Hċkon Wium Lie, chief technology officer for Norway-based Web browser company Opera Software, spoke with me via phone this morning about the company's antitrust complaint against Microsoft in Europe over the connection between Internet Explorer and Windows.

(See this earlier post for details, and Microsoft's response.)

Edited excerpts from the interview with Wium Lie:

Q: When I talked with (Opera CEO) Jon von Tetzchner last year when he was here, he said that, at that point, Opera didn't have plans to file an antitrust action over the bundling of IE in Windows. What's changed since then?

Wium Lie: I don't know the context in which Jon made those comments, but we have been obviously thinking about this all along. Now, we have waited until now because we have wanted the other case to be done and dealt with, and as you know, the judgment from the Real media player case came down in September this year. So that's one factor for our decision. The other factor is the state of browsers. The browser is more important than ever for accessing all sorts of information for all sorts of people and we think that consumers should have a real choice amongst browsers, and it seems like that's very hard to achieve as long as Windows and IE are so tightly tied together.

Q: You mentioned the RealNetworks case, and obviously the result of that was to require Microsoft to sell a version of Windows in Europe without Windows Media Player. Do you see a precedent there for your case, as it relates to browsers?

Wium Lie: Well, we see it as a precedent that it's illegal to do that kind of tight tying. Now, when it comes to remedies, I'm not sure that the remedy was successful in the media player case. I think there might be other remedies that are better. We are also noticing one other thing in our complaint about Web standards, that Microsoft has not really done a good job of supporting Web standards, and that's really a problem for competitors who are working in earnest to support those standards.

Q: What type of remedy would you propose as an alternative, as it relates to browsers?

Wium Lie: Well, we mentioned a couple of things in our statement. One is the untying of IE, and perhaps with a price difference. I think one of the reasons why the remedy in the media-player case didn't succeed was that there was no price difference between the version with and without the media player. Obviously it costs money to develop media player, and so there should be, naturally, a price difference. Another option though is instead of to remove something, you could add more browsers, to give consumers a real choice between browsers, you put them in front of their eyeballs.

Q: Would you ever ask the commission to remove Internet Explorer from all versions of Windows, not simply to require Microsoft to offer one without?

Wium Lie: We haven't really been very specific as to remedies here, and we don't use any such language in there. Obviously I think browsers are very important for users today, and to have a computer without a browser isn't really very useful. So people want to have browsers, and we should have browsers. We should actually give them a choice, a meaningful choice of browsers, not try to remove it from them.

Q: Some of the blogs this morning have said that this seems to be not a reaction to Microsoft anticompetitive conduct but to, they're saying, Opera's inability to compete in the marketplace on its own merits. How would you respond to that?

Wium Lie: Well, we are a very successful company. We have grown from the start in 1995 we have grown to be 400 people, and we only have one product, the browser. We deliver browsers for all sorts of devices: phones, game consoles, and the desktop. And we're successful in doing so. However, on the Windows desktop, it has proven to be very, very difficult, and we believe that's not because of merit. We don't think 80 percent of users use IE because it's so good. We don't think it is a very good browser. We think we should be able to compete on merit. We want fair competition.

Q: Is this an attempt to draw publicity?

Wium Lie: No, it's not, really. Obviously when we do make a statement like that, we want to tell the world why we're doing it, as well. And it's a chance for use to talk about Web standards, which are very near and dear to us. But that's certainly not the main motivation for doing this. What we want to do is to have a fair chance to compete on equal grounds.