14 DAY TRIAL // The seeds of divorce have been planted in the marriage of Internet Explorer and Windows by the European Union's antitrust regulators. Sparked by a complaint filed by Opera in 2008, the European Commission debuted investigations into whether Microsoft illegally bundled IE into Windows, in a move designed to give it an unfair advantage over rival browser makers by leveraging the dominant position of its operating system. The EC indicated that Microsoft was under investigation for allegedly having infringed on the EC Treaty rules on abuse of a dominant market position (Article 82).
“Microsoft received a Statement of Objections from the Directorate General for Competition of the European Commission. The Statement of Objections expresses the Commission’s preliminary view that the inclusion of Internet Explorer in Windows since 1996 has violated European competition law,” a Microsoft representative stated.
“According to the Statement of Objections, other browsers are foreclosed from competing because Windows includes Internet Explorer. The Statement of Objections states that the remedies put in place by the U.S. courts in 2002 following antitrust proceedings in Washington, D.C. do not make the inclusion of Internet Explorer in Windows lawful under European Union law.”
According to the complaint from Opera, Microsoft has been harming competition on the browser market with its practices. In this regard, the European Commission revealed that the software giant was accused of handicapping interoperability with open Internet standards through the proprietary technologies it built into IE. As a direct consequence of the Statement of Objections, Microsoft emphasized that it was willing to conduct all practices in compliance with EU anti-monopoly law.
“We are studying the Statement of Objections now. Under European competition law procedure, Microsoft will be afforded an opportunity to respond in writing to this Statement of Objections within about two months. The company is also afforded an opportunity to request a hearing, which would take place after the submission of this response. Under EU procedure, the European Commission will not make a final determination until after it receives and assesses Microsoft’s response and conducts the hearing, should Microsoft request one.”