This is quite a nifty challenge, because it is perfectly reasonable and true, it would seem, according to their press release:

“Article 93 of the EU’s Financial Regulations – stipulating that bidders who are guilty of serious misconduct and have been convicted by the courts should be excluded from procurement procedures. The Commission recently fined Microsoft a record figure of €899 million for its ‘abuse of dominant market position’.

“Article 45 of the EU procurement directive stipulates that companies which have legal judgments against them can be excluded from the award of public contracts - whether it concerns new software for a small town library or the setting up of a database for a whole regional office.”

Of course, on another level, Microsoft’s domination of the world’s software markets would mean that a swift rejection of their technologies would cause a lot of difficulties in all kinds of government departments.

This might seem to make it impossible for the EU to accept the logic of their own procurement rules – that abusive and monopolistic companies should not be allowed to bid for government contracts.

But the challenge that Caroline Lucas advocates could mean, if taken up, that MS would be forced by the EU to negotiate better behaviour.

After all, there’s a simple answer to dealing with Microsoft, which is to make it agree to use internationally-agreed software standards. This is no different to telling manufacturers that they all have to use three pin plugs, or sell loaves of bread in 800 gram packets.

But while Microsoft write their own standards, like those for Exchange Server, everyone else has to play catch-up to break their secret formulas. Only Microsoft can tell you (for a price) how the plugs work.

Even when they release the formulas publicly, that’s only so you are tempted to write software for the systems they own and control. (Contrast this with writing software for the dozens of freely-available Unix-like systems.)

Microsoft is in a very special position. Software needs inter-operability and they have established a set of de facto standards. Third parties build on their work and have business models dependent on them.

This stuff matters. We’re being ripped off at home and the developing world is precluded from sharing the intellectual benefits of closed but widely used standards in software.

For many of us, how the EU deals with Microsoft is a touch stone to judge its ability to deal with the modern world, and whether it is interested in its citizens and fair play for EU-based businesses, or just in good relations with global mega corps.