Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) is asking a European court to take another look at the EU’s approval of Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype, seeking to have regulators force the VoIP provider to work with products like Cisco’s videoconferencing offerings.
“Imagine how difficult it would be if you were limited to calling people who only use the same carrier or if your phone could only call certain brands and not others,” wrote Marthin De Beer, SVP of Cisco’s video and collaboration group in a blog post. “Cisco wants to avoid this future for video communications.”
The company has appealed the European Commission’s approval of the Microsoft/Skype merger to the General Court of the European Union. It said Messagenet, a European VoIP service provider, has joined in the appeal.
Messagenet, in September, filed its own complaint seeking to block the deal.
The company was seeking to have Skype unbundled from Windows. It also asked regulators to open up Skype’s 124 million-strong Internet phone network to competitors’ services by having Microsoft publish Skype’s computer coding to allow services to interconnect. Messagenet contended that the merger will likely make the software even more interoperable than it is today.
“The first effects of the proposed merger will be an even more rigid approach to interoperability of Skype services so to exclude competitors from the market,” the company wrote in its filing.
Cisco, meanwhile, took pains to explain it isn’t opposed to the deal, but that it wants the products to be interoperable.
“Cisco…believes the European Commission should have placed conditions that would ensure greater standards-based interoperability, to avoid any one company from being able to seek to control the future of video communications,” De Beer wrote. “Our goal is to make video calling as easy and seamless as email is today. Making a video-to-video call should be as easy as dialing a phone number. Today, however, you can’t make seamless video calls from one platform to another, much to the frustration of consumers and business users alike.”
Microsoft said it was confident the decision would stand up on appeal.
“The European Commission conducted a thorough investigation of the acquisition, in which Cisco actively participated, and approved the deal in a 36-page decision without any conditions,” a spokesman said.
For more:
– read this Bloomberg article
- see this Cisco blog entry
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