A little perspective for EU Antitrust regulators

As you may or may not have heard, Microsoft is due in European court in June to defend itself for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. Opera started the suit, claiming that IE “harmed the web” and demanded that IE be unbundled. Since then Google and Mozilla have jumped on the gravy train, and who can blame them?

But it’s pure bullshit. An operating system has to come with a browser. I don’t think anybody is seriously suggesting that MS should not bundle a browser with Windows (although that would be a great “fuck you” in its own right). So what are we really saying here? They should bundle a competitors’ product?

Nevermind that Microsoft has a legitimate case about google becoming a de-facto search monopoly if virtually any other browser is bundled (Firefox, Opera, and Chrome all use Google as the default search engine). What on Earth makes the EU think they can force Microsoft to bundle a competitors’ product?

Honestly, I think Microsoft should agree, as long as Google is willing to make some concessions on their end:

I’ve created a couple analogies to illustrate how ridiculous this notion is: