The New York Times reports that the ruling may bode ill for other companies: “Software and legal experts said the European ruling might signal problems for companies like Apple, Intel and Qualcomm, whose market dominance in online music downloads, computer chips and mobile phone technology is also being scrutinized by the European Commission.”

An updated Microsoft statement and Q&A is available online.

In a statement, Thomas Barnett, the assistant attorney general for antitrust, criticized the ruling, say that “we” are:

concerned that the standard applied to unilateral conduct by the CFI, rather than helping consumers, may have the unfortunate consequence of harming consumers by chilling innovation and discouraging competition.

In the United States, the antitrust laws are enforced to protect consumers by protecting competition, not competitors. In the absence of demonstrable consumer harm, all companies, including dominant firms, are encouraged to compete vigorously. U.S. courts recognize the potential benefits to consumers when a company, including a dominant company, makes unilateral business decisions, for example to add features to its popular products or license its intellectual property to rivals, or to refuse to do so.

At the Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog, Bill Page notes that “there is little to report of interest other than the result—an endorsement of the commission’s position on every substantive issue. The court’s pattern appears to be, on each point, to repeat the Commission’s 2004 decision, describe the position of the parties in great detail, and then to endorse the Commission’s position.”

Randy Picker, at the University of Chicago Law School Blog, posts his initial thoughts and notes that:

The European Commission required Microsoft to offer separate with and without versions of Windows: one version that could include the Windows Media Player and one that would come without it. Microsoft and the EU tussled over the name of the reduced technology version—I think Microsoft wanted to call it “Windows, the Junky Version Required by the EU”—but as the European Commission did not require Microsoft to charge a reduced price for the reduced function version, it has had little market impact.

On a more serious note, he argues that the only remedy likely to have any market impact is the required interoperability disclosure in the work group server operating systems market.

At the Management R&D Blog, Luke Ford argues that “the Court failed to articulate a principle that would tell firms when they are going to violate the increasingly murky European antitrust rules about dominant firm behavior. And, in an unfortunate choice of words that invites criticism from those who remember the bad old days of antitrust, the Court seemed to admit that Microsoft is a target because it is successful.”

Additional reaction from Valleywag, Engadget, Blawgletter, the Wall Street Journal, and Business Week.

p.s. this would have been up sooner but for #%! Apple.

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