Summary: Microsoft sends ACT to fight back against the European Commission on its behalf

AN OBLIGATORY background to this post is presented in this story about ACT. Without knowing the genesis and function of ACT, the severity of this will remain unknown to readers. To sum it all up, it is abundantly clear that Jonathan Zuck and his "ACT" umbrella are there to serve Microsoft as a supposedly independent body [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. In its previous incarnation, known as ATL, the group was helping the writing of fake letters from dead people. That's how unethical these people are.

And guess what?

They are now attacking the European Commission and Microsoft's adversaries whom Microsoft injured. IDG has this report which calls ACT "a familiar ally", but it says nothing at all about why it's a familiar ally; It's more of a Microsoft spinoff than an ally, as we showed the last time using compelling -- if not undeniable -- evidence. IDG is actually more of an "ally" because Microsoft is doing business with IDG [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], which gives a platform for ACT at the moment (by quoting ACT extensively).

Microsoft Corp. gained a familiar ally in its latest antitrust battle with the European Commission today when the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) was accepted as an interested third party in the case.

Then there is this one from The Register, which relies only on IDG as its source.

The Association for Competitive Technology has been accepted as an interested third party in the case.

They say nothing at all about what ACT actually is, so that is just utterly poor reporting which deceives the readers. ACT was pretty much created by Microsoft to serve Microsoft, but all the reporters totally miss that point or neglect to raise it by choice. Some are Microsoft-sympathetic journalists (at least one that we are familiar with) and they echo the words of ACT as though they are trying to help Microsoft against the Europe Commission using the publications they write for.

Regarding disclosure of European lobbying activities like that of Microsoft/ACT, Euractiv published this pessimistic report a few days ago.

EU lobby register 'will never be mandatory'

The voluntary lobbyists register introduced by the European Commission last year has been effective enough not to require a mandatory approach, Administration and Anti-Fraud Commissioner Siim Kallas said last week (17 April).

Here is an older article from the same site: [via Glyn Moody]

As the Commission's upcoming voluntary lobbyists register occupies the mind of every lobbyist in Brussels, some have started to question exactly how many of them there are, casting doubt over the 15,000 figure originally put forward by the Commission.

That's an obscene amount of people and Microsoft is patently the worst in this area (or best, depending on one's point of view). For those who want to see the substance of this latest complaint against Microsoft in Europe, Groklaw has that published as HTML (text extracted from the PDF we cited last week). Pamela Jones adds:

It is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time that the issue of Microsoft's patent threats against Linux have been presented to a regulatory body as evidence of anticompetitive conduct.

The evidence is too hard to conceal, so Microsoft is reaching out to hired guns who in turn attack the regulators and the sources of complaint. There is nothing extraordinary here because Microsoft is doing it every single time and many journalists choose cowardice and ignorance rather than inform about the real story. They play along with ACT (i.e. Microsoft). ⬆

"I thanked Rose for all of his trips to Seattle and his willingness to distract a lot of time for the lawsuit."

--Bill Gates

“Did you know that there are more than 34,750 registered lobbyists in Washington, D.C., for just 435 representatives and 100 senators? That's 64 lobbyists for each congressperson.”

--CIO.com