Mozilla gets involved in Microsoft’s antitrust problems

Open source champion and industry darling Mozilla Corporation has joined the European Commission’s demand that Microsoft remove Internet Explorer (IE) from Windows. Citing decades-old abuses that have since been corrected, Mozilla argues that Microsoft’s attempts to harm competition in the web browser market are having ongoing effects. The company will now file arguments in the EU antitrust case against the software giant.

“The damage Microsoft has done to competition, innovation, and the sheer pace of web development has been both egregious and ongoing,” Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker wrote in a blog post this week. “Microsoft’s business practices have fundamentally reduced (indeed, nearly eliminated) competition, choice, and innovation in people’s access to the Internet.”

That’s quite a statement coming from a company that produces a product that has seen a huge increase in usage share over the last year compared to a given Microsoft product. Mozilla Firefox now controls 21 percent of the browser market, down from 18 percent in May 2008. Meanwhile, Microsoft Internet Explorer has fallen from 74 percent of the market to 68 percent over the same period.

However, digging a little deeper into Baker’s post, it becomes quite clear that she – like Opera, the EU, and virtually everyone else currently aligned against Microsoft, cares more about the past than the present. Discusses Microsoft’s development of IE in the mid-1990s, as well as its “illegal activities” in promoting the browser at the time and its cessation of browser development once competition dried up.

Rightly. All these things happened. Since then, however, the free Firefox browser has steadily eroded IE’s share of usage, and this has happened despite Microsoft’s renewed interest in IE. Mozilla’s success shows exactly why browser complaints against Microsoft are pure fiction: competition in the browser market has increased in recent years, and new browser makers such as Apple and Google have emerged.

“I believe it is worth finding an effective and quick remedy,” he adds. “Microsoft’s actions hinder innovation and choice. If the EC can identify an effective remedy that also serves to improve competition, innovation and choice, I would be very welcome.”