Heavy-handed and power-unchecked European Union regulators have spent so much time going after Microsoft and collecting unjustified fines from the corporation that the London-based The Economist once opined that Microsoft should be entitled to voting representation in the European parliament.

The authorities have gone after Microsoft with a misunderstanding of what the term “monopoly” means. Monopoly is a verb, not a noun. Europeans regulators, leftists as they are, have it backwards. They resent Microsoft simply for being so big. Never mind that it is free-choosing Europeans customers that make Microsoft a dominant players. Instead, Europeans regulators look at Microsoft’s market share and are bothered by it and actuated against the company as if Microsoft should set an arbitrary market share for itself and then stop selling to new consumers.

The European Union officials have targeted Microsoft again, this time not over its operating system [of which that dispute is not necessarily even done with] but over its IE browser. The charge is that by pre-installing the IE browser onto Windows, Microsoft is using its operating system to give its browser an unfair competitive advantage over other browsers. This argument is akin to charging that Apple is unfair to make the iPhone only compatible with iTunes.

What Europeans regulators do not understand is the creative openness of the free market. That in a globalized world of Facebook-using, tech savvy young people, the market acts as a check on anything “unfair” Microsoft may be doing. But the nanny-state that is the European Union treats consumers as if they were helpless children in need of arrogant, unaccountable officials in Brussels to guide them. What unnerving nonsense! If Microsoft were to prohibit other browsers from working on Windows, that would be unfair for it would kill the competition. But it is not. All it is doing is offering its browser pre-installed, which if anything is helpful because many older people would otherwise have trouble installing a browser on their own.

It is hard to argue that Microsoft has an unfair advantage when it has been losing market share to new browsers such as Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome and Firefox [which I am using now].

Microsoft, fearful of paying billions more to European Union regulators whom seem to be concerned more with filling the coffers of the EU by going after an American giant [to pay for farm subsidizes; a study found that Microsoft fines were once used to do just that] than any notion of fair regulation, has caved in. It has told the EU that it will sell Windows without the pre-installed IE browser. You’d think this would solve the matter since that’s what the entire dispute has been about.

Alas, there is no pleasing the EU since the commission has rejected the offer in its grotesque determination to see more money coerced from Microsoft.