● 09.20.11

●● New Antitrust Investigation Into Illegal Microsoft Bundling, But Antitrust Action Over Patent Extortion Overlooked

Posted in Antitrust, Microsoft, Patents, Search at 1:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Extortion company escapes untouched

Summary: Microsoft racketeering comes to Casio and the regulators are catching up with Microsoft’s older abuses of the market, which rely on elimination of choice rather than outright extortion of the competitors that won (with Linux)

Microsoft is bleeding billions in areas that are not reported or under-reported (the company has billions in debt to repay). According to this timely new article, the ‘hidden’ part keeps getting uglier, with Bing now losing at the pace of $4,000,000,000 per year. Surely Microsoft will need to come up with a new business model and the mafia-like business model is what Microsoft chose when it signed a deal with Novell, which is why we cannot ignore Microsoft. It uses patent trolls to attack Linux (an antitrust violation) and builds anti-Linux legal instruments/cartels (which are an antitrust violation too).

According to this one Microsoft booster, the list of Linux companies Microsoft is extorting has just increased somewhat. “On September 20,” writes the booster, “Microsoft officials said that Microsoft and Casio Computer Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of Casio Worldwide, had entered into a “a broad, multiyear patent cross-licensing agreement that, among other things, will provide Casio’s customers with patent coverage for their use of Linux in certain Casio devices.””

It is possibly only FAT but Microsoft states that it is “Linux” just to scare people. That’s based on what we recently learned from OIN. This whole thing is secret because if details were known, it would be easier to nail Microsoft for antitrust violations (see the Barnes & Nobel case). According to another one of today’s ZDNet blog pieces (masquerading as news), “Spain begins antitrust investigation into Microsoft,” but as we learned from Cablegate, US politicians are likely to help Microsoft dodge this. To quote the nature of this investigation:

Spain’s competition commission said on Tuesday it has opened an anti-trust investigation into Microsoft’s Spanish and Irish subsidiaries, on grounds that the company “blocked the sale by third parties” of PC software licences.Though details at this stage are sketchy, it is thought that the watchdog believes that collected information could indicate a possible violation of Spanish competition regulations.The investigation and ruling “must be completed within 18 months“, the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch reports.

How about they start going after Microsoft for patent extortion? There are clearly laws relating to racketeering [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] and it’s a more urgent matter. █

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