Fans of irony rejoice: Microsoft wants Google investigated for anti-competitive behaviour . Had the news come out a day later we'd have chortled heartily, but of course this is no April Fool. There are two questions here. One, why is an American firm asking European regulators to investigate another American firm? And two, does Microsoft have a case here? The first one's easy. As Microsoft knows all too well, European regulators tend to take a tougher line than US ones: for example it was EU, not US, regulators who forced Microsoft to offer a ballot screen of different Windows browsers, and it was EU, not US, regulators who fined Microsoft huge amounts of cash and ordered it to play nice with other networking software. The second one depends on whether Microsoft's telling the truth. If it is, then Google's behaving in much the same way Microsoft behaved before the EU got involved. Microsoft isn't just saying that Google is too big in search, although in Europe it is, its near-100% market share meaning that when Europeans search, they Google
Excerpt from: