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European Court To Rule On Microsoft
by Winter Casey
The European Union's second-highest court is scheduled to rule Sept. 17 on the competition case brought by the European Commission against Microsoft, and some of the software maker's supporters say an adverse opinion could weaken intellectual property protections for technology.
Lars Liebeler, antitrust counsel for the Computing Technology Industry Association, said the case concerns the commission's "order to require Microsoft to remove Windows Media Player from its operating system and make a 'stripped down' version of Windows available to computer manufacturers and consumers." The case also revolves around the commission's order that Microsoft make "software information available to its competitors," he said.
Liebeler said if the European Court of First Instance sustains the commission's order "requiring Microsoft to disclose its server communications protocols, the ruling would represent a blow to intellectual property protections in the technology industry."
"The weakening of IP protections will likely chill investments into new and improved technologies, and instead encourage companies to initiate litigation to obtain a competitor's innovations and inventions," Liebeler said.
CompTIA and the Association for Competitive Technology are among the interveners in the case on behalf of Microsoft. Interveners on behalf of the commission, the EU's policy and regulatory arm, include the Free Software Foundation, Software and Information Industry Association, and European Committee for Interoperable Systems.
Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, said "freedom of competition and freedom of market are issues we are concerned with regularly as they directly impact on the freedom of society as a whole."
He added, "In this particular case, Microsoft has arbitrarily generated secret additions to known formats to lock out competition from the workgroup server market so it could leverage its desktop monopoly into this market, with the typical detrimental effects on competition, innovation and all users of the software -- typically enterprises across all sectors of the economy -- that have to pay the monopoly price."
Greve said his group has represented Samba, the provider of a free software solution, in the EU investigation and court case. He said "our goal is to get the interoperability information on the languages used for communication between servers and clients" so Samba "and others can compete with Microsoft on the merits of their software instead of being locked out of the market by the abuse of the desktop monopoly."
New Broadband Index Released
The United States generally meets expectations in terms of high-speed Internet growth, according to an index released this month that considers the relationship between broadband subscriptions per capita and national economic and demographic attributes.
"According to our analysis, the United States is performing where one would expect, given the demographic and economic factors that are relevant to broadband demand and supply," Lawrence Spiwak, president of the Phoenix Center For Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies and co-author of the study, said in a statement.
The broadband performance index, released by the Phoenix Center, attempts to provide an alternative approach for comparing broadband adoption by countries. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's report this year listed the United States as 15th worldwide in broadband penetration, but that study has been criticized by some.
The Phoenix Center index shows that broadband adoption in the United States, South Korea and Japan is close to what their economic and demographic conditions would predict.
The report also found that "many relatively poor countries, like Turkey and Portugal, which actually rank behind the United States according to the OECD, are doing a better job of converting their national endowments into broadband penetration than many highly ranked countries." Likewise, countries like Denmark and Norway that OECD ranked higher than the United States are "underperforming the United States when one considers demographic and economic factors," the research states.
The report criticizes the OECD for ranking countries by residential and business broadband subscriptions per capita, which do not account for differences in average household and business size. The research also suggests that governments can improve broadband adoption through education and public policy efforts, such as low-income assistance programs for computer purchases and training centers.
Scott Wallsten, director of communications policy studies at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, and Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, recently engaged in a debate on the meaning of broadband statistics. They said an analysis that takes in a number of statistics can be helpful.
Wallsten said the Phoenix Center report is the right way to look at this issue "and if one really wants to compare performance across countries, this is the way to do it." Atkinson said the multivariate model used by the center can help determine whether policies aid performance.
Atkinson, however, said it is not clear that the index "is the right model." The inclusion or removal of one or more variables could result in different results, he said.
Atkinson noted that the authors' decision to include a density variable, or the number of households per square kilometer, "lowers the expectation of the United States since we have among the lowest population density. So it would mean we are doing better than we otherwise would be."
Even in the center's model, the United States still performs in the middle of the pack and could be doing better, Atkinson added.
EU Lawmakers Talk Tech In Washington
Technology products should follow open standards, an EU lawmaker said Tuesday.
Piia-Noora Kauppi, a member of the European Parliament from Finland, told Internet policy wonks gathered at the Internet Education Foundation in Washington that while closed systems make it easier to prevent crooks from gaining access to technology, "we have to get rid of the proprietary, monopolistic system."
She also said a proposal for "soft patents" is an interesting idea that should be considered. Kauppi said the idea behind a soft patent would be to give the inventor protection but require open access to the technology's interfaces.
Kauppi, along with British European Parliament member Bill Newton-Dunn, also addressed the long-discussed community patent proposal that would unify the divergent patent regimes among EU countries.
A community patent would work in all of the nations. The lawmakers said the biggest obstacle to the idea has not been related to information technology but rather to languages and translation issues. Newton said EU officials have yet to find an answer to the language problem.
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