UPDATE: EU To Focus Oracle Probe On MySQL, Despite Critique
- (Adds commission comment, background.) By Peppi Kiviniemi Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES BRUSSELS -(Dow Jones)- The European Commission said Tuesday its antitrust probe into Oracle Corp's (ORCL) planned $7.8 billion takeover of Sun Microsystems Inc. (JAVA) continues to focus on the extent to which Sun's MySQL database competes with that of Oracle, despite criticism from U.S. antitrust authorities that have already cleared the deal. The commission's comments come a day after the companies confirmed they had received formal objections to the merger from Europe's top antitrust regulator. Commission competition spokesman Jonathan Todd remarked that it was "unusual" that the U.S. Department of Justice had commented on the commission's proceedings. "I cannot recall any instance when the commission has remarked on an ongoing investigation in another jurisdiction," he said. The DOJ cleared the deal in August without asking for any concessions, following an extended probe into whether Sun's Java programming language and its licensing rights could be abused by the new owner. After the deal ran into difficulties in Brussels, the DOJ issued a statement saying it had looked at database competition as part of its review and concluded that it wasn't problematic because "customers would continue to have choices from a variety of well established and widely accepted database products." Still, Todd said that although there is good cooperation between the commission and DOJ, "we don't always have the same evidence in front of us." Oracle also attacked the commission's resistance to the takeover, saying that the commission's concerns about the tie-up showed "profound misunderstanding of both database competition and open-source dynamics." Todd described Oracle's comments as "superficial." Oracle is the market leader in proprietary databases that are protected by copyright, and MySQL is the leading vendor of open source databases, Todd said. MySQL exerts a "strong competitive force" in the database markets and appears to be a "major competitive constraint," he said. Despite MySQL being open source, Oracle would still hold the copyright for the database code, which would make it difficult for other companies to compete with Oracle, Todd said. -By Peppi Kiviniemi, Dow Jones Newswires; +32 2 741 1483; peppi.kiviniemi@dowjones.com Click here to go to Dow Jones NewsPlus, a web front page of today's most important business and market news, analysis and commentary: http://www.djnewsplus.com/access/al?rnd=QfH2r6Cl9SvBxovETZx1rA%3D%3D. You can use this link on the day this article is published and the following day.
