I was with Demon back when they were good. Unfortunately, I was also with them as they became flat-out the worst ISP you could hope for in the UK - if you can get them, use bethere instead. Here are some of the things I was subjected to when I was with Demon:

1) Exclusively foreign call centre tech support and customer services
2) Customer services and tech support representatives say they will call you back, but won't
3) Tech support will claim they are escalating your call, but disconnect you
4) Reps will say they have made a note of your conversation, but if you call back, no records will be found. Also, no person by that name will be known to the company, and they will tell you that you made a mistake.
5) Tech support are utterly clueless, and refuse to support routers in any way, shape or form.
6) You will be billed by the company after you leave as a customer.
7) The company will claim they will phone you back with your MAC code to migrate providers, claiming it takes 24 hours, but they never do. Eventually, if you persist, they will give it to you immediately on the phone.
8) Representatives will say anything to keep you with the company, telling you they have upgraded you to a zero usage cap service (which in actuality has just 10gb more leeway per month).
9) Representatives will lie about your monthly usage. I have no wireless and am the sole provider, but somehow in a month where I was away for two and a half weeks, and counted my own usage at under 10gb, I was supposed to have downloaded over 50gb, leaving me with a 128kbit service from 7am to midnight.
10) The usage cap (that they lie about) is on a rolling 30 day period, so when they claim you have used 40gb in one day, your service will be crippled for the next 30 days until that one day slips off your account.
11) Representatives are unable to change, reset or even give you a breakdown of your usage. Representatives will not even tell you exactly how much you have used.
12) The service is overpriced and the lines are vastly oversubscribed.

So, in conclusion, avoid them at all costs. In my opinion they are liars and cheats, and the company deserves to go bankrupt.

Market share. You have to go over a certain threshold (15% in vertical agreements) of market share to even be considered for breach of Article 81, and Article 82 requires abuse of a dominant position.

I'm sorry, but this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what EC competition law is designed to do.

There's 3 aspects to EC competiton law (one of which is to do with mergers and we'll skip it). They're contained in articles 81-83 of the EC treaty. The first article, 81, (full text) deals with concerted practices and agreements between companies that hinder, or POTENTIALLY hinder, trade between member states. As you can see by my emphasis, it's not the point that an agreement affects trade, or that it affects trade in a minor way, or even that it affects trade in only a small area (since one case held that only affecting trade in one town was enough, since it had a large enough trade volume). Thus the fact it's a "relic from the 90s" is completely irrelevant. EC competition law is about potential infringements as much as it is about actual effects of those infringements.

Article 82 (full text) which Microsoft has also been in breach of is simply to do with abuse of a dominant position. Microsoft is dominant. "*EVERY* OS" may well come bundled with a browser, but it's Microsoft with the large market share. Under Article 81 you are permitted to have an infringing agreement if you can show your combined market share (between the conspiring parties) is below a certain level. Under Article 82, you can't have an action brought against you unless you are dominant. You talk about putting Microsoft at a "serious disadvantage" with Apple and Linux - but they are already far and away dominant. Penalising Microsoft would create a more open market with more operating systems having a larger market share, at the expense of Microsoft's own (in theory).

Lastly, if you'd read the article, you'd see that they're punishing Microsoft for 10 years of "bad behaviour." Rather than talking about the EC being "spiteful" and "not helping the consumer" (because an open market is sooooooooo bad for consumers), you should consider that when a company intends to trade within an economic zone it has to comply with certain rules. These rules have been applied to European companies time and time again - why should Microsoft get a free ride by virtue of being American?

And for the record, I'm fine with Microsoft (I don't particularly see why you'd distinguish them from other proprietary/closed source vendors), but I'm more in favour of the EC's positive steps to maintaining a free market than I am in favour of any one company.

What's even more worrying is that the judgement of the Court of Appeal does not EVEN ONCE mention complexity as an issue. Further, it can't be 'appealed' to the European Court of Justice, only a point of law can be queried there. Also, this case already brings the UK closer in line with the EU regarding software patents, and it's not easy to appeal to the House of Lords - they only hear about 90 cases per year and generally only on areas of law that are important to the public. This case is more of an argument about facts than an argument on a point of law.

The original High Court decision is here and the Court of Appeal decision is here.

Basically, Symbian was denied their patent, which revolves around faster accessing of DLLs (more details of which you can find in my first link). The patent was denied because the patent officer in question argued that what they were patenting was nothing more than a different way to call a DLL's functions and not anything that alters the way the computer's resources are managed. The High Court decided that she (the patent officer) had understated the technical merit and effect of the patent.

The Comptroller General of Patents then appealed against the decision to grant the previous appeal, bringing us up to the case in the Court of Appeal. The general argument revolves around whether or not what Symbian have patented is merely a computer program or whether it has some additional effect - if it were just a computer program, it would not be patentable. The Court of Appeal more or less restates the edecision of the High Court, adding that the patent is not 'just' a computer program, because it has the 'knock-on effect of the computer working better'.

Whilst everyone here will have their own view on software patents (largely in consensus here, I imagine), this is a poor summary - although I think that is largely due to the very poor write-up by the Times, which is trying to write in a way that is understandable to regular readers rather than those with a technical background. As stated, patents aren't granted for any old program, but the courts considered this to be more of a software process which improves the way a system runs, rather than a simple program that is executed and terminates. Just how correct they are in this decision is a different matter, but the Court of Appeal decision is not very long at all, for those who are interested.

Anyway, this case wouldn't have received any news coverage even outside the financial crisis, since it's far beyond the understanding of the average person in this country - and doesn't have anything to do with a potential imminent apocalypse.