FOLLOWERS of competition policy had expected the next big antitrust news to come out of Washington. After all, the administration of Barack Obama has let it be known that it would be more vigilant, particularly with regard to information technology. But on September 3rd it was the European Commission that grabbed the limelight.

Its trustbusters announced that they will take a closer look at the proposed $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, a troubled hardware-maker, by Oracle, the world's second-biggest software firm. Is the world heading for another transatlantic row about antitrust akin to that of 2001, when a planned union between General Electric (GE) and Honeywell caused a stink?

There are certainly parallels. The two firms are both based in America. And just as in 2001, the Department of Justice had already cleared the deal—on August 20th. But Brussels has a mind of its own. It worries in particular that the merger will reduce competition in the market for corporate databases. Oracle is the world's biggest vendor of “proprietary” (essentially meaning “paid for”) 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, the competition commissioner, said that she had “serious concerns” that the deal would reduce choice and lead to higher prices.

Yet this is where the similarities end. In the case of GE and Honeywell the European Court of First Instance criticised the commission's legal reasoning, but upheld its decision. Brussels has since adopted new guidelines making it harder to block mergers. And although the commission has extended its review of the deal for several months, it will not necessarily block it. It also thought twice before allowing Google, the web giant, to take over DoubleClick, an online-advertising agency in 2008.

Brussels may simply want to gather more information. The case is not clear-cut. Oracle argues that MySQL's revenues are negligible, particularly in Europe where they amount to a mere $17m annually. And since MySQL is open-source, anyone can use the program's underlying recipe. So if Oracle were to rein in MySQL, the software's community of developers and users could always create and promote an alternative.

While Brussels ponders all this, Sun remains in limbo—and will probably lose business to such rivals as Dell and HP. Its revenues dropped more than 30% in the second quarter compared with a year earlier. Meanwhile, the expected meeting of minds between America's newly invigorated trustbusters and Europe's also seems to have been put on hold.