Microsoft Offers Browser Deal to EU Regulators

July 27, 2009

Microsoft said on said Friday it will offer European consumers a choice of Web browsers with Windows in an effort to settle an antitrust probe by the European Union.

The software giant has been accused of using its dominance to unfairly push its own browser, Internet Explorer, on consumers by tying it to Windows. The European Commission opened an investigation in January, after Swedish browser rival Opra filed a complaint in 2007.

The concession was something that U.S. Department of Justice lawyers as well as lawyers for Silicon Valley’s Netscape had sought from Microsoft in the government’s historic antitrust case against the company. The U.S. lawyers failed in their mission when an appeals court found in 2001 that Web browsers didn’t constitute a market, overturning a ruling by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

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