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"But it did overturn regulators' decision to appoint a monitoring trustee to watch how Microsoft had complied with the ruling, saying the Commission had exceeded its powers by ordering Microsoft to pay for all the costs of the trustee."

Well at least there will be no Truth Commissar at Microsoft's expense.

These articles from the EU sound exactly like passages out of 1984. Commissions and Ministries devoted to "competition" and "interoperability" are really there to punish winners and stifle effective methods.

The quotes are pretty menacing too. They really aren't even dressing up the totalitarianism much:

"... Microsoft must comply" "...I will not tolerate continued noncompliance." "...the remedy imposed by the Commission."

I will buy more ms products if they promise to stop all sales in the EU.

Let them fester with outdated code

MS should pay the fine AND revoke EVERY license to use MS products in the EU. The next day, lawsuits should be slapped on EVERY EU government for illegal usage of MS products.

Much as it pains me to say it, I don't see why you're siding with microsoft on this. They're as criminal as the EU. They just hide it better.

No problemo! Just go around distributing FREE Windows Media Player installer CDs at every computer outlet. Same effect and it's all LEGAL!

Microsoft add a charge of about $50 to the price of windows to cover media player. Look at the new versions of vista and you'll see it in plain sight. It isn't free.

I want to be clear. I am not, for one second, arguing that this is a legitimate action by the EU. It isn't. It's a repudiation of national sovereignty for this court to claim to act on the behalf of our national legislatures. However, having said that, I can at least see their reasoning and I would support similar reasoning in a national court.

It works like this. In the mid 90s, when Unix waas still king, Microsoft cooperated on the creation of various standards for interoperability between computers. CIFS (or SMB) was one of these standards. The short version is that it's a protocol for sharing harddrives transparently over a network. They cooperated on this right up to the point where Novel's Netware product - arguably superior - was reduced to a minority position. At that point they started extending the standard with proprietary hooks in an attempt to lock competitor systems out of their own OS. In the networking world this is about as stupid as you can get. Networking relies on transparent communication between computers. It relies on protocols being know and documented.

That is what the EU court wanted Microsoft to hand over. The documentation for their extensions to these standard protocols. Without that, projects have had to reverse engineer the extensions in order to get their software to cooperate with windows. They want to work with windows, but microsoft won't let them.

That's just one example. Microsoft's entire history is of theft, lies and abuse of a monopoly position those thefts and lies provided. I can never understand why people hold up Microsoft as an example of the american dream. It's a lie. If Microsoft had had their way, the internet as we know it would never have existed. It'd be a walled garden affair like AOL and Compuserve used to be before they were forced to adapt to the open network. Free Speech would not happen.

Again, I'm not defending the EU. I would prefer to see it gone. It's just that I happen to think the same thing about Microsoft.

I should add that this isn't like forcing car companies to hand over cars to eacdh other. It's like forcing a car company with a proprietary locking pin on its wheels to hand over the spec so third-party wheel makers can manufacture alloy rims that will fit that car.