The European Union has taken action that the governments in Washington D.C. and Ottawa have failed to take.
EU Fines Microsoft Record $1.3B
AOIFE WHITE | February 27, 2008
Associated Press
BRUSSELS, Belgium — The European Union fined Microsoft Corp. a record $1.3 billion Wednesday for the amount it charges rivals for software information.
EU regulators said the company charged "unreasonable prices" until last October to software developers who wanted to make products compatible with the Windows desktop operating system.
The fine is the largest ever for a single company and brings to just under $2.5 billion the amount the EU has demanded Microsoft pay in a long-running antitrust dispute.
Microsoft immediately said the issues for which it was fined have been resolved and the company was making its products more open.
The fine comes less that a week after Microsoft said it would share more information about its products and technology in an effort to make it work better with rivals' software and meet the demands of antitrust regulators in Europe.
But EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes remained skeptical and said Microsoft was under investigation in two additional cases.
"Talk is cheap," Kroes said. "Flouting the rules is expensive."
Microsoft's actions have stifled innovation and affected millions of people around the world, Kroes said. She called the record 899 million euro fine "a reasonable response to a series of quite unreasonable actions."
"We could have gone as high as 1.5 billion euros ($2.23 billion)," she said. "The maximum amount is higher than what we did at the end of the day."
The EU alleged that Microsoft withheld crucial interoperability information for desktop PC software _ where it is the world's leading supplier _ in an effort squeeze into a new market and damage rivals.
The company delayed compliance for three years, the EU said, only making changes in October to the patent licenses for companies that need data to create software that works with Microsoft.
Full AP Story: EU Fines Microsoft
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