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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: werefrog who wrote (60196)	7/29/2001 6:13:23 AM
From: dybdahl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

The European commission is controlled by the governments of Europe and should be seen as the equivalence of the government of the USA. It is not elected directly by the people because the European Union is still mostly cooperation and not a nation. There is also a European parliament, which is elected by the people, but it doesn't have so much power, yet. When markets are divided by politicians, the principle is very close to when judge Jackson separates MSIE from Windows as being two different things. It's just done early in the process, in order to prevent bad investments and expensive trials, and it is done very clearly, so that companies know what their conditions are. For instance, you need licenses to do GSM 900, GSM 1800 and UMTS networks. These licenses are treated independently, and there are companies with GSM 1800 licenses, that don't have GSM 900 licenses. This prevents them to make their phone networks nationwide, and forces them to cooperate with other phone companies to provide 100% mobile phone coverage outside the cities. There are rules on how the phone companies operate, in order to ensure at least two nationwide phone networks, so that you can choose between two phone companies no matter where you live. It's a lot of restrictions on the companies, but they know precisely under which rules they operate, and it gives end-users a lot of freedom and choice. I don't expect the operating system market to be handled in this way ever, but the combination of telecommunication services and operating systems is dangerously close to what is being regulated over here, and it might become a very hot issue. Lars.