European Regulators Target Another American Tech Company

The European Commission is once again targeting an American tech company with an antitrust investigation. This time the EC has its sights set on Oracle and it’s $7.4 billion bid for Sun Microsystems. In short, the worry is that if Oracle acquires Sun, along with it’s popular open-source database software MySQL, that somehow competition in the database market will become nonexistent.

But as Matt Asay at Cnet.com pointed out this week, competition is alive in well in the database market. Amazon recently announced that it will launch its own version of the MySQL software, proving that the EC’s probe is a dead-end. By gaining MySQL, Oracle would gain a foothold in a new market of database users (web-based and small businesses). Asay’s conclusion:

Oracle’s bid for Sun/MySQL, in other words, isn’t about squelching competition, but rather about enhancing it. Amazon’s RDS proves that strong, viable competitors to MySQL can arise from within the MySQL community, which disproves the EC’s argument that Oracle’s control of MySQL will somehow crush competition.

Clearly, the case against the Sun-Oracle deal is without merit. The EC needs to quit targeting American’s most innovative companies.