Bonum Certa Men Certa

Amid Decision on €899,000,000 Fine, ITSSD Goes Batting for Microsoft

[Note: written this morning (i.e. before the hearing)]

Lawrence Kogan



Summary: The lawyers/lobbyingmeisters come out in defence of Microsoft almost unsurprisingly, coinciding of course with a very important hearing about Microsoft's abuses

THE FSFE says that it will speak to the European Court of Justice regarding Microsoft. From their new page:

Fresh action in the European Commission's antitrust proceedings against Microsoft: On May 24, the European Court of Justice conducts a hearing on Microsoft's appeal against the fine. FSFE has participated in the case for a decade and will intervene on the Commission's behalf.


Carlo Piana will be there too and he announces this in Identi.ca/Twitter while "Microsoft tries to weasel out of big EU fine," as one reader of ours put it. "This would be in connection with Microsoft's action claiming that the 899 million euro fine the EU Commission ordered in 2008 was excessive," explains Groklaw. "The Commission found that, prior to October of 2007 Microsoft charged unreasonable prices for access to indispensable interoperability information." Here is what Piana wrote:

Ready to fly to Luxembourg. #FSFE and #samba in court for setting the record straight on #interoperability.


There is some funny stuff going on right now. The "interoperability" propaganda (with patents and RAND, not free standards) gets pushed by some mysterious groups and lobbyists whom we never saw before. "Glyn Moody questions a curious Guardian article about standards and discovers an insulting Microsoft think tank," claims a reader of ours, pointing at this article. We are not sure if it's Microsoft behind the spin, but it is rather predictable that Microsoft at least played a role (Microsoft is generally funding think tanks to lie). As Moody shows, the messenger has a very dodgy reputation. He writes: "Let's see what else concerns the ITSSD. How about this?"

U.S. Navy Had a Whale of a Job Fending Off Green Lawfare in NRDC v. Winter Case

In a newly released Washington Legal Foundation working paper, international lawyer Lawrence Kogan describes the U.S. Navy's challenge in convincing the U.S. Supreme Court to vacate a green injunction effectively preventing critical U.S. Naval sonar training exercises from taking place off the Southern California coast. The injunction had been issued on the grounds that the Navy's failure to prepare a full environmental impact statement could trigger possible but scientifically unverifiable discomfort to beaked whales.

"The green group and California State pleadings the Supreme Court reviewed in Winter provide a bird's eye view of continuing activist efforts to rewrite U.S. environmental regulatory law from the bench in pacifist Europe's socialist image," emphasizes Kogan."

You see, it's getting worse: those “pacifist” “socialist” Europeans are trying to protect the whales from pain - whatever next?

Well, how about this [.pdf]?

Congress Should Do its ‘Homework’ Before Adopting Costly Euro-Style Energy/Climate Change Rules

Crafted by unelected bureaucrats, environmental activists and socialist party ‘kingpins’ and supported by most European leaders, such policies have focused more on promoting sustainable development via consumer and business sacrifices than on securing desperately-needed regional energy supplies.

Yes, it's those crafty socialist party ‘kingpins’ again - probably all cheese-eating surrender monkeys - aided and abetted by environmental activists, who have the audacity to promote “sustainable development via consumer and business sacrifices”: can you imagine it?

Yes, I think lots of caution is required here....


Did Microsoft liaise with ITSSD? Here it is lobbying for Microsoft interests at WIPO [PDF]. They even have a blogspot blog, just like Microsoft Florian.

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

IBM Reduces the Thresholds for Acceptance (and the Salaries)
Are chatbots good enough as IBM staff?
When It Comes to Rust, Keep All the Eyes on the Ball (Technical and Legal Perils, Sustainability Questions)
It's not about security or politics
Social Control Media is Just a Digital Weapon
Social control media is not social and not media
 
Happy Birthday (or Anniversary) to SoylentNews
"Happy Birthday SoylentNews"
Techrights' Architecture
Stability is the main goal
Linux Foundation Continues Falling Off a Cliff in Geminispace
Gemini Protocol will turn 7 this summer
Links 16/02/2026: cURL’s Daniel Stenberg Asserts That Slop is DDoSing Free Software, But Still Uses a Plagiarism and GPL-Violating Blender (Microsoft GitHub)
Links for the day
The Techrights Community Never Needed Money, Only Goodwill
We accomplish things by a track record of suppressed facts
"AboutCode" is a Microsoft Proxy and Microsoft's Acquisition of the OSI Advances Via OSI Moles
presenting direct evidence anybody can verify
They Will Call Smart People "Luddites"
Is society "seeing the light"?
Microsoft Amutable Already Reveals That Its Focus Is Not Linux, It'll Promote "Remote Attestation"
This is basically an attack on Software Freedom, even if they toss around the brand "Linux"
More People in Chad Move to GNU/Linux
Last year we began to see GNU/Linux rising there - a trend which continues this year
Dr. Andy Farnell on How Universities and Culture of Education Got Crushed by "Technofascist Nightmare"
Farnell says he "already soft-quit in [his] mind"
Debt of Broadcom Grew by More Than 50%, Broadcom is Deeper in Debt Than Google
Expect many more cuts
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, February 15, 2026
IRC logs for Sunday, February 15, 2026
Links 15/02/2026: Slop, Politics, and Gemini
Links for the day
Small is Beautiful (in Cascading Style Sheets/Inheritance Rules)
If done correctly, pages can take a tenth of a second to fully load
Microsoft Has Fallen to New Lows in Hong Kong This Year
That Windows "market share" falls there is perhaps expected
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Raised About 1.5 Million Dollars This Winter, Almost 50% More Than in All of 2024 Combined
Verbal advocacy goes a long way
Spread the Word About EPO Strikes and Patent Injustices in Europe
Corruption in Europe is a real thing
The Register MS is Promoting Slop, Promotion Connected to Microsoft (Trying to Replace Judges With Microsoft)
marketing spun as "science"
He Did Not Have Enough Souls
A lot of the subjects we cover here no other site dares touch
"Mix Vale" is a Slopfarm
3 "articles" about "ubuntu"
Links 15/02/2026: Roy Medvedev Dead at 100, Rise of "YouTube Politicians"
Links for the day
Links 15/02/2026: How Alexey Navalny Was Executed by Putin, Erdogan Helping Iran
Links for the day
IBM Fedora Keeps Promoting Slop, Red Hat Has Been Turned Into Chaff and Trash to Help IBM's Stock (With "AI" Storytelling)
Red Hat's Fedora is an old brand (20+ years). It no longer stands for what it meant to people in the Fedora Core days (I was a Fedora user back then).
What IBM Said About 2026 Layoffs and What's Happening in Practice
t'll leave IBM at the very bottom, in due course (customers will notice something profound has changed)
Gemini Links 15/02/2026: "Already Midway February" and Loadbars Remembered
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, February 14, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, February 14, 2026
Microsoft's Bing Down to 0.5% in Armenia
Microsoft does not want shareholders to see this
Libel by Bots: Unexplored Legal Area?
Liability can be traced back to the operator
Maybe Obvious, But Merits Repeating: A Lot of "Demand" for Slop is Faked, Manufactured, Fabricated by Dark Patterns, Bundling, Media PR (Deception/Hype) Campaigns
Over the past few years many products and services got rebranded as "AI"
xAI and X (Twitter) Live on Borrowed Time, It'll Get a Lot Worse Fast
Being associated with a child porn site formerly known as "Twitter" is odorous to say the least
Microsoft is Lobbying Brussels via Opensource.org and OSI
The new (GAFAM) management at OSI is not serving the OSI's original mission
Will Lockett's Newsletter: Microsoft became Microslop and Windows users are "flocking" to GNU/Linux "to escape the mess"
"Users are fed up and jumping ship from Windows to Mac or Linux. In fact, it appears that Windows has lost 400 million users since 2022!"
Photographic Collections
There are going to be over 100,000 JPEG, PNG, and GIF files by the time we turn 20
Norway Curbs Social Control Media as It Harms Norway's Society
A decrease from 11% to just 1.87% is possible to reason about
Accomplishments of Our Community
Why I enjoy writing in Techrights
Microsoft Invented a Slop CEO ("AI CEO") Because Real Interest in Slop is Waning, So It's Just Faking Its Prominence
It's noise
Google Promoting Slop, Not Journalism
The truth of the matter is, Google is part of this problem and it doesn't seem to care
Another IBM Company (Spawned by IBM) is Hiding the Scale of Layoffs, Just Like Red Hat and Kyndryl
Why is the scale of the layoffs there shrouded in secrecy?
Links 14/02/2026: Financial Woes in Hong Kong and "Hong Kong Journalists Face ‘Precarious’ Future After Jimmy Lai Jailed"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 14/02/2026: Fish Shell and Meta Slash-commands
Links for the day
Links 14/02/2026: "Bias and Toxicity in" Slop, Microsoft's Vista 11 System Update Breaks Systems Again
Links for the day
Links 14/02/2026: "Suppression of Free Speech" and "Climate Change Puts Winter Games on Thin Ice"
Links for the day
EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part I - Getting the Word Out About What the 'Alicante Mafia' Did to Europe's Second-Largest Institution
Can't everyone in the European media agree that letting cokeheads run Europe's second-largest institution is a terrible idea?
Richard Stallman in the United States - Part I - Huge Audience (Offline and Online), 'Cancel Culture' Attempted and Failed
the comeback of Richard Stallman (RMS) in the United States
GitHub Cannot Survive for Much Longer
Microsoft is trying to just hide the debt
Ed Zitron: Microsoft Is A Decaying Empire That Bet The Future On Making In Excess Of $500 Billion In New Revenue Within The Next 4 To 6 Years From AI — And It Hasn’t Made A Dime In Profit Yet
Microsoft bets its future on a bunch of nothing
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 13, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, February 13, 2026
Gemini Links 14/02/2026: "Throwback VR Headset" and OFFLFIRSOCH 2026
Links for the day