On the 16th of January [2009] the European Commission DG Competition reported that it had issued a statement of objections regarding Microsoft's tying of Internet Explorer (IE) to the Windows Operating System product family. This action builds on a complaint originally submitted by Opera, a European company involved in web browser development.

Free Software Foundation Europe welcomes the European Commission's decision and offers its support in the coming anti-trust investigation. As stated previously in a letter to the European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, anti-competitive behaviour is unacceptable, whether it occurs as 'tying' products with dominant market segments, or in circumventing standards and fair access.

"Web browsers are becoming a critical platform for home and business computing," says Shane Coughlan, legal coordinator at FSFE. "The market previously failed to prevent unfair distortion of the desktop environment and we cannot allow such practices to be repeated."

"It is important that no business in Europe is allowed to institute any policy of embracing, extending and extinguishing competition either through manipulation of interoperability information or through abuse of a dominant position by unfair tying and bundling of products," says Georg Greve, FSFE President. "Microsoft is a company that has previously been convicted of market distortion in the Work Group Server market, and we would welcome if the Commission also took up the antitrust complaint initially lodged in early 2006 by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) regarding market abuse in other areas."

For FSFE's previous statement on this issue please see: http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/2007/news-20071221-01

For FSFE's letter to the European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes please see: http://fsfeurope.org/documents/20071219-opera-antitrust.pdf