BECTA THE UK's Education technology quango, has thrown its lot in with an EU anti-trust investigation of Microsoft. It was only in February that the EU slapped a $2.5bn fine on Microsoft for abusing its dominant market position by restricting the ability of its server products to interoperate with those of competitors.

Becta, which governs IT spending in UK schools and colleges, said today that it briefed the commission about its own complaint regarding the limited operability of Microsoft products, as well as what it said where Microsoft's " anti-competitive" licensing practices.

The quango told EU investigators how poor interoperability limited schools' choice of software, and drove up the cost of IT. Dr Stephen Lucey, Becta's technology director, said it wasn't only the market that Microsoft "damaged" by erecting barriers to trade with limits on interoperability. It even effected education policy, harming results and hindering school efforts to bridge the digital divide.

The complaint hinged on Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document format. Microsoft won some Brownie points for OOXML recently when it got on the fast-track to approval by the International Standard's Organisation. But Becta said Microsoft skewed the market in its favour by giving its application software native support for OOXML, but neglected to do the same for Open Document Format (odt), a competing standard.

Even when Microsoft did support odt, it did so poorly, said Becta. The EU had opened a new anti-competitive investigation of Microsoft - this time of its desktop applications - in January.

Becta's last complaint on the matter, to the UK's Office of Fair Trading, was similar in scope.

Microsoft was not available to comment. µ