It seems to be all over the news these days: companies are joining the fray left and right in the European Union’s investigation to determine whether Microsoft’s bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows violates anti-trust laws. Just this week Google became another voice in the suit initially begun by the top execs at Opera, a browser that holds around 2% of the overall market share (no wonder they’re upset!). Mozilla is also part of the suit as an “interested 3rd party.” Ultimately, it seems that the EU is more interested in protecting competitors than protecting true competition. As has been proven by Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, if you create a better product, people will actually use it!

But here’s the real problem with this case: if Microsoft is forced to remove IE from Windows, then you face numerous problems, first of which is…how do consumers initially gain access to the Internet? No IE = no browser. Buying a computer through an OEM would allow bundling of that company’s preferred browser, which would help in alleviating some of the difficulty there.

A second issue points directly at Apple. If Apple is allowed to bundle Safari with their OS, how can you possibly tell Microsoft that they can’t bundle IE with Windows? This point is further supported by the fact that most Apple OS X users prefer Firefox over Safari and make it one of the first applications they install after buying a new Mac. Clearly bundling Safari with OS X hasn’t hurt Mozilla at all. I imagine this will be further illustrated once Google releases Chrome 2.0 with support for OS X. Not to say that Safari isn’t popular–it is–but it doesn’t discourage most users from using alternate browsers. Alternatively, you actually can completely remove Safari from OS X if you like–I just tried it. But…why would you want to??

Opera is a pretty small fish in a very big ocean–who is most likely just jealous that most people prefer other browsers over theirs. This suit will get more face time in the news during the coming weeks and months, but in the end, expect everyone’s pockets to be just a little lighter. Not much else will change.