In 2004, the EU did what the US DOJ suddenly lost the courage to do after the Bush administration took over and fined Microsoft 497 million Euros for abusing what was then a 95% monopoly on desktop software.
Microsoft paid the fine, and simply kept doing the same thing, keeping Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer "in the box" and even further integrating them into their operating system. In the EU, this is an illegal business practice. They knew this, and didn't care, because I guess some accountant figured that they would still make a profit if they paid the fines while crushing competition.
In 2007, they were fined another 280.5 million Euros for non-compliance, which Microsoft appealed, and lost.
This latest penalty is the largest amount of money that any company has had to pay, and the first time a company has been able to treat such penalties as "the cost of doing business." That's right, normal corporations learn their lesson. Microsoft? Not so much. Money quote, from Reuters:
Microsoft paid the fine, and simply kept doing the same thing, keeping Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer "in the box" and even further integrating them into their operating system. In the EU, this is an illegal business practice. They knew this, and didn't care, because I guess some accountant figured that they would still make a profit if they paid the fines while crushing competition.
In 2007, they were fined another 280.5 million Euros for non-compliance, which Microsoft appealed, and lost.
This latest penalty is the largest amount of money that any company has had to pay, and the first time a company has been able to treat such penalties as "the cost of doing business." That's right, normal corporations learn their lesson. Microsoft? Not so much. Money quote, from Reuters:
"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.
For years after the decision Microsoft said it was making every effort to comply with the Commission's orders.
"Talk is cheap, flouting the rules is expensive," Kroes said. "We don't want talk and promises. We want compliance."
I wonder if the much-ballyhooed "interoperability" announcement and release of some binary specs is an attempt to avoid further fines, now that it appears they will continue to get bigger and bigger. The fines, I mean. Not Microsoft.
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