Microsoft evades European Commission anti-trust hearing

Microsoft on Friday informed the European Commission that it could not attend the anti-trust hearing scheduled from 3 to 5 June as it coincides with a "most important worldwide intergovernmental competition law meeting" in Zurich, Switzerland.

The International Competition Network (ICN) meeting in Zurich is scheduled on the same dates.

However, the European Commission has denied Microsoft's request for rescheduling the hearing saying that those are the only dates it has available in Brussels for the hearing.

"Why hold a hearing in the EU (European Union) if key decision makers are unable to attend," said Dave Heiner, vice president and deputy general counsel, in the company blog.

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

"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at a different date, that request has been denied and the Commission hearing officer has deemed Microsoft to have withdrawn its request for a hearing," he wrote.

''It appears 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,'' Heiner wrote.

Regulators have been investigating Microsoft for long, following a complaint by the makers of the Norwegian web browser Opera, and another from the industry group, European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), which accused Microsoft of unfairly obstructing the ability of rival applications to work on its operating systems.

Recently Google also joined forces against Microsoft. (See: Google teams up with Opera to challenge Microsoft supremacy).

The charges are similar to those Microsoft faced in 2004, when it lost a European anti-trust case and was forced to sell a version of Windows without its Media Player software. Microsoft was hit by a fine of 497 million euros ($688.84 million) in September last year after Europe's second-highest court dismissed the company's appeal against an EU antitrust decision, taken in 2004.

Thomas Vinje, a lawyer representing Opera and other Microsoft adversaries, said he suspected Microsoft was trying to win some sort of delay. ''I have never seen EU national competition officials, who are observers, play a significant role in such cases,'' Vinje said.

In January 2008, the EC released its preliminary statement of objections, and said in a statement that Microsoft's bundling "undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice."

Then in March, Microsoft asked the commission for a deadline extension so it could pepare its response to charges that it illegally bundled its Internet Explorer Web browser with its Windows operating systems. The commission granted the request.

It is not clear what the next step is, but Heiner said the company believes it has a strong defense to the commission's complaint, "especially given the remedies put in place by the US courts and the widespread usage of competing browsers."

"It is too early to know how the case will end, but whatever happens Microsoft is absolutely committed to offering Windows 7 in Europe in a manner that is fully compliant with European law," he wrote in the blog.

The European Commission on 13 May fined computer chip maker Intel a record 1.06 billion euros, or $1.44 billion, for abusing its dominance in the computer chip market to exclude its only serious rival, Advanced Micro Device  (See: EU fines Intel record $1.44 billion in anti-trust case). 

According to the internet statistics specialist Net Applications, Internet Explorer was used by 68 per cent of web users worldwide in January. This compared with a 22 per cent market share for Mozilla's Firefox, 8.3 per cent for Apple's Safari, 1.1 per cent for Google's Chrome, and 0.7 per cent for Opera.