The EU Meddling In US Tech Industry Grows

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 19, 11:33AM EDT · Published Sep 22, 5:17AM EDT

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The EU regulators who combat monopolistic practices have never been kind to Microsoft (MSFT). They have hounded the world’s largest software company for years, accusing it of bundling its browser into its operating system and other actions that make it hard for the company’s competitors to get fair access to the market. Everything the regulators say may be true.

More recently, EU officials accused Intel (INTC) of treating its smaller competitor AMD (AMD) badly by cutting special deals with PC companies to keep its dominance in the chip market. Regulators in Europe have gone so far as to release e-mails that they used to determine that Intel had violated anticompetitive regulations.

The latest victim of EU vigilance is Oracle (ORCL) which has been trying to buy Sun Microsystems. US regulators did not seem to have trouble blessing the deal. There were no objections from antitrust officials in any Asian country. The EU, however, is worried that the combined company may have too much of the database software market in Europe, so its is conducting a long investigation into the matter.

Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison claims that Sun is losing $100 million a month and that the EU review is hurting his company’s chances of getting a reasonable return on the Sun transaction. He is probably telling the truth. The Sun deal was supposed to have closed two months ago.

The EU has now become the major roadblock to global tech companies that want to introduce or expand dominate products or make marriages to increase the size of their businesses. There is no getting around that. Neither the companies themselves of the US government has any leverage to make EU regulators change their habits. Like it or not, no signifcant global tech deal or global enhancement to important products made may hardware or software giants can be complete until the EU has its say in the matter.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.