They are only assisting to the point of giving fair, assessable and informed
choice.

The objective of the corporate 100m hurdles is not for the best company to
win, but for several companies to compete against each other as best they
can so that no one can afford to slacken the pace.
If one competitor is running the 100m hurdles in the rally car of universal
software distribution, then it is quite right that the competition should be
maintained by removing that advantage by any means necessary.

The coice is there for customers already, and with Explorer no longer be part of Windows, the comfort-argument that people would stay with explorer for reasons of laziness, does not work anymore.

No need why one company should actively assist the other company at its own cost. That is not what market competition is about. microsoft offers Explorer as a separate download. Mozilla offers firebird as a separate download. and so on. Issue solved. No need for the state to overgovern things over nothing.

I see you are determined to push this up to the realms of absurdity again. So I leave here.

That kind of thinking is the fastest road to monopoly and oligopoly you can take besides simply nationalizing an industry.

While it sounds rational enough on the surface, the reality is that instead of barring companies from the power to create a monopoly, you just opened the door for them. Business' single favorite method of creating a monopoly is to use the power of the state to do it.
In the most common cases, businesses help legislatures to establish strict sets of regulatory, licensure, and legal standards for their own industry, shutting out a good deal of would-be entrepeneurs who cannot compete for lack of capital. Even when these entrepeneurs secure enough investors to get started, the state punishes them heavily by exacerbating their overhead costs through taxation.
Is it any wonder so many new companies fail so quickly? Of course, big business with a place secured by the state is always there to pick up the pieces afterwards if there is anything of value.

Another common usage of the state is for subsidization and penalization of the competition. Especially international competition. Who is always at the forefront of efforts to 'protect' national interests and jobs? All they really want to do is gain an unfair advantage over competitors. The same company that lobbies heavily to protect jobs through subsidization or tariffs will gladly cut or export ten thousand jobs the next year if that is deemed necessary to maintain healthy profitability.

Of course, there are thousands of other ways that business takes advantage of the state at the expense of the consumer and the taxpayer every year, not just these, but the point is that once you give government anything other than very strictly limited power over business in any capacity, you give business power over the state, especially in a democractic government and doubly so in multinational legislatures. The desire to guide the actions of the free market is a pandora's box that is not easily shut once it has been opened.
It is best to limit the state's power over business to the judicial realm, punishing fraud, theft, breach of contract, false advertising, harmful products, workplace abuses, and the like (only after they have been committed). While that still leaves a crack for business to exploit, it is a very small one. The threshold that must not be crossed is proactive government interference in the market.

In this particular case, Microsoft's most likely response will be to simply make their OS more expensive for consumers in the short term. In the long term, I have no idea what machinations they may put in place, but I assure you that they will totally sidestep the intent of this legislation.
Like bureacrats and politicians, the sole reason for my professional exsistence is not to evaluate potential market strategies for Microsoft.
However, the best thing to do imo, is to simply let Microsoft's natural monopoly run its' course, and give it no cause to intervene in state affairs. If people begin crying out for an alternative where none is to be found due to lack of competition, the state can always fall back on punitive trust-busting measures.

Perhaps you still see things differently, but I invite you to consider the wisdom of letting an entity that is almost universally detested for being incompetent, slow, corrupt, and inefficient, match wits with the best and brightest that private industry has to offer. I can assure you that business will beat the state every time and establish a shadow (and sometimes, overt) plutocracy, unless the state steps in and runs business entirely, which is tantamount to national fiscal suicide.

That's more than a bit of an overstatement, don't you think?

Not particularly. The U.S. Federal Reserve is a sterling example. Although it was abolished (or rather, did not have its' charter renewed) by President Andrew Jackson's administration in the 1820's, it resurfaced in the early 20th century and is now the determining factor in Global Economic policy. Despite what it may sound like, and despite the fact that the Federal Reserve does have a state-appointed board of trustees (sort of), it is still very much a private entity.
Other examples include the rail Baronies of the late 19th century, which experienced their heydey after the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in the late 1880's. Despite the fact that the rail Baronies were 'broken up' and consumers were 'protected' by the activities of the ICC( which became the surface transportation board in the 90's under Clinton, and a Republican Congress, with even more power), it did nothing to change the fact that within 50 years, the U.S. rail industry was reduced to only 5 Class-1 railroads(down from almost a dozen), and within 100 years to only 3, the two largest of which are practically the same company, so cemented are the policies by which they conduct their trade.
To this day the major rail companies routinely deliver goods late and at inflated prices because they are so protected. There only competition is the horribly inefficient trucking industry, which has become non competitive due to rising fuel prices, which have been exacerbated by (guess what!?) higher fuel taxes, which the freight rail industry lobbied for in the guise of promoting public transportation, which they provide 0% of.

There are many, many, more examples here in the U.S that I can name off the top of my head; the aluminum industry, the agricultural industry, the steel industry, the lumber industry, the automotive industry, etc. etc. ad nauseum. I'm not particularly familiar with European state intitiatives but judging by what I have seen of the budget outlays(not to mention the insane taxes you pay and the insane prices for goods, and the lower standard of living) for Germany and the U.K. alone, I suspect that I'd have no trouble at all locating a wealth of plutocratic state-industrial combines controlling many sectors of E.U. industry.

So again, I do not think it is an overstatement at all, especially not in the context of Europe, a continent which has largely been fiscally re-invented since the end of the Second World War. It took the U.S. over a century, to really get started on the path to fiscal liberalism and plutocracy, and still another half-century before it really began to manifest itself. Europe launched into the fallacy of "Social Democractic" economics after barely a decade, less in some cases, and if GDP per Capita and PPP per capita are any kind of indicators, is hell-bent on becoming a plutocracy with a vast wealth gap and a massvie international defecit as soon as possible.

I think that the U.K., and the rest of the E.U. nations have placed far too much faith in the judgement of their elected representatives, especially those within the E.U. legislature. Only time will tell, but if history has anything to say about it, plutocracy it will be.

This is a non issue really. First and foremost 99% of windows pc are sold with an oem license and guess what, its the OEM that will install a browser on the system before selling it to the consumer. And you want to guess WHICH browser they will choose ? Of course IE. As for the 1% of consumers that buy a retail license and install the operating system themselves, well I guess they are tech savy enough to have a copy of firefox or another browser on some usb pen, usb drive or floppy disc. Non issue at 100%.
The real problem, is that by unboundling IE from windows and putting the choice on the OEM, for the consumer there is really no choice at all.
Its like Henry Ford once said : "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black".
The EU comission has to enforce that browser choice be made available from within the operating system itself. Its the customer that has to choose which browser to use upon installation, and not the OEM deciding for him/her because we all know what they will choose. Microsoft had to comply with the EU comission decision, instead they took matters into their own hands to make a go-around the EU. I hope the EU fines them to death. Micorosoft is a company that deserves no respect, its like a bully defying continously the law.
There will be a time, when they step one step too far.

Why would whoever is selling the OEM always choose IE, given the choice?

There have been lots of times MS went a step too far. I can still see Gates rockin back and forth in that courtroom chair. I actually felt sorry for him when I saw that, such a sad sight...

http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny-2...utistic-p1.php
Because that's what people are familiar with. It's just the most obvious choice.

Because having IE installed means no compatibility problems with the OS, the programs and of course web sites. Some services such as STEAM require IE.
And its not the only one. So you see that from a customer oriented point of view the OEM really has no choice as to what browser install.
And thats precisely the reason that Microsoft shifted the choice on the OEM, ignoring the EU complaints. Pretty devilish is you ask me, but the EU will come even harder on Microsoft.

Okay, but then it is still a free choice by the consumer if they chose to download IE instead of Firefox or Chrome or whatever.

If Firefox or Chrome want their's to be downloade, they have to make them more attractive. It is not microft's moral obligation to do their work for them, it just needs to accept the obligation to give them the needed infomation so that Mozilla and Google can make their browers working in a Microsoft Windows environment. It is the other competitor's job to make their products attractive enough so that they are compatible. And if they are not attractive for a wide audience, the EU should not force them down people's throat nevertheless by demanding Microsoft to distribute the rivalling products by Mozilla and Google.

They are competing - not cooperating. The EU does not seem to know the difference here.

The problem is that even if they are more attractive, IE still has an advantage.

On the contrary!
The EU is ensuring that they are competing; that the best product wins,
not just the product that is shipped out with other software.

Heck, I don't understand your problem. Microsoft has agreed not to bundle Explorer with Windows anymore. Have you even realised that?

The psychological advantage that people use Explorer for reasons of laziness and comfort, is gone (and for all Firebird and Opera and Chrome users it has been a questionable argument anyway, since longer time). All three products now line up at the starting line, at equal terms. People see them, weigh them, make their choice, download for free the one they want, and install it.

What else do you want...?

If people still prefer Explorer over the others, than this must not be your or the EU's concern. I would, for example, prefer Explorer nevertheless. and I do not see any problem at all to download it and install it. I do download a lot of additonal programs of my choice when installing, and I download updates several times a week.

I do not expect or demand Microsoft to actively distribute the competing products of their rivals. It violates common economic sense to demand that. equality of chances is what it is about - and this has been acchieved. Now it is up to Chrome and Mozilla to use their chances. They are free to fail, too. And if they fail, it is not the EU's job to compensate for that.

You have lost me!
That is what I want....I was under the impression you where against that.

No its not. You don't understand it do you.
The situation Microsoft has created with this decision doesn't change a iota as far as the consumer is regarded. It has been the same situation for the last decade, pretty much the reason Microsoft was first investigated by the EU.
The real game changer (and the reason Microsoft doesn't want to comply) is to have a screen that offers the consumer a choice as to what browser to install before the installation of the OS is complete.

You simply don't understand the reason Microsoft was first investigated and found guilty. If Microsoft had never bundled at 0 cost IE with Windows and AT THE SAME TIME bullied OEMs to not install third party browsers there wouldn't be a problem. The most viable browser would have survived. As we all know thats not what happened and as a result we have a heavily crippled web that just in the last 2-3 years has started slowly very slowly to heal itself from Microsoft proprietary crap. This in and of itself doesn't not excuse the original actions made by Microsoft 10 years ago.

You hit the head on the nail. You beat me to this post.

Now a lot of lawmakers are going to get beat up because of this simple oversight. Microsoft will not be the loser in all this, the European people will.

You guys are just so smart over there! :D Opinionated to the point where you become useless.

-S