US Gov't Lobbied EU To Approve Oracle-Sun Merger 169
littlekorea writes "Cables leaked by Wikileaks have revealed that the U.S. Government actively pressured the EU Competition Commissioner to approve Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The cable reveals that the U.S. went to great lengths to discover how the competition commissioner felt about the 'pro-competitive' nature of open source software and whether this would represent a threat to the US$7.4 billion deal."
Re:The weird thing. (Score:5, Informative)
Because they wish to do business in the EU, you know, the biggest economy in the world.
Europe's opinion matters because not being able to do business in such a large economy would make it pointless to procede with the takeover anyway as they'd have been better off not taking over Sun and keeping their EU business than taking over Sun and being ineligible to do business in the EU.
It's worth pointing out it's a two way street too. BAE, a British defence firm, bribed Saudi officials to get an aircraft deal, but despite them being a British company and the deal being with Saudi Arabia and hence having nothing to do with the US, the US still fined the company and BAE accepted and paid the fine because it'd rather continue to be able to do business in the US, with by far the largest military expenditure in the world, than not pay the fine and not be able to do business in the US.
This is the thing with an increasingly globalised world, companies are responsible for their actions wherever they do business, not just where they were founded or are headquartered- if you want to take European money, you need to play by European rules.
"Pressured" is a strong word... (Score:4, Informative)
This sort of thing is exactly what diplomats do. They lobby other countries to take actions perceived as favorable for their own country. There is no evidence here of threats, extortion, or arm twisting. Just diplomacy.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Re:It's only right! (Score:4, Informative)
Nonsense. This is an utter falsehood. Sun and Oracle's markets were by no stretch of the imagination "non overlapping".
You had the problems of excessive vertical integration as well as one direct rival swallowing another. This deal undermined the level of useful diversity in both the enterprise operating systems and RDBMS space. It also impacted a large number of other software projects and led to patent issues. It directly led to collateral damage in a seemingly unrelated market with patent litigation over Java.
The Sun-Oracle deal was nothing but anti-trust issues.
Re:It's only right! (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, because Oracle DB is completely different from MySQL, Oracle Linux is completely different from Solaris, and they have no competition between them whatsoever. Yup.