20 Years of Solicitude, and Commissioner Kroes, An Apology

As HPL points out in the comment on my previous post, I intimated too much credit to Commissioner Kroes, she merely appended some words to the June 2009 mobile roaming regulation. I look forward to giving her more credit when prices are reduced from 20,000%+ above wholesale cost, in the near future.
But lets give her credit where its due. In 1990, the Federal Trade Commission began its inquiry into Microsoft Windows pricing/bundling policies. In 1997, the great State of Texas (full disclosure: I am an honorary citizen), began its landmark antitrust action against Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer into Windows95 -  which it fought to the bitter end in 2004, even though Dubya's DoJ spat the dummy.
Today marks the day that Microsoft finally is giving consumers a (somewhat redundant and almost mandatory) choice of browser under settlement of the EC case which began in 1993 (Novell) and again 1998 (Sun). Its in your Update - I keep having to stop it happening as I use Chrome - that address/search bar is bundled genius.
And just as the Roaming Regulation is carried over from Commissioner Reding, so this remedy is carried over from Commissioner Kroes. So well done!
That brings me to the complaint against Google. I am expecting 20 years of activity on this, too - though as with Microsoft and its Passport/.NET case, I expect Google to find its relations with privacy law - yes, Mme Reding - to become sticky long before any antitrust action. I have a research student engaged in research in this field, and its only tangentially relevant to net neutrality (its a counter-attack aided by Vodafone and Microsoft if you believe the rumours and of course the Barcelona speeches at the Congress).
Gloves are off, battle will commence.

Clinton speech - what it didn't say

Hillary is rather caught between her own spooks' need to snoop on her citizens (and everyone else in the world) and the old 'fr'dom' chant of George Dubya - she freely admits this is his policy initiative:
'All societies recognize that free expression has its limits. We do not tolerate those who incite others to violence, such as the agents of al Qaeda who are - at this moment - using the internet to promote the mass murder of innocent people. And hate speech that targets individuals on the basis of their ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation is reprehensible...We must also grapple with the issue of anonymous speech. Those who use the internet to recruit terrorists or distribute stolen intellectual property cannot divorce their online actions from their real world identities. [But] these challenges must [not] be[come] an excuse for governments to systematically violate the rights and privacy of those who use the internet for peaceful political purposes.' (My punctuation).
So do we want the home of the NSA, the Patriot (sic) Act and most of the surveillance-intelligence complex lecturing the rest of us on free speech while licensing the flogging of blade servers and other DPI kit to friends, Romans and Chinamen? Its a point made robustly by Rebecca McKinnon and Ian Brown, who points out the nasties perpetrated by Yahoo! and Microsoft back in the day. To which we can add of course Mr Murdoch, an unambiguous threat to free speech in China based on past history.