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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
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.
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.
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.
The bug was that if you didn't see the choice screen before installing SP1, you would never see it. Most of those 400 million were sold with the original Windows 7 with no service pack, and got the choice screen as soon as they clicked the blue e.