Slashdot Mirror
EU Set To Charge Microsoft Over Ruling Breach
New submitter quippe writes in with some bad news for Microsoft. "Microsoft Corp will be charged for failing to comply with a 2009 ruling ordering it to offer a choice of web browsers, the European Union's antitrust chief said on Thursday, which could mean a hefty fine for the company. U.S.-based Microsoft's more than decade-long battle with the European Commission has already landed it with fines totaling more than a billion euros ($1.28 billion). The Commission, which opened an investigation into the issue in July, is now preparing formal charges against the company, EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said."
If they want to really make any pressure on MS.
If I fail to pay the fines to city police, they seize my car until I pay.
The law should be equal to everyone.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
You can ship the screen in the code, but if you never show it to users what good is it then? Microsoft admits they didn't comply, so what's the problem with the EU fining Microsoft?
Sig?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/17/microsoft_ec_browser_choice_fresh_investigation/
So 28 million Windows went out without the choice, and Microsoft got away with it for 17 months. I don't see why you have difficulty understanding it, it all seems pretty simple to me. It's not like they can claim ignorance, they were told by their competitors it wasn't showing the browser choice and they chose to 'investigate' it for a heck of a long time before finally fixing it when Brussels became involved.
It's just Microsoft being Microsoft, they'll never change, just hit them with a big fat non-compliance fooling-nobody fine and move on till the next time (which will be the 3rd time) they do it.
I don't understand why they're doing this. There has been a browser choice screen shipped with it and via windows update for ages now. It stinks of profitteering on the part of the EU. You don't hear them suing the crap out of pharmaceutical companies for a monopoly either.
Here's a little back ground
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_competition_case
Watch those corners
How do you figure? Microsoft clearly violated the terms of the ruling, which resulted in a fine. Are you objecting to
a) the court's interpretation of the law?
b) the anti-monopoly laws in effect in the EU?
c) anti-monopoly laws in general?
We keep reading that they're being investigated, charged, "fined", but cut to the chase: what actual sums have left Microsoft's account and gone into the Brussels swill trough?
The summary says $1.28 billion, i.e, just slightly more than Apple got from Samsung in a patent lawsuit where the jury didn't understand how prior art worked.
I made the mistake of taking that 28 million at face value, but that number comes from Microsoft wishing to downplay what it did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7
"On March 4, 2010, Microsoft announced that it had sold more than 90 million Windows 7 licenses.", so when SP1 was introduced it was 90 million.
"On July 12, 2011, the sales figure was refined to over 400 million end-user licenses and business installations"
So when they fixed it they'd shipped 400 million.
So 310 million windows were shipped, and Microsoft is claiming less than 10% market share for Europe? Seriously? They've previously claimed that 35% was Europe giving a number more than 100 million....
A billion dollars for a browser choice dialouge? It is beyond my comphrension how this could be considered rational or acceptable in any way.
Has it been stated anywhere that they will also fine this specific violation at 1 billion dollars?
I mean, just because the last time Microsoft violated EU laws it got slapped with a fine of that size, it does not follow that this different violation will get the same penalty.
Anyways, the fine is "up to 10% of yearly global revenue", and could include daily fines if Microsoft doesn't fix the issue in a timely manner.
Ignoring a court ruling would land most people in jail for contempt of court. I think the EU should start fining corporations percentage of revenues for contempt of court (a billion is a start, but it should be higher if it has to have any effect on microsoft)
A billion dollars for a browser choice dialouge? It is beyond my comphrension how this could be considered rational or acceptable in any way.
It's proportional to the company profits. All the big number means is that Microsoft earns a lot of money.
No sig today...
And some MS (I assume?) installs keep sneakily reverting me to fucking Bing. The offence is not having a monopoly - it's abusing it, ie. leveraging your other crap onto people's desktops by virtue of having dominance in the OS arena.
If you had read the fucking article, you would have seen that MS admits the breach anyway: "The company acknowledged its mistake in July, saying it was now distributing software with the browser option and also offered to extend the compliance period for an additional 15 months."
FTA:
Market share of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in Europe has roughly halved since 2008 to 29 percent so far this year as it has lost clients mostly to Google's Chrome.
Chrome controls 29.3 percent of the European browsing market, while Mozilla's Firefox has 30.3 percent of the market, according to web research firm Statcounter.
That's 90% of the market equally shared over three browsers. With the other 10% for the rest. Well I'd call that a rather healthy situation, and a great progress from 90%+ for IE.
Browser selection screen or not, the dominance of IE is obviously broken without any other browser becoming dominant, and that I'd say is good. Very good. The next step is a proper html standard, and a standard interpretation/rendering of that standard.
The fine is set so high because Microsoft repeatedly and willingly ignores what the EU tells them to do, not because what Microsoft is doing wrong is worth a billion.
If you keep parking your car in a no-parking zone and just pay the low fines because you can afford them at some point the police will just impound your car and haul you in front of a judge. This is the corporate equivalent.
Well the point of the fine is to make it economically adventageous for Microsoft to follow the law. Suppose that they were expecting to benefit by $250M (through network effects of having a larger market share, &c) by having 28 million people running IE by default instead of being given a choice. And suppose they thought there was a 50% chance they'd just get away with it. Ignoring morality or commitment to rule of law or anything like that, and looking only at money, what's the rational decision for the following fine amounts?
Given the size of Microsoft, and the potential benefit they get from breaking the law, a "rational" fine is one big enough to make it "rational" for MS not to play games with the EU anymore.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Or:
Multiple-convicted monopolist company with assets on a par with the entire EU annual budget, seeks to avoid legal redress by failing to implement agreed-to legal measures (or only implementing them half-assedly) and claim they didn't know, nor bother to check, they were working for several YEARS, after already being fined half a billion Euros and made to implement those measures in the first place (after ANY NUMBER of appeals and legal arguments failed because the evidence was just so overwhelming).
It's all in the spin, really, and it's hard to have sympathy for the convicted monopolist worth more than a lot of EU countries combined, when they are basically here because they can't be bothered to instruct one person within their company to keep an eye on their half-a-billion-pound + expenses mistake and the complementary obligation they were legally required to implement over several years.
If you wanna do business in the EU, you have to stick by EU law, no matter how ridiculous you think it is or how much you disagree with its application. If that's a problem, don't do business with it. And if you don't want a repeat of your half-a-billion-dollar-plus-expenses blatant disregard for that law, maybe you should have one of the many very expensive lawyers, or even just someone involved in implementing the solution, keep an eye on it once a month, say, for the duration of your punishment.
Anyways, the fine is "up to 10% of yearly global revenue", and could include daily fines if Microsoft doesn't fix the issue in a timely manner.
Is it just me who thinks that "up to 10% of yearly global revenue" might possibly be worth it for Microsoft?
It certainly could have been worth it back when they were the clear browser-war winner.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
So you are saying they don't have to run a major attack vector just so that they can avoid running a major attack vector? What about when they want to keep their computer secure by using Windows Update; can they avoid using Internet Explorer by using Chrome or Firefox? Can they simply uninstall IE so they it won't run against their wishes at various times? Can they stop Windows from interrupting the Update process and prompting for the inevitable IE updates that attempt to shove Bing down their throat?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
You're confusing fines and damages. Fines are a punition and are part of criminal law, damages are for reparation of prejudice and part of civil law.
They follow different rules. No general principle of law exists that forbids fines to be adjusted to the means of the condemned.
There's nothing like $HOME
Nobody, not one person, initiated complaints in the "plain text editor", "basic bitmap editor", "calculator" software categories that were proven in a court of law to be a monopolistic misuse of power to ensure that ONLY their calculator/whatever dominated the market for years.
And the "real" Office suite is an entirely separate (and therefore optional) product.
Which is lucky because if MS were sued by every software manufacturer whose market they had manipulated contrary to anti-monopoly laws, there'd be an awful lot of these "You owe us $0.5bn" messages on some executive's desk. AV/spyware is probably the next major category, but I'm not aware of them doing dirty tricks like paying their end distributors NOT to put McAffee/Norton on machines that already have Windows Defender etc.
It's not a case of what they did. It's a case of what was brought to, and can be proven in, a court of law as deliberate monopolistic manipulation of the relevant market. Either they don't do it in other markets, or they haven't been brought to court for it (yet?).
I'm confused why Apple isn't being sued for the exact same kind of behaviour with their products and ecosystem. I guess Apple must get much larger and then people will open their eyes and realize the are stuck with no alternative as everything they've downloaded over the years is controlled by Apple.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
Bullshit. I just went through the hassle of building, installing, and updating several M$ Server 2008 machines. Trust me. It is a major problem.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I'm confused why Apple isn't being sued for the exact same kind of behaviour with their products and ecosystem.
Because Microsoft has a monopoly on desktop OSes, something like 90%. Apple has no monopoly in any space, for every iPhone sold, there are two Android phones sold. If MS did this with phones they'd be off the hook, because they have no monopoly in that market.
Free Martian Whores!