A European Commission antitrust ruling against Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer into the Windows OS may be good for consumers, but it's a nightmare for independent software developers, said Jonathan Zuck, president of the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) Monday.

Zuck was planning to make his argument in person next week at an antitrust hearing, but Microsoft cancelled the hearing because key European Commission officials involved in the case wouldn't be able to attend. The ACT is one of several trade groups that have been accepted as interested third parties in the European antitrust case against Microsoft

Ah, our old friends ACT are speaking up to protect Microsoft's right to misuse its Windows monopoly to prevent their non-OS applications from being challenged by competing applications software products. This time, they are crying because their members build their software to be dependent on the existence of a specific browser--or more accurately, the embeddable ActiveX control subset--instead of designing their applications to work with whatever browser is installed and set as default.

Someone seems to have forgotten that competition law (or antitrust law, as we know it on this side of the Atlantic) does not make allowances because you built your business upon the availability of one particular company's products. There is not any--nor should there be--special dispensation because you built your company on the leftovers that a monopoly chooses to leave on the table.

If ACT was really interested in competitive technology, they'd be interested in encouraging more competition in technology industries. Rather than champion a look-the-other-way attitude toward abuse of a monopoly, they'd be calling for the destruction of barriers to competition, such as bundling IE into Windows in order to prevent any other company from gaining the lead in browser market share. Sadly, ACT seems to be nothing more than a front-group, created to espouse the Microsoft position on any issue, while claiming to represent smaller industry participants.

I'm not so sure of the proposed remedy. I think I'd rather see Windows ship without a built-in Web browser. The first time an Internet connection is detected, a browser download application should ask the user to select from one or more of the top five browsers and to select which one should be the default. Then the application should download and install the browser(s) selected and set the user's chosen browser as the default. (This solution was proposed by NoTW on another site, but is a good idea.)

As for ISVs, they should not build their solutions upon the availability of Internet Explorer nor its embedded subset. Instead, build solutions that work with any major browser by following the W3C and WHATWG standards. (FYI, Mozilla used to offer an embeddable ActiveX control that wrapped their Gecko browser engine and enabled it to be a drop-in replacement for the IE-based ActiveX control. I am not sure whether it is still available, but if it is, vendors could bundle it with their products.)

Either way, none of IE should be included by default in Windows. Neither should it default to carrying any other browser.

Tags: competition, antitrust

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