EU Gets Tough with Oracle

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In 2001, the Europeans blocked General Electric’s planned acquisition of Honeywell.

The Europeans have kept up their supervision of Microsoft’s activities long past the point that U.S. regulators stopped paying special attention to the software giant. In May, EU regulators fined Intel a record $1.45 billion for its alleged attempts to block other computer chipmakers from the personal and server computer markets. Intel is appealing that ruling.

Though U.S. regulators had looked into Intel’s practices several times, they had taken no action.

It was only this month that someone in the U.S. decided to take on the chipmaker. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo brought an antitrust suit against Intel.

The Journal reports that sources within the U.S. Justice Department say there are plenty of database software providers, both open source and otherwise, to provide competition to a combined Oracle and Sun.

Redwood City, California-based Oracle pointed to the U.S. Department of Justice’s approval of the proposed deal in August and said there are “eight strong players” in the database market, including IBM, Microsoft, and Sybase.

Oracle agreed to buy Sun in April after talks between Sun and IBM broke down. And Sun has been suffering through the delays in the deal’s finalization.

Oracle’s CEO, Larry Ellison, has said the delay is costing a lot of money, as Sun has been losing as much as $100 million a month.

Oracle said in April it would buy Sun for $7.4 billion. Though the companies guessed the deal would close over the summer, antitrust regulators in Europe have held it up.

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