The big profit makers are at it again. This time, Microsoft was fined by the European Union a record 899 Euros in a new antitrust ruling by EU regulators, according to this Yahoo! report. The report quotes the regulators as saying that the company charged “unreasonable prices” for those who want to manufacture software or hardware compatible with the company’s near-ubiquitous operating system in the world’s computers. The company immidiately responded that those issues “have been resolved” and that it was working to make its operating system more often.
Neelie Kroes of the EU however was still skeptical. “Talk is cheap. Flouting the rules is expensive,” she said. How true.
Haven’t we all heard it before? Promises by big conglomerates assuring worried consumers that nothing is to be feared by their monopolies, and that such monopolies would not hinder, but help, improve the quality of offered products or services. Yet stauch capitalist advocates have the galls to tell us all that “capitalism promotes competition, which in turn benefits the consumer”. Yeah right. This is but one example putting paid to that off-quoted lie.
In this situation consumers are still lucky. The governments in the Eurozone still place much weight on consumer/worker protection, and strong standards on “fair” trade are in force, much to the chagrin of the more free wheeling capitalist states such as the US. Such strict standards are also not applicable in Asian countries mostly, and its only Asian government and people apathy for concepts such as “interllectual property” that keep us free from conglomerate domination of our economies.
People could do better though. For one, they could actually strive to abolish capitalism altogether and usher in a world commune. But nah, that would be too much to ask, wouldn’t it?
