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EU Court Upholds Microsoft Antitrust Fines
a_n_d_e_r_s writes "The ongoing saga of Microsoft's misuse of their dominant position in the EU marketplace to block competitors may be finally over, with the fine set to 860 million euros (just over 1 billion dollars). In 2004 Microsoft was ordered to provide certain information to competitors but failed to do so and was given an hefty fine. Now the EU General Court in Luxembourg has upheld the EU Commission decision and ruled against Microsoft."
This is a minor reduction (4.3%) of the original fine because of a minor technicality. Microsoft, naturally, is unhappy with the result.
So Microsoft are running the EU bailout now?
Not sure about that. Since 2004 they sold at least a billion pricey products ; that makes a pretty juicy ROI.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Mod parent up. It's a couple of month's profit for Microsoft. Spread it over eight years and it's not a bad investment.
No sig today...
Wow, that is a chunk of change - the EU could really use the money right now too (conspiracy ???). This could pay for the bailouts being debated right now throughout the EU.
-------- -1 for SUCK IT!
...here in the United Kingdom both central and local government will consider this ruling and act in the manner which they consider appropriate;
So they will make absolutely no effort consider alternative suppliers and reward Microsoft with more lucrative contracts for software and services.
I think they should go after Apple!
Apple are the worst offenders and is the most anti-competitive company in the industry, they're worse than Microsoft.
Now they need to go after them for secure boot UEFI
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
Since this lawsuit was like 50% legit 50% bullshit, I would definitely find it amusing if Microsoft now jacked up the price of all MS product licensing in all of Europe by like 25% to pay for the fine. Then the EU would just be shooting itself in the foot.
Microsoft has to report that they're unhappy with the result. They have to whine and complain. If they didn't, it wouldn't be seen as sufficient punishment.
The ______ Agenda
Microsoft's competitors and consumers aren't too happy with the result either. I'm sure they would have preferred that MS not have engaged in such practices in the first place.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Microsoft must open-source and stop trying to lock people in with docx and other microsoft ONLY file formats...
and stop bullying households in selling home users multiple licenses, that's what we call extorting a paying customer...
it's a criminal and they must for for extorting the European consumers, this amount is small compared to the profits they sucked out of our people and our governments.
they are doing the same in your country and over 30million Americans don't have health insurance also because of these kinds of criminals...
I can't help thinking that if Microsoft were based in Europe, and had behaved in the exact same fashion, it wouldn't have gone down this way.
Europe acting on anti-trust type of actions on big companies. I remember a time when the U.S. did that and we had decades of prosperity. Ah the good old prosperous days of the 50's and 60's with 90% top tax rate.
The practice of what?
Daring to include a browser in their OS? THOSE BASTARDS.
Or not sharing enough details about their software to their competitors? THOSE BASTARDS.
People around here like to paint MS as some great evil, but honestly I just don't see it. All I see is a company that gets penalized for acting like everybody else.
The claim made in many of these lawsuits, especially from Neelie Kroes the European Commissioner for Competition is that Open Source/Standards is better. (From Wiki: "Kroes has stated she believes open standards and open source are preferable to anything proprietary")
Does this mean that *any* company with a significant revenue (say $1 billion or more) is required to release all their file formats under some "interoperability" thread of lawsuit from the EU, or is it just Microsoft?
I'm curious to see how many other companies in other domains have they gone after. Photoshop is dominant in their domain, so will they be sued for a closed format? ( I used them as an e.g. - I haven't checked if they actually have opened their formats recently)
There are plenty of EU antitrust rulings against EU (and other non-US) companies, your ignorance of them probably shows your bias, not theirs.
Astra Zeneca (a UK company) are up for 50 million euros.
Telefonica (Spanish) are up for 150 million euros.
Examples are not hard to find....
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Do you really think you know more about what "monopoly" and "monopoly abuse" is than the bloody courts?!?!?
This is not a trivial sum. Who gets it?
That is called "abuse of dominant position". I'm sorry these laws are inconvenient, but I thought it was fairly well admitted that monopolies are a bad thing for the economy, or is that another common sense economic notion that is now labelled "socialo-communist" ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Can anyone point me to something indicating what information the EU feels Microsoft should have provided but did not provide? (or information competitors of Microsoft believe Microsoft should have provided but did not provide?)
The spec documents at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd208104(v=prot.10) seem to cover a lot of the things that competitors might want access to so whats missing?
You fucking freedom hating commie! You shouldn't be allowed to post such things! There should be some congressional committee to subpoena you or something.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Subpoena ? That's sooo 2001 ! Just label me soft-terrorist, extradite me to US and send me directly to Guantanamo ! I always wanted to meet Assange anyway...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
They were charged guilty by the highest court in the US... and nothing.
Microsoft just complained that it was hard to comply and dragged their feet. The US did nothing. No fine, no nothing, until it reached stature of limitation. Then Microsoft, a convicted criminal, got off the hook without even a slap on the wrist.
In that aspect, The EU was much smarter. They gave Microsoft time to fix their stuff, and when that time expired, without Microsoft doing anything, they started fining 1 000 000 euro for every additional day of non-compliance. That is where the 980 000 000 euro fine is coming from.
Microsoft is not the only case like this.
When Microsoft will increase the software licensing fees for EU organizations.......
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
More EU companies have been hit by antitrust than non-EU ones.
Now lets look at how Apple (USA) vs Samsung (Not)...
Actually, if MSFT was smart, it will cost them nothing. As soon as they knew there was a risk that they could be fined, move $4-5 billion to a high interest bank account, say 3% per year over 8 years. They would be able to pay the fines on the interest earned alone.
According to the Sherman Antitrust Act monopolies are not bad. In fact we have several of them (post office, amtrak, the electric company). Monopolies are only bad when they abuse their power, as defined by the act.
As for "economic notions", in a truly free market no monopoly lasts forever because new competitors rise-up and take it away. I think we're witnessing that now, as Microsoft has lost its 90s and early 2000s monopoly over browers and OSes. They have to share the spotlight with Mozilla, Google, and Apple.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Because banks never go broke, right?
Completely riskless, never in all of history has a depositor lost their money
UEFI boot comes to mind, just off the top of my head.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Not in america, apparently, and if they do they just get a bailout.
Waiting to see if Apple gets the same treatment. After all Apple is in the dominant position in the tablet market. Many would say the smartphone and mp3 markets as well. Apple even gets courts to block other companies from bringing in a competing product. Is that not considered abuse? Even Apple has said that the ipod/iphone sales have lead to higher Apple computer sales.
They better make them pay up asap or don't allow them to do business in the EU.
This lawsuit was about documenting proprietary protocols/formats/services, for interoperability. Has Apple done all of that ? Are all of their formats - iwork, pages, garageband, itunes etc all open?
The problem with MS is only exaggerated because customers have overwhelmingly chosen to use them consistently over the previous decade. Third parties are effectively shut out because they can never overcome such a massive market barrier to entry.
...Microsoft is still unlikely to pay the reduced fine. A Microsoft spokesman was quoted as saying "Awww, the widdle EU antitrust court thinks it can fine us. Isn't that just precious?"
0 1 - just my two bits
As for "economic notions", in a truly free market no monopoly lasts forever because new competitors rise-up and take it away.
The thing is, because they can prevent exactly that, that's why monopolies are generally considered an undesirable side-effect of free market. A sufficiently big actor can actively prevent a new entrant inside a market. If it was not forbidden, Microsoft would be forbidding OpenOffice and LibreOffice to run under windows, would prevent any other browser than IE and any other web search engine than Bing. Things are even worse in fields where there is a huge initial investment to enter the market.
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