Deux Poids, Deux Mesures

The EU is trying to shake down Oracle and Sun, presumably to break up a merger on anti-monopoly grounds. Which would be fine if either company were based in the Eurozone, and they weren’t the same bunch of hypocrites who created Airbus as a monopoly (that intentionally steamrolled the smaller players like Fokker), or protect and prop up their “national champions”.

Imagine the Reverse

Consider the hyperventilation had the US government protested the Suez-GDF merger (36% of them still state-owned,) or the government subsidy to Alstom to prevent their acquisition by a non-French entity. Just imagine what the invective and accusations of imperialism would sound like.

The focus of the investigation is whether Oracle would gain too much power in the market for database software. Last year Sun bought a Swedish company called MySQL, which makes the leading open-source database program. Regulators are looking into whether Oracle, the leader in overall database software, might give MySQL's products short shrift in favor of its own products.

Short shrift, now being a crime against the state, requires that the any segment of a business with a European origin be preferred over others. THAT, as they see it, is an anti-trust issue, if you can believe that.

Inasmuch as one of them is a struggling hardware company, and the other a software company, the terminally stupid though of the day turned away from their own Dr. No-esque mustache twirling to the Emperor-Bokassa-like institutionalized theft of foreign owned property.

"The [European] Commission has an obligation to ensure that customers would not face reduced choice or higher prices as a result of this takeover," Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement.

What they want is to dislodge Java from Sun, the US based company that created it.