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Despite the settlement between Microsoft and US Department of Justice, the European Commission said it would press on with its investigation of the company.
In August, the Commission said that it was investigating whether the company's decision to embed Media Player in its Windows operating system was damaging potential competitors. Additionally, the Commission said at the time that it was investigating whether Windows 2000 was designed to work better with Microsoft servers than with rival servers.
On Monday the European Commission said the investigation is still in preliminary stages, and was "ongoing." Nevertheless the organisation admitted that it was too early to say if the settlement in the US would impact its separate investigation. "There might be certain features in the US settlement which might or might not have an impact on the Commission's own investigation involving Microsoft," said a spokesperson for the European Commission according to a Reuters report.
While legal experts are mixed in terms of what they expect the Commission to do, the organisation does have a history of moving forward with anti-trust investigations that may have been cleared by officials in the US. Earlier this year the EC rejected General Electric's proposed acquisition of Honeywell in a decision that was widely criticised in the US.
Furthermore, some experts in the US and in Europe have said that the EC's investigation does have some notable differences to the investigation in US.
Additionally the 18 US States that joined in the legal action against Microsoft have not yet signed on to the deal that was reached by the company and the Department of Justice on Friday.
While it remains unclear what many of the States will do at this point, Massachusetts has already said it would not sign on to the settlement. The State's attorney general said on Sunday that his State would not sign on to the proposed deal, because it does not protect competing software makers.
"Microsoft will use this agreement to crush competition," Massachusetts attorney general Thomas F. Reilly said Sunday. According to an AP report, he said the deal between the company and the US Department of Justice would not be approved by the Massachusetts without "major changes." Reilly also said that he did not expect those changes to occur before Tuesday's deadline.
The State attorney general said that if Massachusetts could get a group of States together to continue the fight against the maker of Windows it could consider continuing the litigation. California, Wisconsin, Iowa, Connecticut, Kansas, Maryland, Florida, Massachusetts, West Virginia and the District of Columbia at this point are all understood to be opposed to the settlement reached last week. It is expected that these States will tell US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly on Tuesday that they will not support the agreement without changes to its language.
It is believed that officials from some of the States thought to be in opposition of the pact, including California, Connecticut and Iowa, had met with mediators to try to reach some agreement on harsher penalties for Microsoft, according to the Wall Street Journal.
It is understood that Illinois, Ohio, North Carolina, New York and Utah are leaning toward approval of the now controversial agreement. The positions of Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan and Minnesota remain unclear.
Still more troubles arose for Microsoft last week when long time rival Sun Microsystems said it was considering a lawsuit against the software maker because it believed that the deal with the US federal government would not protect competitors.
While legal action does not appear imminent at this point, it remains a possibility for the creator of Java. Sun already has some ammunition for a potential civil anti-trust lawsuit because a US Court of Appeals ruled in June that Microsoft held a monopoly and violated anti-trust laws in its efforts to suppress Sun's Java programming language.
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