ECIS members include Adobe Systems, Corel, IBM, Nokia, Opera, Oracle, RealNetworks, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. It was Norwegian browser maker Opera that first filed a complaint with the European Union in December 2007, accusing Microsoft of violating EU antitrust law by bundling IE with Windows. And the company isn't satisfied yet. "Opera is a member of ECIS, which supported the complaint to the European Commission because it promoted the ECIS core values of competition, interoperability and consumer choice," reads a statement in an ECIS press release today. "Microsoft agreed to change its business practices in the face of formal charges from the Commission. Consumers deserve the same unbiased browser choice on all the world's more than 1 billion personal computers." Of course, Opera doesn't rule the ECIS alone, but given that the lobbying group is mainly composed of Microsoft rivals, we doubt any of them would object to Opera's proposition.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has dismissed the ECIS' call to arms. "The issues in the Internet Explorer case have already been the subject of extensive legal action in several other countries around the world, including the United States, which have each developed their own legal solutions which are different than the browser choice screen pursued by the European Commission after years of litigation," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars.
Microsoft is not obligated to take the ballot screen outside the boundaries of the EU, but the push from ECIS could spur other consumer groups, competition agencies, and antitrust regulators to band together against the software giant. It worked in Europe, but will it work in the rest of the world?
Source: Arstechnica.com
