Microsoft Fined by EU
This post was published 1 year 8 months 10 days ago and its content may not be valid anymore.Microsoft has been fined by the European Union for breaching sanctions placed upon them for anti-competitive behavior. The amount? $1.4bn or £680.9m
EU regulators said the firm was the first to break an EU anti-trust ruling.
The fines come on top of earlier fines of 280m euros imposed in July 2006, and of 497m euros in March 2004.
“Microsoft was the first company in 50 years of EU competition policy that the Commission has had to fine for failure to comply with an antitrust decision,” Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement.
The issue is Microsoft being found guilty of not providing key code to rival software makers, according to the BBC. The fine itself is just a drop in the bucket for Microsoft, but I’m not sure about the ruling itself. I’m not lawyer of any sort (I just play one on the internet) but why is it that Microsoft has to give up its own documentation? If I started an ice-cream company and made my own flavors I wouldn’t want to give out my recipe, nor would I want to be fined for not doing so. Any commenters have some more light to shine on the issue?
Read More
On September 17, 2007, Microsoft lost their appeal against the European Commission’s case. The €497 million fine was upheld, as were the requirements regarding server interoperability information and bundling of Media Player. In addition, Microsoft has to pay 80 per cent of the legal costs of the Commission, while the Commission has to pay 20 per cent of the legal costs by Microsoft. However, the appeal court rejected the Commission ruling that an independent monitoring trustee should have unlimited access to internal company organisation in the future.[15][16] On 22 October 2007, Microsoft announced that it would comply and not appeal the decision anymore,[17] and indeed Microsoft did not appeal within the required two months as of 17 November.
Microsoft announced that it will demand 0.4 percent of the revenue (rather than 5.95 percent) in patent-licensing royalties, only from commercial vendors of interoperable software and not from open source developers. The interoperability information is available for a one-time fee of €10,000.
Please read http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/07/420&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en
God, is this really the prevailing wisdom in the non-tech world?
Microsoft has created, in legal terms, a monopoly. This alone isn’t really a crime. The free market encourages it. The problem is that they leverage their monopoly to bully into other markets, and gain even more market share.
Why is this a problem? Because it is essentially impossible for any other company to compete.
Microsoft owns the OS, more specifically the pricing of the OS. Manufacturers who play by all of Microsoft’s rules get the best pricing. For example, in the late 90’s that meant not shipping Netscape or WordPerfect. Have you heard of those products lately?
The problem here is that they use the OS monopoly to force Office, Windows Server, and Exchange Server onto people. By pricing bullying and subtle service pack changes, competing products are always at a disadvantage. Businesses, therefore, are too cautious to choose non-Microsoft products because they see it as a potential liability.
So, Lotus Notes and Groupwise are being slowly killed because of this bullying. The EU is trying to force Microsoft to open the Exchange protocol to allow competition again. However, Microsoft has been so powerful for so long that paying a billion dollar fine is nothing compared to losing their monopoly.
it’s only about programming interfaces so that non-microsoft software play well with Microsoft software. Not about revealing the source code of the whole softwares.
It’s because the EU thinks that having almost a monopole in one domain and stopping people from being compatible with you is no fair concurrence.
Microsoft didn’t want to do it at first. Then first condemnation from the EU, they have to do it.
Then they ask third party developers for insane amounts of money for this code. Second condemnation: they have to reduce the price (to 10 000 euros a licence I believe, $15 000) before october 2007. They did it in november 2008, and this delay is the reason for the fine you’re writting about.