Microsoft Risks a 2 mln Eur Daily Fine

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Microsoft Risks a 2 mln Eur Daily Fine

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The European Commission said that Microsoft has failed to comply with some of its obligations under an EU decision that found the company had infringed the bloc's competition rules, and now faces the threat of a daily fine.

The commission's March 2004 decision found Microsoft to have infringed EU competition rules by leveraging its near monopoly in the PC operating systems sector onto the markets for work group servers and media players.

Under the terms of the decision, Microsoft was instructed to disclose by Dec 15 fully detailed interface documentation that would allow non-Microsoft work group servers to achieve full interoperability with Windows PCs and servers.

The software giant failed to do this, and now has five weeks to implement the measures if it wishes to avoid a daily fine of up to 2 mln eur for non-compliance, the commission said.