EU scoring Micropoints?

NET RESULTS:I'VE ALWAYS believed that Microsoft has more or less got what it had coming to it in terms of legal challenges. Go through the evidence from the US anti-trust trial for example, and the judge's findings of fact, and you can see that few would have nominated the company for the Miss Congeniality award.

The EU's various cases also have had some merit - at least, way back when it all started. Indeed, many felt that the EU was following through with some proper financial "remedies" after the US huffed and puffed and then, well, merely smacked the company's wrist.

But in light of the extraordinary fact that the same EU just okayed search giant Google's acquisition of online advertising monolith DoubleClick, competition commissioner Neelie Kroes's latest fine for Microsoft - a hefty €899 million - is beginning to look like an ultimately meaningless EU vendetta against the company.

Does the European Commission honestly think that bundling a browser is more harmful to EU citizens than permitting unprecedented consolidation and mining of personal information about practically every move you make on the web?

And why is it okay for Apple to give me its Safari browser when I purchase a Mac in Europe, but getting Internet Explorer (IE) bundled with Windows is a shocking limitation of consumer choice?

Yes, I know there was lots more in the EU case, which centred on whether Microsoft had complied with an earlier order to unbundle IE and also open up some Windows code to expand competition (Kroes determined Microsoft hadn't, hence the fine). And I also know from various reports that the fine, large as it is, amounts to about two weeks' operating profit for Microsoft. Whoop-de-do.

But many observers feel that the EU is chasing after Microsoft on points that might have made sense a decade ago, but are increasingly nonsensical. The success of open-source operating system Linux has long since demonstrated that Microsoft has some aggressive competition out there and that it can come from the most unexpected places.

Maybe opening up that Windows code will change the computing world, but somehow, I think not. And Microsoft has already been releasing code into the open-source space anyway and built up a lively community around this initiative. In that respect, the company has done a lot of rethinking.

The cynical might say they've only done this to get off the commission's anti-trust hook, but the company surely isn't that blinkered. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are nothing if not shrewd, and like their competitors Sun and IBM, they have had to take stock of the upheavals in computing, technology and business over the past decade.

The growth of the internet, the rise of open-source development, the expansion of social networking - all have forced these companies to remake themselves in different ways, to become more open, to let go of the closed platform.

And, as Michael Arrington of tech blog TechCrunch wrote last month, in a post entitled 'Microsoft: the EU's ATM Machine': "Google, Apple and Mozilla, among others (including Germany's SAP), seem perfectly able to compete against Microsoft without crying for help every time users decline to use their products."

Ironically, days after fining Microsoft, the commission was busy approving Google's $3.1 billion takeover of DoubleClick for the European market, stating it didn't feel competition would be hindered or EU citizens adversely affected.

Yet privacy advocates and Google competitors have been expressing concerns about this merger for ages. DoubleClick drops a tiny program called a cookie onto computers, which then sends back information to DoubleClick on what websites an internet user is visiting, causing "relevant" ads to show on some of those sites.

It is almost impossible to browse the web and avoid DoubleClick cookies. Flushing them out of one's browser cache like so many marine parasites in the bilgewater has become the norm for anyone not wishing to be on a kind of web activity CCTV.

Given that Google is used by nearly all of us, and that the company stores all our searches for 18 months, and can now link those searches to DoubleClick's knowledge about what we do, the company has unprecedented scope to peer into the online activity of individuals.

On the competition side, DoubleClick and Google competitors argued the combination could also make ads served up by Google's AdSense program more attractive than competitors'. Google already controls 40 per cent of the online advertising market.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said this of the approved merger: "By failing to impose safeguards, EC regulators have helped strengthen a growing digital colossus that will now be in the dominant position to shape much of the global future of the internet and other online media."

But thanks to our diligent commission, at least I won't be forced to look at that future on an Internet Explorer browser.

Blog: www.techno-culture.com