Is Microsoft Behind Google's Italy Woes?

Microsoft is up to its old tricks again. Google is under all sorts of attacks right now—all somehow related to Microsoft. There are a slew of stories about how Microsoft managed to get Google into anti-trust trouble with the EU. This proxy fight may also have had something to do with the situation in Italy, in which Google executives were indicted for allowing some dopey video to be uploaded in that country.

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I see Microsoft lurking around the Google/EU situation in much the same way Sun and others did while Microsoft was being beat down by that same body. The situation not only makes Google miserable, it also gets at Eric Schmidt, Sun's former CTO. The irony here is that, while Microsoft was employing unfair business practices, the only thing unfair about Google is the fact that it offers superior search results. The company isn't forcing people to use it. But Microsoft knows that the EU is against anything made in America, and the company keeps pointing to Google as a big American company.

Thanks to the EU, Microsoft must offer consumers a checklist of alternatives to Internet Explorer on new machines. Personally, I side with Microsoft on this. Why should a company be forced to do this sort of thing? If users are not complaining about Microsoft's defaults, then so what?

Microsoft also seems to have buddied up to Rupert Murdoch, confirming his belief that Google's search needs to be destroyed, because there is some underlying illegality lurking about. This curious copyright battle has been going on since the first Web crawler hit the Internet.

In the strictest sense, there is a case to be made that some sort of copyright violation occurs when you use a search engine. A lot of material is typically lifted and presented to the user for the purposes of identification. But I call this fair use. It's a one-time snapshot used for the purposes of discovery. Once discovered, the user proceeds to the site where said information can be found. Who or what is this process actually violating? How is this really bad?

The way Murdoch sees it, the whole thing is a violation of copyright law, and that's that. Besides the fact that this sort of absolutist thinking is a menace to society, I'm absolutely stunned that the company would side with Murdoch on this. It's seriously sickening. If Microsoft was a stand up company, it would be straightening Murdoch out. But no.

It's as if Microsoft has pushed Google out a plane and is jumping out after it, without a parachute—just to make sure. In that scenario, both companies plummet to their death. Oh, and in the process, the public be damned.