On Thursday 23rd of November 2006, Microsoft avoided an immediate daily penalty of up to $3.8 million when it submitted 8500 pages of documentation of Windows server APIs to the European Commission antitrust department only hours before the latest deadline.
Commission lawyers, potential licenses and Neil Barrett, a British computer professor and Microsoft’s monitoring trustee, will examine the documents, to determine whether the group has complied with the 2004 ruling. This will probably last months before it is clear if the potential licensees are able to achieve full interoperability with PCs running Windows. If not, Microsoft will face a fine of more than $440 million a day, backdated to July 2006, for the company to keep on trading in the European Union.
Even if the Commission finds the documentation satisfactory, Microsoft is still in danger of facing further fines if the price for Windows is found to be made up by Microsoft’s dominant position and not by the product’s true value.
Microsoft said there had been an unprecedented effort by more than 300 engineers and technical writers to review the technical documents to meet the Brussels deadline. “We look forward to receiving feedback from the industry,” the company said in a statement.
Find out how all this started and how much Microsoft had to pay into European Commission’s bank account for fines until now.
This is the EC statement and this is Microsoft’s response.
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