EU Antitrust Complaints Against IBM Dropped By 3 Firms
Big Blue’s monopoly in the mainframe market has been subject to some scrutiny from the EU lately, mainly after three smaller firms trying to compete in this market filled antitrust complaints against IBM. TurboHercules , a France-based company that sells the Hercules open-source emulator, clone mainframe maker T3 Technologies and Neon Software, which developed the zPrime workload accelerator, have now all dropped their complaints.
The companies claimed that IBM tied mainframe computer sales with its leading mainframe OS’s, similar to how Microsoft installed IE on every copy of Windows it shipped until EU regulators threatened to ban the product from the European market if the company would not discontinue this practice.
“The Commission said it had no comment on the issue,” reports Reuters. “The regulator could now decide either to continue or scrap the investigation. IBM declined to comment.”
The Register’s Tim Morgan laid out just why the complaints have been dropped: Neon Software agreed to stop selling zPrime back in June after legal clashes with IBM, and TurboHercules cited that it’s seeking to “explore new business opportunities.” Its website has been taken offline. Meanwhile, T3 did not release an official reason and declined to comment.
This investigation may not be carried out in light of these recent developments, but a second probe initiated by the European Commission itself may not go away so easily. In July of last year the Commission asked to look into suspected discriminatory behavior by IBM towards competing mainframe maintenance service providers, and has been interested in reviewing the company’s business practices for quite some time now.
Google is also taking some heat in Europe. The search giant was yesterday slammed with 9 antitrust lawsuits from the EU, that are added to an already lengthy list of 46 existing suits (the majority of which filled by Google’s competition).
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