The European Commission slapped Microsoft with a fine of EUR 561 million for breaching a 2009 settlement over the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. Under this agreement, the company promised to display a “browser choice” screen on Windows installs in Europe, inviting users to choose other browsers in addition to the company’s own program.

Neelie Kroes favours open standards, recognition of industry standards bodies and open source in her role as European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda

Thanks to the European Commission's antitrust like activities, European citizens will soon be presented with a ballot choice between twelve browsers when first using a newly purchased computer preloaded with the Microsoft Windows operating system. But is this really progress?

While I believe that browser diversification is a good thing, I feel that approached used here is a flawed one, and will make Windows user more vulnerable to malware.

The European Commission is either unwilling or unable to understand how Microsoft uses software patents against Free software, even in Europe where such patents are illegal

The European Commission - Directorate for Competition has officially dropped its antitrust charges against Microsoft, after Microsoft agreed to provide users of its Windows operating system a choice of web browsers. Under the new deal, Microsoft will avoid future E.C. fines and, from March, consumers will have a choice of up to twelve other web browsers.

The Microsoft-stuffed European Commission is caving in to Microsoft and the threat of software patents in Europe grows

Another voice heard on the European Commission's objection to Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems. This time, Eben Moglen has weighed in with an analysis of the objections related to the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2). Moglen disagrees with the commission, and says that the GPLv2 is sufficient to protect the MySQL community apart from Oracle.