Tom,

Absolutely. I did not intend to talk past you, so if I did I apologize too. Thank you for saying this, I appreciate your intent to clarify and I hope I can do the same.


To clarify and sum up as much as I can my posts and view, all I mean is that I've found myself in disagreement with the EU commission few times, both on principle and in practice, a the very core of their rulings.
Historically, I've found myself usually and mostly in agreement with the US DOJ.

Hence, my joking statement that the EU has no clue or something along those lines. That's all.


For example, while in the IE case I disagree IE itself harmed competition and so consumers (Please notice this was in fact not a case in the US, see my statement above), I am not entering now this discussion and for the sake of the argument I want to assume it in fact did, as the EU Commission claimed. It is my opinion that:

1. Preventing a company from enriching its products with more functionality and features and parts, or deciding to establish to what extent it can, in principle, generates a far greater damage to consumers, and it is not the way to address the issue.

2. Eradicating a (core) part of a product from it, was in different ways just as wrong in principle as it was silly in practice. (IE engine could not be removed). EU Commission approach to this was quite superficial and technically naive.

3. It honestly seems quite evident and factual to me that the ballot screen brought no benefit in competition at all. It brought just more clicks and confusion during installation. Users who knew nothing about browsers did not benefit from it (in ways I can describe if you want, as my personal direct experience), while users who knew about browsers did not need the thing to choose what they liked.
Instead, IE lost market share because of sound, honest competition. Other products were better in ways that many users valued.
Now, if MS was not disclosing information (APIs and such) to competition preventing them to create compelling browsers, as it did in other occasions for other kind of software, that would be a different story. But, this was not the case. And I won't enter into the issues of web standards and deviation from them. That's not my point. My point is that this was a wrong solution that brought no real tangible benefit, and real and tangible annoyance.


With Google and search in particular, I too can't see how Google market share per se is harming competition and consumers. Bing is finding nice and smart ways to compete, trying to find its ways by being embedded in other services, for example. If and when it will be perceptibly better, users will switch to it - even though their machines came pre-configured to use google.com as a home page.
So, while I disagreed with the DOJ in the first place, I am happy they decided not to pursue Google any further. The EU commission instead is not happy yet. I can't but ask myself if they should not put their resources somewhere more useful, given what they've done in the past.

Admittedly, EU Commission more heavy handed approach at interfering into product and service design is in line with a general, historically consistent, tendency of the EU Governments to attempt to shape the market the way they (and not necessarily citizens) see fit. They historically have been really (really!) bad at that and, as a European, I may be biased against and suspicious of them.