EC Vista antitrust concerns fleshed out

A senior Microsoft executive has revealed details of the European Commission's antitrust probe into its upcoming Vista operating system.

Microsoft and the EC have been in protracted discussions regarding Vista since March, over the EC's concerns. that parts of Vista may violate anti-competition laws.

Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of the security technology unit at Microsoft, said: "There were four different areas where the Commission gave feedback on Vista. Two security components, and two other components."

The Commission was concerned that Windows Security Center would give Microsoft an unfair advantage by flashing up alerts that would guide consumers to buying Microsoft or Microsoft-endorsed security products.

In an interview at the RSA security show in Nice on Tuesday, Fathi told silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK: "The EC wanted vendors to have the ability to disable alerts in Security Center. They are satisfied that we've provided those APIs [application programmable interfaces] to all of our security partners. We're completely open to that."

The second Vista security area causing the EC concern was PatchGuard, or kernel patch protection, the code that prevents access to the Vista kernel. Security vendors McAfee and Symantec were incensed they were banned from the kernel. The EC wanted Microsoft to disable this feature but Microsoft refused.

Fathi said: "Kernel patch protection really is something we do not want to disable. We told the EC this is something we are working on with our partners going forward." Microsoft has agreed to supply its security partners with APIs for any parts of Vista, according to Fathi.

The EC was also concerned about XML Paper Specification (XPS) which describes the formats and rules for distributing, archiving, rendering and processing documents created in Microsoft's XPS format.

The EC wanted to make XPS an open standard. However, Microsoft brokered a compromise whereby anyone can read or write documents using XPS, which is distributed under a royalty-free copyright licence - meaning it can be distributed freely once a licence has been obtained. Licence holders must agree to a "covenant not to sue" people who use XPS.

The EC also expressed concern about default upgrades from Internet Explorer 6 to IE 7, according to Fathi. IE 7 was launched last week, and is expected to be pushed out over Microsoft's Automatic Update system next month.

Tom Espiner writes for ZDNet UK