The Danish Unix User Group wrote a complaint to the European competition about the Danish situation:
The Danish Unix User Group DKUUG has made a formal complaint to the EU commission over the Danish state, for breach of the EC Treaty article 81 on unfair competition.
The complaint concerns the internal regulation in the Danish state to prescribe the use of a mandatory standard, namely the specification ECMA-376 or ISO/IEC DIS 29500 OOXML, which describes a format that is used in the Microsoft Office 2007 product.
Other producers of software are here having a competitive disadvantage, as Microsoft has a great competitive advantage of already having a product which implements the specification, and substantial parts of the specification are not specified, such as formats and their interpretation in earlier versions of Microsoft Office, and these specifications are therefore very diffficult for competititors to implement fully.
DKUUG asks the commission to make a decision to make void the part on OOXML of the Danish regulation on mandatory standards, so that other products can participate in the competition on office software for the Danish state. This is in line with regulations in other countries, for example in the federal Belgium, or Norway, where only the ISO standard ODF is specified for the subject.
Source of the press release: http://www.dkuug.dk/content/view/220/34/
What may surprise you is that the Danish Unix users did not try to complain at their responsible national competition authority first. You have to keep in mind that competition policy was centralised in Europe which fundamentally weakened national competition authorities and competition policy at large. Website of the Danish Competition Authority: http://www.ks.dk/
The text of the DKUUG complaint is very short which lawyers usually regard as an indication of quality.
http://www.dkuug.dk/keld/complaint.pdf
Part of the criticism is the lack of openness in the ECMA procedures:
Report from Ovitas AS to ITST that the OOXML specification from ECMA cannot be considered an open standard:
http://www.itst.dk/arkitektur-og-standarder/Standardisering/Aabnestandarder/baggrundsrapporter/Research_OXML.ODF2.pdf/view
It is concluded on page 4: ”OpenXML cannot be considered as entirely open, as it is considered that Ecma does not work in an entirely transparent manner.”
Core issue of the Danish complaint is
DKUUG asks the Commission to find out whether the Danish regulation constitutes unfair treatment of one competitor over others, by virtually specifying just one solution to certain procurements. This would be in violation of the EC Treaty Article 81, in particular litra 1(d). Following its finding, DKUUG asks the Commission to nullify the Danish regulation on ECMA 376, pursuant to Article 81 litra 2.
I am sure more of the same will follow in other nations in Europe when they decide to adopt ISO OOXML as a national standard for the public sector. The European Competition authority also has a consumer liaison office:
http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/forms/consumer_form.html
