Groklaw: Interview on the EU Microsoft decision

When the EU Court of First Instance announced its verdict on September 17, upholding the EU Commission's findings that Microsoft abused its market dominance, the media flocked to the lawyers representing the various parties for reactions to the ruling, Brad Smith for Microsoft, Carlo Piana for FSFE and Samba, and Thomas Vinje, who represented ECIS, the European Committee for Interoperable Systems. You can see both Smith and Vinje in this YouTube video from EUX.TV, for example.

Mr. Vinje was gracious enough to sit down with our own Sean Daly for an interview about the case, the decision, its implications, the history, and what it means going forward. I was particularly interested in his comments forcefully explaining how in his view the decision in no way impacts on Apple, Google or any company but Microsoft:

This decision is based upon facts where you have a single company which has a 95% market share which has lasted for a long time -- and that's very significant in antitrust law, the durability of the monopoly -- and it is a platform monopoly that is very, very powerfully protected by strong network effects in the form of an intense applications barrier to entry.

Now, those circumstances apply, I would suggest, to only one company in the world.

And the reasoning of both the Commission's and the Court's decision is limited to *those* set of facts....I was speaking yesterday evening with the number 2 executive in a rather significant American software company, and she had been approached the evening before yesterday by a relatively senior Microsoft executive suggesting that US technology companies should get together and oppose this European court decision in some fashion, because it was so terribly troublesome for US industry, and her reaction was, "Well, you know, when I get a 95% market share, I'm going to start to worry." And you know, she's exactly right....Microsoft got slammed. And they got appropriately slammed. And they're trying to figure a way out of this. They're trying to figure a way to get the world to think there's some sort of problem here for anyone else than Microsoft. And so they're conjuring up images of the European Commission going on a rampage against American technology companies. That is, to put it rather nicely, a mirage.

 

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