Microsoft Corp. spent years trying to persuade the U.S. court system it was not the 800-pound gorilla that the Justice Department made it out to be. Now it's giving a command performance to European regulators. The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant begins hearings today in Brussels to persuade the European Commission that the Windows operating system and its, shall we say, aggressive business practices are no threat to competition in the software industry. The company will argue that the European antitrust complaint "focuses unfairly on the company and disregards its intellectual property rights and consumers' demands. In a showpiece hearing, the company will seek to appeal beyond the staff of Mario Monti, competition commissioner, to other parts of the European Commission and national regulatory agencies in the hope they might rein back the Commission," The Financial Times reported.
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