New antitrust investigations against Microsoft

Uli14 Jan 2008

Brussels, 14th January 2008

"Antitrust: Commission initiates formal investigations against Microsoft in two cases of suspected abuse of dominant market position"

For details read:

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/08/19&forma...

"The European Commission has decided to initiate two formal antitrust investigations against Microsoft Corp concerning two separate categories of alleged infringements of EC Treaty rules on abuse of a dominant market position (Article 82). The first case where proceedings have been opened is in the field of interoperability in relation to a complaint by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS). The second area where proceedings have been opened is in the field of tying of separate software products following inter alia a complaint by Opera." etc. etc.

For previous investigations see http://typophile.com/node/37143

aluminum14 Jan 2008#

is this really type related?

Nick Shinn14 Jan 2008#

Fonts are software.
Bundling fonts with an operating system is quite similar to bundling a browser.
In both cases the dominant company provides an ancillary, lesser-valued product for free as an added value, because it facilitates the use of its major product. Meanwhile, there are small, independent companies whose sole business is the lesser-valued product, whose potential customers now don't need to buy that kind of product.

Uli27 Feb 2008#

On 27th February, 2008, Microsoft was fined again by the European Commission. In this new case, the sum of the fine was 899 million Euros, i.e. more than one billion Dollars, i.e. more than $ 1,000,000,000.

(For this sum, instead of buying Arial, Segoe and other ripoffs, you could buy a lot of original fonts, couldn't you?)

Official link:

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/08/318&format...

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 25 Apr 2015. original URL