Written by: Beck

A brief article at the Mises Institute discussing the latest EU insanity with regard to the Microsoft anti-trust sanctions proves highly illustrative.

In March of 2004 Microsoft was fined a record $648 million by the European Commission for exercising its (alleged) monopoly power in the operating systems market. The most important element of that alleged monopoly power was Microsoft's free inclusion of its program, Media Player, in its XP operating system...

Microsoft is currently in the process of complying with that regulation. But there is a problem. Microsoft has tentatively titled its stripped down XP operating system as "Windows XP Reduced Media Edition." Whoops! The problem, now assert the regulators, is that the new name makes the "stripped down" version of XP appear, well, stripped down and thus less desirable to consumers than the bundled version. But we can't have that! So Microsoft will have to come up with another name.

Now if all of this sound like something out of an Ayn Rand novel, I would have to agree with you. Let's see if I've got this straight. Microsoft first sells an XP operating system with Media Player included at no charge... Competitors who sell rival media players complain, however, that Microsoft's free bundling makes it harder for them to do business. And they bring all of this to the attention of the European antitrust regulators.

So the European regulators come in, absent any evidence of consumer abuse, and order Microsoft to sell a consumer inferior version of Windows XP so that rival media player competitors will have an opportunity to do more business. But, the coup de gras, the name of the consumer inferior version must not reveal that it is in fact consumer inferior! Indeed, Microsoft has been ordered to do nothing commercially that would make the consumer inferior operating system appear less attractive to consumers and that includes, apparently, naming the product correctly. Microsoft, in short, has been ordered in effect to lie about its new operating system in the title and all in the name of preserving "competition."

Essentially, European consumers are no better off, European businesses are no better able to compete, millions have been chewed up in legal fees, and a bunch of bureaucrats have extorted nearly a billion dollars from the American software company which has done more to increase office productivity than any other company in history.

And these people think the EU is somehow going to be the next superpower? These people aren't fit to wipe Bill Gates' ass.