Microsoft Hands Over Docs To EU

hankwang writes "Reuters reports that Microsoft has handed over technical documents to the EU in order to enable the competition to make interoperable software. So far, the EU has imposed fines of €497 M and €280 M onto Microsoft for abuse of its monopoly. The deadline for this documentation was today. According to Microsoft, the documentation is over 8500 pages."

where?

[convolvatron]

does anyone know where to actually get the specs?

How do you get this documentation

[Timesprout]

Is it to be made publically available or do you have to request it from the commission?

The question still remains...

[bogaboga]

The question still remains...Are these documents up to date? Or if they are at the time they were handed over, will they remain up to date in a perpetual manner? Microsoft could submit "up to date" documents and later change interoperability metrics of what these docs represent. They have done something similar before.

Re:8500 pages

[Lex-Man82]

I wonder if its possible to fund the whole of the EU on fines from large corporations?

Re:Another obvious question

[Lex-Man82]

Will the documents be usable outside the EU? The EU may allow Mac and Linux developers documentation, but that documentation may have the status of trade secret in the US.

I presume the EU will just fine Microsoft more for stifling competition if they tried to pull a stunt like that.

Re:Nobody To Cheer For

[jbertling1960]

Given Microsoft's history of denial, avoidance, and outright dishonesty, stating "Microsoft said it was going to comply, then delivered the required documentation. End of story." strikes me as a little naive.

I believe that before this story ends we will have to judge the quality and accuracy of the documentation as well as Microsoft's willingness to keep it up to date.

Re:Nobody To Cheer For

[jandersen]

What it means is that your illusion of the free market is broken, simply. If you start out with a market with no restrictions at all, you will most likely get a few companies that are immensely powerful. These companies will use their power to keep others out, thus creating a non-free market.

Morale: The free market is at best an unstable and short-lived artifact. Besides, I don't think anybody actually want a *free* market - what most want is a *fair* marketplace; one where everybody has equal opportunities, so that if you are clever and hardworking, you can achieve financial success. But this requires some sort of regulation - ie. government intervention in most cases. Legislation is, after all, a form of government intervention.

Apart from that, the EU Commission is not a government of a country - the EU is not a state or nation in any sense. It is 'a supranational and intergovernmental union of 25 independent, democratic member states' - to quote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU [wikipedia.org]

Re:How to get them

[KokorHekkus]

The EU is going to decide three things: whether the documents satisfy their requirements...

And for those who wonder if EU is competent to judge wether the documents are appropriate it should be pointed out that the expert that will look at the documents was picked from a shortlist that Microsoft themselves submitted.

Re:How to get them

[Daddy_was_a_donkey]

That's been one of the funniest things about the whole dispute; Microsoft list, EU pick, expert said Microsoft's docs where shite, Microsoft "attack Mr. Barrett's competence and accuse him of colluding with its rivals". Marvelous
Previous slashdot article [slashdot.org]

8500 pages

[nosq]

Is 8500 pages really that much? I remember that in July, when MS protested against the fines, they said that 300 employees had been working for over a year with writing the documentation. This makes 8500/(300*12)=2.4 pages per employee and month, which means that I'd really like to have that job..

Let me try to explain

[Moraelin]

First of all, noone got taken to court for just being big. Maybe you don't make that confusion, but a lot of (other) people seem to think that anti-trust somehow means "punished for being big" or "punished for being successful." That's not the case. Coca-Cola is still perfectly on the safe side of the law, for example. And noone orders McDonald to give the recipe to its secret sauce.

The thing sorta goes like this:

1. It must be proven that you've actually abused your might in a non-lawful way, and there was an actual harm to the consumers. (Harm to competing companies actually doesn't matter.)

If you will, it's like taking the school bully to court. He's not tried or punished for being big, he's tried for punching people in the face. There's a not-so-subtle difference there.

2. It must be proven that you were in a monopoly position, in which it was artifficially unfeasible for someone else to undo the harm you did. I.e., that in that situation, the free market just didn't work.

Basically that's the reality check to your Ayn Rand-inspired musings. If it can be proven that the free market can neutralize the harm on its own, then the company _doesn't_ get the legal equivalent of a kick in the nuts.

E.g., if two pharmacies aggree to fix prices on vitamins, it's _not_ an anti-trust case. The market can work around such minor speedbumps. People will just go buy their vitamins at the super-market, or go to the other pharmacy down the road. Or maybe someone will open their own pharmacy across the road. But when (as has at least once happened) the major pharma companies fix prices, that may well be an anti-trust case.

Look... noone is against the notion of a free market. We quite like it in Europe too. We don't go asking companies for their secrets just for the heck of it, but only when there's no other recourse left to force an aberrant situation back to being a free market.

The free market is actually a lot less robust on its own than some libertarians seem to assume. The whole notion and theory is centred around some assumptions: there are many identical/interchangeable products, the buyers are perfectly informed, it's trivial for a new competitor to enter that market, etc. _That_ situation can balance itself all right. But the whole mechanism falls apart when those pre-conditions aren't true any more. There are some actions and some kinds of damage that it can't work around, and there are people who have the financial interest to try to do just that: destroy that ideal free market.

And that's the other thing: the assumption that it's in everyone's interest to play nice, is false. It's in society's interest that they play nice, but for the individual competitors it's most often the exact opposite: you make more money if you can get in a situation where you don't have to play nice.

E.g., as a simple example, if there are two smiths in the same medieval town, sure, it's in everyone else's interest that they start acting like in a free market and undercut each other's prices. But those two smiths can make more money if, say, they make a secret aggreement to fix prices. Then they're the only supplier in town and can fleece everyone else with impunity. Or maybe one of them will decide that instead of even that, he'll hire a couple of mercenaries to beat the other up. Or whatever.

So to make a long story short: expecting the free market to always just work on its own, is a bit like expecting a city to work without a police station. Sooner or later someone will have the means and the incentive to ruin all that for everyone else.

Re:I'm Very Highly Skeptical In The Ultra Extreme

[Anonymous Coward]

I can tell you, as an MS employee who wrote some of this documentation, that the people in my group took the job very seriously and tried hard to write RFC-quality documentation.

In many cases, the developer who wrote the code wrote the first draft of the docs, and passed it off to technical writers to be edited and reviewed.

But thank you for your vote of confidence :)