Cisco Wednesday filed suit in the European Union's second-highest court, the General Court in Luxembourg, challenging the European Commission's rubber stamp last October of Microsoft's $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype.
Cisco says it isn't opposed to the merger, but figures the EC should have put strings on its unconditional approval to ensure Skype's standards-based interoperability with other systems like its own videoconferencing widgetry "to avoid any one company from being able to seek to control the future of video communications."
Messagenet, a European VoIP service provider, has joined Cisco in the appeal.
The EC is expected to defend its decision and not give ground.
In a blog posting Marthin De Beer, the head of Cisco's Video and Collaboration Group, said, "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. Cisco wants to avoid this future for video communications" and "to make video calling as easy and seamless as e-mail 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."
Cisco is worried that Microsoft's plans to integrate Skype with its Lync Enterprise Communications platform "could lock-in businesses who want to reach Skype's 700 million account holders to a Microsoft-only platform."
Cisco evidently wants to somehow impose interoperability by what it calls "non-partisan governing bodies" because "when vendors implement their own protocols and selectively interoperate," it says, "they push the burden of interoperability to the customer."
Skype became a Microsoft division last year as soon as the EC waved the acquisition through. Microsoft already had US approval.
See http://blogs.cisco.com/news/video-to-video-communications-is-the-future/.