In Monty Python’s satirical Life of Brian an angry dissident demands: “What have the Romans ever done for us?” A fellow plotter, innocently taking his question at face value, responds with a long list of Roman achievements, including aqueducts, roads, schools and, above all, public order – in essence, all the trappings of a civilised society.

Perhaps Nicolas Sarkozy was confusing ancient Rome with the Treaty of Rome when the French president recently asked his Pythonesque question: what has competition ever done for us? With judgment due on September 17 in Microsoft’s appeal against the European Commission’s €497m ($675m, £335m) fine for alleged abuses of its dominant position in operating systems, it is a fitting time to take up his challenge. The question is ripe because the judgment may guide European competition policy for years to come. Is it regulation that has delivered advanced technological innovations, from desktop, to iPod, to do-everything mobile phones – or is it competition?

The Commission began its investigation in 1998. It made a decision six years later. The appeal before the European Union’s Court of First Instance has run for more than three years. So we are now some nine years after the facts. In the meantime, the industry has moved on: IT markets have never been static. Innovation has flourished. New products, new business models and vigorous new competitors abound: think Linux, Flash (which is used on more than 95 per cent of personal computers in Europe), Firefox. Think Google – a company that was only three months old when Sun Microsystems complained about Microsoft to the European Commission. Today Google has an overwhelming share of online advertising revenues – its very name has become a verb – and its own share of antitrust (and privacy) controversies.

Many of the issues in the Microsoft case are almost quaint now – the idea that customers want an operating system without a media player, for instance. Today, Apple dominates the market for online music. Google’s YouTube service is a juggernaut in the online video space. Was either held back because its target customers were mostly running Windows on their computers? No. Neither of these technologies existed when the Microsoft case started. Even Linux was a niche operating system being nudged along by a Finnish visionary and a small band of loyal developers.

Microsoft has also moved with the market. The FT itself dubbed it a “symbolic event” when the chief executives of Microsoft and Cisco recently pledged to make their equipment fully inter­operable: this was “a clear reminder of where the real power lies these days in the IT business . . . corporate buyers of technology . . . [are] in the driving seat”. Reflecting the same pressures, Microsoft had previously agreed with “open source” companies, most notably Novell, to promote the combined use of their products in computer networks, and worked with other IT companies on enabling consumers to choose competing software products rather than Windows features.

A few days before the CFI hands down its judgment in this protracted dispute, it is useful to ask whether a new philosophy (based on Adam Smith’s “old” economics) is needed in applying antitrust to IT issues. The judgment is awaited with the hope that it will provide clear guidelines to all market players. But regardless of who wins or loses, a lesson of the nine years’ wait is that a lighter touch is needed on the part of regulators. Firms in the IT sector cannot make the huge investments required for innovation on the basis of rulings that can be reversed, or that are based on industry conditions of long ago.

You can always count on some of the public to enjoy a good bashing of a large company and competitors always relish seeing a rival in a regulatory morass. But all consumers really care about is finding the products they want at the right price.

What has competition ever done for them? Well, other than making and organising a nearly limitless world of information and entertainment for instantaneous use in home, business, school and cafés around the world . . . not much. Technology markets are fast-moving and antitrust law and regulation in Europe need to move on too.