Credit: Mike Blake/Reuters Microsoft failed in its bid to subpoena communications from IBM relating to an antitrust case against Microsoft in the European Union, when a U.S. District Court judge in New York quashed Microsoft’s request on Thursday.In an attempt to substantiate its allegations that the European Commission colluded with its rivals over enforcement of the antitrust ruling, Microsoft had asked U.S. courts in Massachusetts, California and New York to order IBM, Sun Microsystems, Novell and Oracle to hand over details of their communications with the commission and with the monitoring trustee for the case. All three courts have now rejected Microsoft’s requests.Starting Monday, Microsoft will begin its appeal against the 2004 antitrust ruling at the European Court of First Instance in Luxembourg. The hearing runs through next Friday. SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe In 2004, the commission found Microsoft guilty of abusing its dominance in the operating system market for desktop computer systems, and ordered the company to provide details of the communications protocols used by its workgroup server software, among other remedies. The commission appointed a monitoring trustee—selected from a list proposed by Microsoft—to evaluate the company’s compliance with the ruling. His responsibilities include consulting with Microsoft’s competitors to gauge the effects of the remedies on the market. In March, Microsoft accused the commission and the monitoring trustee of colluding with its rivals and sought to obtain details of their communications from the commission.Frustrated by the commission’s refusal on the grounds that its procedural rules made such communications secret, Microsoft sought to obtain the documents from the U.S. offices of the companies concerned. Judge Colleen McMahon issued an opinion Thursday quashing the request for IBM’s documents, confirmed Tom Brookes, a spokesman for Microsoft in Europe.A California court rejected Microsoft’s request for Sun and Oracle documents last month, and on Monday, another court in Massachusetts quashed its attempt to subpoena communications from Novell.Microsoft has decided not to pursue the California case further. “The writing was clearly on the wall. They’re not going to be pursued further,” said Brookes.“Things have moved on in Brussels, and some of the clarification that Microsoft was seeking [from the monitoring trustee] we have received,” he said.-Peter Sayer, IDG News ServiceFor related news coverage, read Microsoft Loses Latest Battle in EU Antitrust War. This article is posted on our Microsoft Informer page. For more news on the Redmond, Wash.-based powerhouse, keep checking in.Also, have a listen to CIO Publisher Gary Beach’s podcast on Microsoft’s upcoming operating system, Vista, as well as the topic of open source.Check out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage. Related content feature The year’s top 10 enterprise AI trends — so far In 2022, the big AI story was the technology emerging from research labs and proofs-of-concept, to it being deployed throughout enterprises to get business value. This year started out about the same, with slightly better ML algorithms and improved d By Maria Korolov Sep 21, 2023 16 mins Machine Learning Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence opinion 6 deadly sins of enterprise architecture EA is a complex endeavor made all the more challenging by the mistakes we enterprise architects can’t help but keep making — all in an honest effort to keep the enterprise humming. By Peter Wayner Sep 21, 2023 9 mins Enterprise Architecture IT Strategy Software Development opinion CIOs worry about Gen AI – for all the right reasons Generative AI is poised to be the most consequential information technology of the decade. Plenty of promise. But expect novel new challenges to your enterprise data platform. By Mike Feibus Sep 20, 2023 7 mins CIO Generative AI Artificial Intelligence brandpost How Zero Trust can help align the CIO and CISO By Jaye Tillson, Field CTO at HPE Aruba Networking Sep 20, 2023 4 mins Zero Trust Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe