ODF vs. OOXML is just the excuse
The European Commission (EC) is to investigate how the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) came to make the MS Office Open Extensible Markup Language (OOXML) an official global standard last April.
The announcement clarifies what Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes meant when she said “the competition authority has to recreate the conditions of competition that would have emerged from a properly carried out standardisation process” in her attack on MS.
Hold the cheering
Precisely how does a “competition authority” create a “properly carried out standardisation process”? Would that be the way the EC arrived at DVB-H as the mobile TV standard for Europe, which Communications Commissioner Viviane Reding wishes to make compulsory?
People reared in bureaucratic glasshouses are institutionally inclined to identify examples of “market failure,” because such alleged failures justify their own power and privileges. In addition, Kroes’s biography suggests there may be personal issues involved in her feud with paternalist MS.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Kroes and the EC are piling it on. The ISO/IEC decision to create a new standard alongside the established (in 2006) Open Document Format (ODF) is already subject to an appeal by member states Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela.
Kroes suggested that the ISO/IEC decision might have been “influenced less by the technical merits of the technology but rather by side agreements, inducements, package deals, reciprocal agreements, or commercial pressure.” Sounds like standard operating procedure for EU decision-making to us.
That aside, it is hard to see on what authority a pan-European bureaucracy with no effective democratic checks and balances believes itself empowered to question the result of an international vote supporting the recommendation of a joint ISO/IEC technical committee.
It’s just politics
Where were the ISO and IEC representatives of the EU, Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela when the issue was being debated? Objections to adopting OOXML as an ISO/IEC standard were set out in the No OOXML petition, circulated to all member states.
What has happened since then is that MS announced that it will add ODF support to the Office 2007 suite alongside OOXML in the first half of 2009. MS also said it would join the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards and the ODF working group of the ISO.
The European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), a lobbying group for ODF supporters, which include IBM, Sun Microsystems, Oracle and Nokia, protested that MS’s acceptance of ODF was directly related to the ISO/IEC approval of OOXML. This seems undeniable – but so what?
The EC said it would investigate whether the announced support of ODF in Office would “allow consumers to process and exchange their documents with the software product of their choice.” The snag there is that the software product of overwhelming choice is Office.
So ultimately, in order to prevent MS side-stepping the hostility built up against it in the EC and nourished by ECIS lobbying, the ISO/IEC verdict must be impugned. The central issue seems to be that MS has defied the authority of the EC, an offence Kroes and her peers seek to punish by hook or by crook.
