Microsoft questions EU unfair treatment in browser hearing

Stan Beer
Monday, 25 May 2009 14:37

Opinion and Analysis

In his blog Microsoft vice president and deputy general counsel, Dave Heiner, said:

"It appears that many of the most influential Commission and national competition officials with the greatest interest in our case will be in Zurich and so unable to attend our hearing in Brussels.

"We raised concerns about this scheduling conflict with the Commission the very same day we were notified of the proposed hearing date.

"We asked the Commission to consider alternative dates and expressed our serious concern that holding a hearing during the same days as the ICN would make it much more difficult for the Commission’s and Member States’ key decision makers to attend.

"We pointed out that there’s no legal or other reason that the hearing needs to be held the first week of June.

"We believe that holding the hearing at a time when key officials are out of the country would deny Microsoft our effective right to be heard and hence deny our “rights of defense” under European law."

According to Heiner, the reason given to Microsoft for not rescheduling the hearing was that a suitable room could not be found at any other date.

"The Commission has declined to reschedule the hearing despite our offer to find and outfit a suitable room ourselves at another time," Heiner said in his blog.

"Therefore, we reluctantly notified the Commission that we will not proceed with a hearing on June 3-5. While Microsoft maintains its request for a hearing at a different date, that request has been denied and the Commission hearing officer has deemed Microsoft to have withdrawn its request for a hearing."

Regardless of the merits of this particular antitrust case against Microsoft - and there appears to be considerable doubt given the increasingly strong market position of Mozilla Firefox both globally and especially in Europe - the actions of the EC appear to be a bit bloody minded.

In any case, it's a stretch to argue that Microsoft's bundling of IE with Windows disadvantages the competition when IE market share is dropping almost daily at the hands of competitors such as Firefox, Safari and, when Google gets it right, Chrome.

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