The EU, The Antitrust Capital Of The World

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published

Winter_2IBM (IBM) has become a target of antitrust regulators in the European Union. Several media sources say that a US company called T3 Technologies claims that IBM refused to offer its software on IBM hardware.

At almost the same moment, the antitrust watchdogs in Europe are after Microsoft (MSFT) again. The officials have an old concern, which is that Redmond gets market share for its Internet Explorer web browser by packaging it with other Microsoft software. If IE was not bleeding market share to competing products, that charge might make sense.

It is odd that similar charges and investigations are not popping up in the US, China, India, or any other large country or region in the world.

What appears to be the case is that the EU is more zealous in its tracking down of antitrust targets, but that may put it out of sync with the practices everywhere else. Protectionism? Maybe. More likely it is bureaucrats who have nothing better to do.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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