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The good, the bad and the ugly media player

The decision of the UE commission number IP/04/382 of the 24th march of this year represents a milestone in UE's history of vision of technology and computer system evolution history. The commission is not new at decisions on informaticion and generally technological oriented matters, suffice to remember the decision that three years ago fined heavily Nintendo for abuse of position in the market of console videogaming. But surely never the knife had cut this near to the center of the real problem on the battlefield of the operative system for desktop computers and low server market. The decision is composed by a preamble with some comments from EU commissar Mario Monti (responsible for antitrust matters) and then composes itself of three precise fines:

-First a monetary one (the infamous 497,2 million Euro, rougly translating in 613 million dollar counter value), by ease the higher ever inflicted in the story of the commission.

-A second one forces Microsoft to reveal not later that 120 days accurate and complete informations on interfaces that consent to non Microsoft server working groups to get to the complete interoperability with PCs and server that works with Windows.

-Last but not least the commission sentenced Microsoft to offer a stripped version of its Windows OS without the windows media player in a time segment of 90 days from the sentence.

Useless to say MS appealed itself to the European court of justice in Louxembourg and things will run smoothly till the said court's decision. Decision that will take some time (even if I do not agree with the catastrophic prevision of 2009 made from Assistant Attorney General Hewitt Pate form Department of Justice). The decision is complex and prone to misunderstanding. Like each juridical text it has clear and unclear points, but in all its vision is revolutionary. I was a not surprised that the decision itself rised a whole host of comments, most of them were acute and interesting. In fact I was happily surprised that the majority of the people reacted with positive comments on the commission's decision, and the one that did not agree on the fines, agreed on the general principles.

I could not help but to notice a rising portions of wails and rants from the dark that described the work of the commission as a fascism, an attack to US or (I quote) "the last idea of justice from European crybabies". With the exclusion of this kind of rudeness, that, thanks God, belongs to a marginal minority of people, I was not surprised that a good portion of the surfer did not see what really the decision was about, seen the fact that being US citizens, they are not accustomed with the law system that rules EU. I contacted thus Eugenia Loli-Queru and asked if she could be that kind to give my humble opinion a little space on her web site and she gladly agreed, so here I am and I hope that I will not bore you too much. Let start.

Some premises are sometimes necessary...

This, sadly for the audience of OS news is NOT an entirely technical article, having to deal with law more than with technical issues. But fear not, because I happen to be as much as geeky as it is permitted to a jurist and law scholar. I will divide this article in three parts, a legal introduction, the analysis of the decision and finally the conclusions. Being those not easy matters, I expect some kind of feedback in the form of comments, that I will answer as appropriate on the comment section of the site. If you really do not want to read what I've written under this lines, please feel free to go directly to the section "Returning home" where everything has been recapped for your enjoyment. That said I think I will start.

The story so far

The decision of The UE commission starts for a plaint deposed by SUN microsystem in December 1998. Sun lamented that Microsoft refused to give information about the interfaces that were necessary to the company to create programs that could dialog with the omnipresent Windows operating system. The Commission started its enquiry, finding out that not only SUN had had those kind of problems. In fact they found out that this behavior was part of a more complex and generalized strategy. So, after 5 year and half of work and three communications to Microsoft (1) the commission decided that:

-Microsoft is in a position of near monopoly with it's huge customer number in the desktop market; near monopoly meaning that even if it has to fear the concurrence from some other smaller companies, its power is that big that it does not fear to lose its monopolistic power on the market itself.

-Microsoft has abused of its position of monopoly creating dialogue protocols between server and client and then refused to reveal how those protocols worked, creating a situation in which only time and retro engineering could permit to non Microsoft programs to work. Note well, I am speaking of the documentation on the protocols, not on the API coding, more information on this later.

-Microsoft bundled its media player (from now on WMP) into Windows, creating a dangerous situation in which, by sheer number of WMP existing, other competitors started in disadvantaged position in competing for the market of media resources and playback possibilities.

Now, before we continue, a bit of explanation is needed about the monopoly's view of the commission. View that guided this decision. The commission noted that Microsoft's situation is that of a near monopoly , meaning that even if MS did not act as a full monopolist (well it actually did, but let go for now), the sheer power of it's market position forced other competitors out and did not offer space for other competitors to enter the market.

How?

Easy enough, with that quantity of Desktop system installed it is easy to predict that the most part of people will use IE, outlook,WMP or other MS related products in their daily life, meaning that companies that produced software of any kind had to confront themselves with the "Microsoft way of doing things". There wasn't an express denial for customer to get other programs, but the commission argued that the choice was limited from the start, more on that later. This consideration drove the following action that was to concentrate on two points, the multimedia capabilities of Windows, identified in its framework, which WMP is only the tip of the iceberg, and its politic of denying the access to the protocols of dialogue between client and server that permits to applications to work in the Windows system.

The truth to be told, companies had this problem from a few years, and had started with patience and will to build a set of tools to outflank Microsoft's denial. Proof it is the Samba suit for dialogue with non Windows machine (tool set that each user of Linux knows well). But the problem that the commission foretold was that if Windows opened it's way in the low server market (thing that the Redmond company was doing) the monopoly would have quickly spread even in this growing section of the market. Thus the decision and here is how it works.

(1)A communication is a document, that indicates that an enquiry has started on you or your company. It is necessary that the act is known from the suspected who's under enquiry, because, in case it is proved in court that the communication wasn't received at all, the entire enquiry is useless and has to be started over again!

The decision

The decision articulates on three points, all of them with more implications as it can first catch the eye, let's see them together

1. "EU punishes MS, Page 1/4"
2. "EU punishes MS, Page 2/4"
3. "EU punishes MS, Page 3/4"
4. "EU punishes MS, Page 4/4"