From their article The traditionally protectionist group responsible for providing input into the EU's globalization arm and butcher knife (read collude and conspire to squash American, Japanese, and Asian competition) comes the brilliant idea that will ruin many a grandmothers' Christmas present.

Right out of the "Gee Boss, I'm not sure what to come up with so I will just come up with someone else's idea" department the EU group recently published an article which says they believe the best way to increase competition and help consumers is to damage the companies that the market reward. Why don't they just come out and say it. The solution? A PC and it's OS should be sold separately. The fact that most major companies already sell PC's with many different variants of Linux isn't good enough, if grandma buys a PC, she should be forced to also buy an OS, if she doesn't know what one is, she will be trying to email her family from BIOS. 

Instead of letting the market decide what technologies they want at home and in the workplace, the EU seems to want it to be regulated. A monopoly should be forced to compete on equal of slightly less secure footing, but this is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard. The group is trying to bring down a slew of American companies including Intel, Apple, Rambus, and many people are speculating their next target for rape is Google.

Candace Lombardi says:

The signal the institute refers to is the September 17, 2007, ruling in which the EU's Court of First Instance upheld commission rulings requiring Microsoft to share certain technical specifications with rivals and to offer customers an unbundled option in cases where Microsoft has tied together two separate products. The court ruling also upheld a $613 million antitrust fine against Microsoft that had been imposed by the European Commissioner for Competition, Neelie Kroes.

I'm not sure why I even am blogging about this, this group seems pretty confused, let's point out some foolish statements from their article:

• Moreover, there are other costs: some argue that support costs are higher for Windows than other operating systems, particularly when one considers security vulnerabilities:
• We do not believe this would add complexity for consumers ??? What???
• By increasing competition, 10 operating systems would all be competing, and all programs would somehow run on all of them.
• We consider the Mac to be a premium, niche product
• Microsoft has had an OS monopoly for 20 years.

This paper is so off the mark that I think the act of publishing it has forever stained and tarnished the word think tank. They must have been living in a tank for the last 20 years perhaps. This will actually hurt consumers who would not be able to buy Microsoft OEM version and end up costing Europeans more money.