It's very simple: citizens go to jail, companies can't; so we have to make them pay, a lot. When fines are a fixed amount, the corporations have to simply earn more by committing the crime than they would have to pay if caught; banks are very adept at playing this game.
Microsoft was fined around 1 percent of their global sales for a violation of the terms of a kind of a settlement in an old competition case (antitrust case). Microsoft already knew that if they violated the terms they would be fined up to 10 percent of their global revenues: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-09-1941_en.htm?local...
Microsoft mostly complied with the terms of the settlement, but not entirely as the OP describes. In that light the 1 percent fine is probably not way off.
If a someone in a corporation is actually committing a crime , then, yes they can go to jail.
If they have committed some kind of civil offense or if it's a criminal offense with no jail term attached then they don't go to jail. There's nothing special about corporations that prevent the people in charge from serving jail time.
Not even close. It's in a majority position but nowhere near a monopoly.
Although it can probably be considered to be a "dominant position", but then come the next part:
1. Has somebody complained
2. Is "Android" using its dominant position to distort the market
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/apple-raises-market-share-to-5...
The highly competitive marketplace for mobile devices gives you as a consumer a wide variety of choices of operating system, and each operating system (apart iOS) is adjusted by the operator to best fit their idea of market
You can choose devices, you can choose different versions and setups of android. There is a competive market
The fact that its not free as in speech is not the problem (it should be but)
There's nothing wrong with having a monopoly. What is, however, illegal is to abuse your monopoly to keep and extend your monopoly to other domains.
Btw Google / Android isn't near anywhere a monopoly in the smartphone / tablet market.
What would be illegal would be, for example, Google using its search engine to eliminate any mention of the word "Apple" and of the "apple.com" domain or, worse, only allowing access to negative criticism of Apple products. But they aren't doing that (at least not that we know of).
On the contrary MS has been officially judged has being a monopolist abusing its power to try to keep and extend its monopoly. Both in an US judgement and in an European judgement.
Heck, even selling the Xbox at a loss for years and years while living on monopoly money is a dubious way to enter a market (but personally I wouldn't mind if MS faded into irrelevancy and had only its Xbox division doing fine ; )
Consider an analogy: let's say there's a power company who runs a monopoly on generating electricity. They also provide natural gas services to their customers. There is, however, a bunch of other smaller natural gas companies just a phone call away that people can buy natural gas from; all you have to do is call them and have a technician come and flip a switch in your home. Is it really harmful to the consumer if the power company with the dominant market position doesn't give their customers the phone numbers of the companies competing with its natural gas division? No.
And for that sin, MS will keep paying for a long time; they're basically an ATM for the EU now. This is not great but hey, they do have a history; once a felon, forever a felon, so to speak.
We've accepted browsers are part of the OS for a long time, what's next fining Apple for not promoting Mozilla or Chrome on iOS?
There's nothing crazy about it.
> We've accepted browsers are part of the OS for a long time
We've accepted that browsers are necessary, the EU seems to have not accepted an OS natural monopoly can be leveraged into a browser monopoly. Sounds perfectly sane, and a good thing.
> what's next fining Apple for not promoting Mozilla or Chrome on iOS?
Apple does not have a monopoly marketshare, which lead to the original decision which Microsoft then broke: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_compet...
Why not do the same thing with AV, audio players, text editors, file browsers, CD/DVD burners, etc... ?
So is it in the US as well.
Where? You're making that up.
Every phone has a browser, and many did before the iPhone launched in 2007 (even if all they had were crappy WAP browsers)
Yes, they stopped offering the browser choice, but at what point did someone from EU-HQ contact MS-HQ and tell them they'll be fined if they don't put it back in? Surely it would only take a few weeks at the most to actually re-instate the "feature" once they were threatened with a huge fine.
It might have been better for Microsoft to have actually been forced to give money to the other browsers to promote their products, or alternatively, just bundle Firefox/Chrome with Windows and be done with it.
It's not like they weren't told about it first.
It wouldn't have been better for Microsoft. They know very well that each product they establish as a monopoly increases their chance of coming back as an all-around industry leader. Actually, I'd be willing to bet this wasn't a "technical error". I've never seen features just unexpectedly disappear out of any piece of software.
Do you think that makes sense?
If anything is 'anti-competitive' it's rulings like these, which punish people for producing quality software and increase the uncertainty of doing business in the EU.
There's a good comparison of the two systems over here: http://www.iie.com/publications/chapters_preview/56/10ie1664...
When they do and take actions that are detrimental to the proper functioning of a free market they will get fined as well
Microsoft is not evil, not by any normal definition of the word, but they are using power to keep power. That's normal, and that's why anti-trust laws are draconian - something is needed to equalise the odds
Abuse of a natural monopoly.
> Apple should also give that choice to their OSX users.
Stuck at 10% global marketshare (probably below that in the EU), there is no risk Apple will be able to leverage a dominant OS position they don't even remotely have into market distortions in related domains.
On the other hand, I do find it weird there are no repercussions like this for Windows' new secure boot "feature".
Because "proprietary" is irrelevant, the operative word relevant to the original judgement was "monopoly". And more precisely abuse of a natural monopoly.
> It's Microsoft own operating system and they should be allowed to incorporate whatever piece of software they'd like, albeit to a reasonable extent.
If they were sitting at a 10% desktop OS market share that would be the case. But over the last ~150 years, natural monopolies have come to be seen as too dangerous (due to their ability to leverage an essentially impregnable stronghold into dominance in other domains through "legal" market distortions) to be left to play by the normal rules, so many first-world countries have additional rules for monopolistic entities to follow.
In the EU, companies in dominant positions have "a special responsibility not to allow [their] conduct to impair competition on the common market".
If they raise the price by €1 and for the sake of argument we assume a net profit of 50%, they would have to sell 1.1 billion packages to recoup the fine (I don't think Microsoft has sold that many software products in their lifetime, but it's a fun little thought experiment). 1.1 billion Windows 8 licences at €280 a piece is €308 billion revenue of which the corporation taxes will flow back to the EU members. It's a win-win for our tax payers!
High software prices indeed harm tax payers. There is no win-win.
Microsoft already started hiking prices for some of the enterprise products, and for now they can afford this.
1. I don't think it's useless, when companies raise their price they loose customers so Microsoft will probably be more careful next time.
2. If it is useless in practice, we should change the law but surely not let them do what they want, just because it's useless.
To be more clear, there is noting illegal about HAVING a monopoly. It's what you do WITH a monopoly that matters. If you don't have a monopoly, you're much less restricted with what you can do.
To correct you analogy, it would be if one car company manufactured 90% of the cars and decided to sell the cars with its own tire brand.
But more importantly, problems caused by some monopolies (e.g. extortion), and monopolies themselves, have historically been the RESULT of government intervention. Other web browsers obviously can compete considering IE is not the most widely used browser anymore.
The browser ballot is BS imposed by bureaucrats.
If they did, I'd be heading to Brussels with a pitchfork along with about 100 other people at my company.
