A majority of US senators (59 out of 100) sent, on 24 November, an open letter to the EU authorities asking them to authorise, as quickly as possible, the proposed acquisition of software company Sun Microsystems by Oracle. “Continued delay of the European Commission’s decision on clearance threatens thousands of American jobs, so we felt compelled to ask for a speedy resolution,” underlined Senator John Kerry (Democrat) in a press release. The Republican Orrin Hatch blamed “foreign regulatory agencies” for deliberately and “unfairly” spinning out their authorisation procedures, “to impede the business of American corporations”. He noted that the US Department of Justice, “after an intensive investigation, closed its inquiry into this transaction without taking any action”. “I thus hope that the European Commission will quickly conclude its investigation,” he added.

On 3 September, the Commission opened an in-depth investigation into this merger and was, in principle, due to make a decision by 19 January. However, on 20 November, it decided to postpone this deadline to 27 January. In fact, it fears that this takeover - valued at US$7.4 billion - of Sun Microsystems, the owner of the Java programming language, by the professional software company Oracle, may have negative effects on competition in the market for database products if Oracle has MySQL, the database system belonging to Sun (see Europolitics3858 and 3810). Oracle did not appear to come round to the conditions desired by the Commission, which sent a statement of objections to the parties.