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A Matter of Sovereignty You asked for it,now live with it. That was, in essence, the message spread by Microsoft s lobbyists after the European Court of First Instance upheld a landmark antitrust ruling against the world s largest software firm on September 17th, dealing it the most stinging defeat in nearly a decade of antitrust litigation. Emboldened by this decision, Europe s anti-monopoly squad will now go after other technology firms with high market shares, the lobbyists warn, forcing them to give up valuable intellectual propetty and curbing the incentive to innovate. Yet it is unlikely that that Neelie Kroes, the European Union competition commissioner, will now be leading a prison march of the word s most successful firms through her Brussels doors , as one lobbyist put it. The judgment s consequences are far- reaching, but in a different way. If it is not overturned--as ,Tbe Economist went to press, Microsoft had not said whether it would make a final appeal--the firm will, in effect, lose much of its sovereignty over the virtual territory staked out by its Windows operating system. Microsoft ended up in the dock in both Europe and America because it tried to protect and extend its Windows monopoly in two ways. One was by bundling other types of software along with Windows, notably its web browser, a move that triggered the antitrust action in America. Its other approach, which lay at the heart of the European case, was to withhold information from rivals that would have allowed their software to interoperate well with Windows over a network. | 
