ECIS sends open letter to the European Commission regarding the Europe 2020 communication. The open letter is available here.
The European Commission recognised ECIS as an interested third party in support of the Commission’s preliminary findings that Microsoft is violating EU antitrust law by tying its Internet Explorer (IE) web browser to its dominant Windows operating system present on over 90% of all personal computers. A statement made on behalf of ECIS is available here.
ECIS member Opera has recently released a video explaining the importance of choice of web browsers and why Microsoft has an artificial competitive advantage over other browsers like Opera and Firefox. For more information click here.
Microsoft’s conduct over the last two decades has demonstrated Microsoft’s willingness and ability to engage in unlawful conduct to protect and extend its core monopolies. This conduct has caused real harm to consumers, who continue to pay high prices and use lower quality products than would have prevailed in a competitive market. This paper aims to help developers, consumer groups, and government authorities better to understand Microsoft’s history of anticompetitive conduct and to recognise its current and future misconduct at an early stage in order to intervene to prevent Microsoft from using tactics other than competition on the merits. For more information click here.
The European Committee for Interoperable Systems was founded in Brussels in 1989. It played an important role in securing provisions benefitting interoperability provisions in the 1991 Software Copyright Directive, and numerous intellectual property initiatives since at European and international level. ECIS Chairman Simon Awde was already present in the early days of ECIS representing what was then Amdahl (since acquired by Fujitsu). He notes: “Much has changed since the founding of ECIS, except what ECIS stands for.”