Christine A. Varney heads up antitrust at the Department of Justice, and she's going hunting. She is the point person for a group consisting of the presidential administration and some Congressional Democrats that is looking to put the breaks on large companies in several industries.

Already, airlines have run into roadblocks when requesting relief from antitrust regulations. Varney & Co. are digging into complaints by AT&T (NYSE: ATT) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ) that cable competitors – e.g., Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) – have locked them out of the market for cable company-produced programming.

(Imagine that, a phone company complaining! Usually, they're the objects of derision.)

The European Commission has launched a new antitrust investigation against software giant Microsoft, alleging that the company abused its market dominance, Reuters reported.

Following complaints by Norway-based Web browser company Opera, and a coalition of technology companies, the EU will inquire as to whether Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) broke EU competition rules to help its Web browser and its Office / Outlook products.

Microsoft's a focus, again

The inquiry comes four months after Microsoft lost its Europe appeal of a case in which officials ruled that the company had illegally tied its Media Player to the Windows operating system and had failed to disclose information that would make other server software company's products operate on the Windows system, the Financial Times reported Tuesday.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), finally seeing the writing on the wall after losing in the European courts, decided today to withdraw its appeal [subscription required] of an antitrust ruling by the South Korea Fair Trade Commission, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal today. "It is important to note that Microsoft remains committed to Korea and continues to work closely with the FTC to ensure that Korean consumers benefit from vibrant competition in the IT industry," the company said in a statement. I bet that's how they really feel. I don't think Microsoft truly wants to help the competition, but they are being forced to do so by the antitrust regulators.

In February 2006, South Korea's FTC imposed a fine of 32.5 Korean ($35.4 million) against Microsoft for abuses related to its dominance in certain software, primarily its Windows operating system. Microsoft must provide two versions of Windows in Korea, one stripped of the Windows Media Player and Windows Messenger and the other carrying links to Web pages that allow consumers to download competing versions of such software. Microsoft appealed this decision in March 2006. This appeal was turned down in May 2006 by the FTC and it asked the antitrust regulator to review the fine. Today Microsoft dropped the appeal most likely because it realized it would lose.