FOR a brief period expectations had been high that trustbusters on both sides of the Atlantic would start playing in tune. The European Commission's regulators have customarily taken a far more activist approach to competition policy than their American counterparts. A few months ago, Barack Obama's administration let it be known that it would act with more vigilance particularly with regard to antitrust issues related to information technology. But this apparent meeting of minds has proved illusory. It emerged on Monday November 9th that the commission has officially objected to the proposed $7.4 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems, a troubled maker of computer hardware, by Oracle, the world's second-biggest software firm.

America's Department of Justice had given its approval to the tie-up in August. Not long after the news of the commission's objections filtered out the justice department backed up its ruling by issuing a statement arguing that the deal does not raise any antitrust concerns. “After conducting a careful investigation of the proposed transaction between Oracle and Sun, the department's antitrust division concluded that the merger is unlikely to be anticompetitive”, insisted Molly Boast, one of the division's lawyers. But she did attempt to limit the damage to the newly warming relations between trustbusters on both sides of the Atlantic. She added that the department and the commission “have a strong and positive relationship on competition policy matters…The antitrust division will continue to work constructively with the [commission] and competition authorities in other jurisdictions”.

Nevertheless, it is unclear how a transatlantic row can be avoided along the lines of the spat in 2001, when a planned merger between General Electric and Honeywell caused a stink. The commission worries that a union between Oracle and Sun would reduce competition in the market for corporate databases. Oracle is the world's biggest seller of proprietary software to run such databases, with a market share of nearly 50%. Sun is the owner of MySQL, the most widely used “open-source” database software, which already competes with Oracle's products and could become more of a threat in the future. Neelie Kroes, Europe's competition commissioner, spoke of her “serious concerns” that the deal would reduce choice and lead to higher prices.

It does not help that Oracle seems in no mood to compromise. A meeting in October between Safra Catz, Oracle's president, and Ms Kroes did not dispel her fears of the American firm's unwillingness to make concessions. Ms Kroes let it be known that during the meeting she had expressed “her disappointment that Oracle had failed to produce, despite repeated requests, either hard evidence that there were no competition problems or a proposal for a remedy to the competition problems identified by the commission”.

Even though the commission has now made official its objections to the merger, Oracle is unlikely to cave in. On the contrary, it seems prepared for a fight with regulators in Brussels. “The Commission's Statement of Objections”, the firm wrote in a statement, “reveals a profound misunderstanding of both database competition and open source dynamics. It is well understood by those knowledgeable about open source software that because MySQL is open source, it cannot be controlled by anyone. That is the whole point of open source.”

It is too early to tell how this stand-off will end. The fact that the commission has issued a statement of objections does not mean that it will inevitably block the deal. Similarly, Oracle may agree to spin off MySQL after all—the remedy most likely to satisfy the commission in this case—to resolve the problem speedily. As long as Sun remains in limbo, it is losing business to rivals such as Dell, HP and IBM. Last week Sun reported that revenues in the quarter ending in September fell by 25%. And if the case drags on for too long, Sun may sink behind the horizon for good.

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