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Cisco and Italian VoIP provider Messagenet have
challenged the European Commission's 2011 approval of Microsoft's USD 8.5
billion acquisition of Skype, saying the EC should not have allowed the
creation of a monopoly.
Reuters reports that Cisco's attorney, Luis Ortiz
Blanco, told judges that the takeover “marked a tipping point in the video
communications market”.
The plaintiffs are arguing that the EC should
have forced Microsoft to make concessions for the deal to be approved.
Microsoft said in March that its one-third of the
world’s voice calls are on Skype and over 280 million people use the service
for more than 100 minutes each month.
EC lawyer Corneliu Hoedlmayr pointed to Skype
rivals such as Google Talk and Viber as evidence that there is no competitive
harm, adding that emerging technologies “could render Skype a relic”.
The court is due to give its verdict in the
coming months.
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