same thing on Android. Android is in a monopoly position in EU and I do not saw any broswer choice screen when I first start my Android phone.

You're seriously confused as to what a monopoly is and what a monopoly implies.

There's nothing wrong with having a monopoly. What is, however, illegal is to abuse your monopoly to keep and extend your monopoly to other domains.

Btw Google / Android isn't near anywhere a monopoly in the smartphone / tablet market.

What would be illegal would be, for example, Google using its search engine to eliminate any mention of the word "Apple" and of the "apple.com" domain or, worse, only allowing access to negative criticism of Apple products. But they aren't doing that (at least not that we know of).

On the contrary MS has been officially judged has being a monopolist abusing its power to try to keep and extend its monopoly. Both in an US judgement and in an European judgement.

Heck, even selling the Xbox at a loss for years and years while living on monopoly money is a dubious way to enter a market (but personally I wouldn't mind if MS faded into irrelevancy and had only its Xbox division doing fine ; )

Re: Microsoft fined $731m by European Commission over web browser choice

#84

Post by devcpp »

sbennettmcleish wrote: post #71

Whilst it is Microsoft with bags of money and all that, I don't really see how such a huge fine (even for M$) is warranted. Yes, they stopped offering the browser choice, but at what point did someone from EU-HQ contact MS-HQ and tell them they'll be fined if they don't put it back in? Surely it would only take a few weeks at the most to actually re-instate the "feature" once they were threatened with a huge fine. It…

They had been threatened a few times before implementing it. It's about time we stopped to play this game and make it clear stuff like that won't be tolerated at all.

It wouldn't have been better for Microsoft. They know very well that each product they establish as a monopoly increases their chance of coming back as an all-around industry leader. Actually, I'd be willing to bet this wasn't a "technical error". I've never seen features just unexpectedly disappear out of any piece of software.

Re: Microsoft fined $731m by European Commission over web browser choice

#85

Post by omd »

mda wrote: post #46

Microsoft will probably counter-fine by raising its prices by 1€ in EU. Europe will happily pay for it.

Ah, it's the "Don't upset corporations or they will punish us with infinite price hikes" mantra.

If they raise the price by €1 and for the sake of argument we assume a net profit of 50%, they would have to sell 1.1 billion packages to recoup the fine (I don't think Microsoft has sold that many software products in their lifetime, but it's a fun little thought experiment). 1.1 billion Windows 8 licences at €280 a piece is €308 billion revenue of which the corporation taxes will flow back to the EU members. It's a win-win for our tax payers!

Re: Microsoft fined $731m by European Commission over web browser choice

#87

Post by masklinn »

tm4n wrote: post #68

This still seems rather unfair, why are other proprietary operating systems not obliged to incorporate a similar feature? It's Microsoft own operating system and they should be allowed to incorporate whatever piece of software they'd like, albeit to a reasonable extent. On the other hand, I do find it weird there are no repercussions like this for Windows' new secure boot "feature".

> why are other proprietary operating systems not obliged to incorporate a similar feature?

Because "proprietary" is irrelevant, the operative word relevant to the original judgement was "monopoly". And more precisely abuse of a natural monopoly.

> It's Microsoft own operating system and they should be allowed to incorporate whatever piece of software they'd like, albeit to a reasonable extent.

If they were sitting at a 10% desktop OS market share that would be the case. But over the last ~150 years, natural monopolies have come to be seen as too dangerous (due to their ability to leverage an essentially impregnable stronghold into dominance in other domains through "legal" market distortions) to be left to play by the normal rules, so many first-world countries have additional rules for monopolistic entities to follow.

In the EU, companies in dominant positions have "a special responsibility not to allow [their] conduct to impair competition on the common market".

Re: Microsoft fined $731m by European Commission over web browser choice

#88

Post by mda »

bnegreve wrote: post #65
mda wrote: post #46

Microsoft will probably counter-fine by raising its prices by 1€ in EU. Europe will happily pay for it.

I disagree with this kind of reaction: 1. I don't think it's useless, when companies raise their price they loose customers so Microsoft will probably be more careful next time. 2. If it is useless in practice, we should change the law but surely not let them do what they want, just because it's useless.

So they fined a company which controls almost entire European Government infrastructure. Company screws up, gets fined, things will continue business as usual, Microsoft still can do whatever they want, at least in the medium term. What EU could do is to actively try to reduce their dependency to a single firm, they can check the future deals, look for alternatives. Then they can have an upper hand and then no companies would screw up a simple thing like this.

Re: Microsoft fined $731m by European Commission over web browser choice

#89

Post by mda »

omd wrote: post #85
mda wrote: post #46

Microsoft will probably counter-fine by raising its prices by 1€ in EU. Europe will happily pay for it.

Ah, it's the "Don't upset corporations or they will punish us with infinite price hikes" mantra. If they raise the price by €1 and for the sake of argument we assume a net profit of 50%, they would have to sell 1.1 billion packages to recoup the fine (I don't think Microsoft has sold that many software products in their lifetime, but it's a fun little thought experiment). 1.1 billion Windows 8 licences at €280 a piec…

€1 was just figure of speech. (Still, Governments pay for a ton of Microsoft products; Ms office, Windows, Exchange mailboxes, Sharepoint licenses, SQL server licenses etc. etc. How much money do you think Ms makes from EU governments in one year? in 5 years?)

High software prices indeed harm tax payers. There is no win-win.

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