The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee is set to begin investigating claims, made by the Mozilla (News - Alert) Foundation, that Microsoft has been obstructing third party browsers from running on their Windows RT operating system. Sources have named Democratic Senator, Herb Kohl, who heads up the subcommittee on antitrust, competition policy, and consumer rights, as the source of the report. 

Windows RT is designed for use on devices with ARM (News - Alert) processors such as tablets and mobile phones. Mozilla has alleged that Microsoft is not making available to them the APIs or application programming interfaces that it needs to adequately render Java Script, isolate plug-ins and tabs, and make their browser as safe and stable as it can be. Google (News - Alert), who launched their Chrome browser in 2008, have said they will side with Mozilla in this argument. Microsoft currently has full access to these APIs.

Microsoft (News - Alert) has appeared on the government’s radar for similar issues before. 1998’s United States v. Microsoft saw the company facing civil actions, in part for including its Internet Explorer browser on all its computers along with Microsoft Windows. Plaintiffs in the case claimed that Microsoft monopolized both browser and system sales by including them together on every computer they produced. Litigation ended with Microsoft agreeing to share APIs with third party vendors. 

Harvey Anderson, who currently serves as Mozilla’s chief counsel in this dispute, seemed to think that legal action against Microsoft would not be the best path for either side at this time, instead favoring settlement through discussion.